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This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: • This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. • A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. • This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. • The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. • When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. The Image of the Orient in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Writing Joanna Neilly A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the PhD The University of Edinburgh 2013 Declaration This thesis is my own original work throughout except in those instances when the work of another is explicitly cited. No part of this thesis has previously been submitted for any degree or professional qualification at any university or other institution. Joanna Neilly July 2013 ii Abstract Although the field of German Romantic Orientalism has been growing in recent years, the prolific writer E. T. A. Hoffmann has largely escaped critical attention. This study of his oeuvre reveals, however, that it was shaped and influenced by both the scholarly and popular orientalist discourses of his time. Furthermore, Hoffmann satirises literary orientalist practices even as he takes part in them, and so his work exposes the ambivalence of the apparent German veneration for the ‘Romantic’ Orient. While Hoffmann responds to the Romantic image of the Orient set up by his predecessors (J.G. Herder, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel), he does so in order to reveal both the uses and the limits of this model for the Romantic artist in the modern world. The Orient serves as an inspiration for Romantic art, and thus Edward Said’s claim that the Romantics appropriated the East merely for the rejuvenation of European literature must be acknowledged. Nevertheless, as an extremely self-aware writer, Hoffmann does not utilise this approach uncritically. My thesis shows how Hoffmann responded to the image of the Orient as it was produced by writers, musicians, and scholars inside the German-speaking lands. The Orient resists successful imitation, as his texts acknowledge when they turn a critical eye towards German cultural production. Furthermore, Hoffmann’s famous criticism of nineteenth-century society is enhanced by comparison of German and oriental characters, with the latter often coming out more favourably. Hoffmann’s tales therefore demand a reassessment of the view that the Romantics constructed the Orient exclusively as a paradisaical land of poetic fulfilment. His (self-) reflective response to the nineteenth-century treatment of the Orient in Germany marks him out as an original – and essential – voice in Romantic Orientalism. iii Acknowledgements First and foremost, my thanks go to my supervisor, Dr. Eleoma Bodammer, for her invaluable constructive comments, persistent encouragement and dedication throughout all stages of the thesis, and for many enjoyable conversations. I would also like to thank Dr. Howard Gaskill for his many useful suggestions and sharp critical readings of Hoffmann, and for his infectious enthusiasm. In addition, I am thankful to my examiners, Professor Ritchie Robertson and Dr. Frauke Matthes, for a very productive discussion of the thesis and for their kind and helpful advice. I am also grateful to members of the German Department at the University of Edinburgh for providing such a friendly and constructive environment in which to work. My doctoral research has been generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, including additional funding to spend time as a British Council Research Fellow at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, Washington D.C. Some of the research presented in Chapter Five results directly from this trip, and I would like to thank the librarians and staff at the Center for their support. iv Table of Contents Declaration ………………………………………………………………………….. ii Abstract ………………………………………………………………………….…. iii Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………… iv Table of Contents ………………………………………………………………..….. v List of abbreviations ……………………………………………………….....…... vi Note on editions and citations……………………………………...……………..... vi Introduction ………………………………………………………………………..... 1 Chapter One Hoffmann’s Oriental Spaces and the Modern German Setting ………………….... 23 Chapter Two Romantic and Oriental Bodies: Hoffmann and the Mind/Body Problem ………..... 51 Chapter Three Oriental Music and Romantic Aesthetics: Hoffmann’s Response to the Alla Turca Style ………………………………………………………………………… 80 Chapter Four Oriental Women and Bourgeois Girls: Hoffmann’s Critique of the Feminine Ideal ………………………………………………………………………………. 109 Chapter Five Scholars, Sages and the Limits of Cultural Transfer ………………….…………. 137 Conclusion ……………………………………………………….……………….. 165 Bibliography ………………………………………………...……………...…….. 169 v List of abbreviations The following are used to refer to academic journals in the footnotes and bibliography: DVjs Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte EGY Edinburgh German Yearbook GLL German Life and Letters GQ The German Quarterly HJb E. T. A. Hoffmann Jahrbuch MHG Mitteilungen der E. T. A. Hoffmann-Gesellschaft MLR Modern Language Review NGC New German Critique Note on editions and citations Unless otherwise stated, Hoffmann citations are taken from E. T. A. Hoffmann, Poetische Werke, 6 vols (Berlin: Aufbau, 1958). SW refers to E. T. A. Hoffmann, Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Hartmut Steinecke and Wulf Segebrecht, 6 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985- 2004) Where italics are used in citations, emphasis is from the original, unless otherwise noted. vi Introduction In 1950, the French scholar Raymond Schwab wondered, ‘Will it still be possible to speak of Romanticism, of the nineteenth century, of the modern soul, without recording the consequences of the Oriental Renaissance in all provinces of the mind?’.1 With this rhetorical question, Schwab identified an issue which even today continues to preoccupy scholars of German Romanticism. As Suzanne Marchand has noted, ‘[t]he German romantics became some of the Orient’s biggest champions in the period between about 1800 and 1820’.2 The strong link between the Romantic movement and studies of the Orient is far from a recently discovered area of enquiry. Almost thirty years before Edward W. Said was to admit his failure to address in detail the German preoccupation with the East in his seminal work, Orientalism (1978), Schwab had begun this very process. Fourteen years after Schwab, A. Leslie Willson added to the field a literary history of what he termed the ‘mythical image’ of India and its reception in Romantic-era Germany.3 While Willson identifies earlier, incomplete, works in the field, these two stand out as comprehensive studies of the important relations between Romanticism and Orientalism, and the uses the former made of the latter. Written before post-colonial theory came into vogue, these works serve as evidence for a thorough engagement with Romantic Orientalism from the ground up. For this reason they provide a fitting point of departure for my study, which aims to define the place of the writer E.T.A. Hoffmann within Romantic Orientalism, by shedding light on his response to the scholarly and literary Orientalism of his time, and demonstrating how he both related it to the Romantic project and used it as a lens through which to examine his contemporary Germany. For students of German Orientalism, the Romantic period is particularly pertinent, as Schwab insistently claims. The Oriental Renaissance is a meticulously- researched study of the historical coincidence of Romanticism and Orientalism, and 1 Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880, trans. by Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 473. First published in French as La Renaissance orientale (Paris: Editions payot, 1950). 2 Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 55. 3 A. Leslie Willson, A Mythical Image: The Ideal of India in German Romanticism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1964). 1 Schwab concludes that these two scholarly and literary movements were not merely temporally linked but functioned as interlocutors in a great shift in European thought which characterized the tumultuous post-Enlightenment period.4 Focusing on England, France and Germany, with a nod to Russia, Schwab demonstrates how Orientalism and Romanticism worked in tandem to revitalize a Europe ‘which had had enough of the rationalizations of reason’.5 The intellectual fomentation around the turn of the nineteenth century added up to no less than a second Renaissance, with Romanticism and the Orient challenging norms in literature and thought from within and without, respectively. For Schwab, the key date is 1771, representing a linguistic breakthrough when Anquetil-Duperron translated and published the Zend Avesta, breaking down language