Kleist and Hoffmann in Dialogue with Enlightenment
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KLEIST AND HOFFMANN IN DIALOGUE WITH ENLIGHTENMENT A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities 2018 WILLIAM J. HALL SCHOOL OF ARTS, LANGUAGES AND CULTURES !2 Contents List of Abbreviated Works 4 Abstract 6 Declaration 7 Copyright Statement 7 Acknowledgements 8 Introduction 9 Part I Mündigkeit Chapter 1 Mangelnde Mündigkeit 22 Über das Marionettentheater: The Irredeemable Loss of Grace 27 Die Familie Schroffenstein: The Intellectual Awakening that never was 30 Testing Nurture in Der Findling 41 Conclusions 48 Chapter 2 Michael Kohlhaas: The Pursuit of Absolutes 51 Michael Kohlhaas, merchant, family man, rational bourgeois 58 Moral ambiguity: The narrator’s shifting presentation of Kohlhaas and the contingent 61 The political Kohlhaas 69 Conclusions 72 Part II Time, Space, and Causality Chapter 3 The Supernatural 74 The Green Epistemological Lenses 75 Das Bettelweib von Locarno: A Tale of Projected Blame 82 Narrative reliability in Das Majorat 89 Conclusions 101 Chapter 4 Metaphysics and Materiality 102 Religious Metaphysics and the Island of Truth 103 Die Elixiere: Crafting a Narrative of Redemption 108 A Tonic for Rationalism 117 Doppelgänger and Materiality 119 The Gothic 123 Avatars of the Unconscious 124 !3 Die heilige Cäcilie, or a Tale of Church Dominion 128 Vested Interests 132 Conclusions 137 Part III Representational Aesthetics Chapter 5 Beyond Mimesis 140 Mimesis 149 The Creative Process 154 The Serapiontic Principle 156 Creative Struggle 160 Inspiration - Divine and Mundane 162 Satire: ‘Anselmi’ Figures 166 Conclusions 168 Chapter 6 The Sublime 171 Narrative strategies and the moral codex 178 Dogma against the natural order 182 Ritter Gluck 187 Madness and the Narrator 188 Gluck and ‘die romantischste aller Künste’ 190 Kant and the power of music to move 193 The blank score 194 Conclusions 195 Conclusions 197 Bibliography 207 Word count: 81,543 !4 List of Abbreviated Works All pages numbers given for E.T.A. Hoffmann’s works refer to the six-volume Deutscher Klassiker Verlag edition of his complete works edited by Hartmut Steinecke and Wulf Segebrecht (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag 1985-2004). Page numbers for Kleist refer to the Berliner/Brandenburger editions in 21 volumes, edited by Roland Reuss and Peter Staengle (Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1988-2000). In order to avoid overly long precisions in the text to these frequently cited works and for easy reference, I have listed the appropriate volume for each of the texts mentioned along with the abbreviated reference used in the thesis. Where applicable, I have provided a shortened reference in parentheses to the title used in the footnotes. Hoffmann: II/1 (1993) Nachtstücke - Das Majorat (DM), Die Jesuiterkirche in G. (DJ) II/2 (1988) Die Elixiere des Teufels (DE) III (1985) Fantasiestücke in Callot’s Manier - Ritter Gluck (RG), ‘Beethovens Instrumentalmusik’ (pp. 52-61). IV (2001) Die Serapionsbrüder - Der Einsiedler Serapion, Der Artushof (DA) Kleist: I/1 (2000) Die Familie Schroffenstein (DFS) I/5 (1992) Penthesilea II/1 (1990) Michael Kohlhaas (MK) II/3 (1993) Das Erdbeben in Chili (DEIC) II/5 (1997) Das Bettelweib von Locarno (DB), Der Findling (DF), Die heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik (DHC) II/7 and 8 (1997) Berliner Abendblätter I and II ‘Über das Marionettentheater’ (I, pp. 317-319; 321-323; 325-327; 329-331) ‘Allerneuerster Erziehungsplan’ (I, pp. 128-129, 133-134, 138-139, 177-179, 182-185) ‘Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft’ (I, pp. 61-62) ‘Brief eines Dichters an einen anderen’ (II, pp. 23-26) IV/1 (1996) Briefe I IV/2 (1999) Briefe II IV/3 (2010) Briefe III II/9 (2007) Sonstige Prosa ‘Aufsatz, den sichern Weg des Glücks zu finden und ungestört – auch unter den größten Drangsalen des Lebens – ihn zu genießen’ (pp. 9-24) ‘Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden’ (pp. 25-32) !5 Kant: Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 29 vols (Berlin: Georg Riemer and Walter de Gruyter, 1902-1980). III (1904) Kritik der reinen Vernunft (KrV) IV (1903) Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten V (1908) Kritik der Urteilskraft (KdU) VI (1907) Metaphysik der Sitten VIII (1912) Abhandlungen nach 1781 !6 Abstract This thesis considers how Kleist and Hoffmann’s fiction might be considered as re- sponding to the perceived shortcomings of enlightenment. The two writers, despite the barriers of literary categorisations, have a striking affinity in their sense that notions of truth and knowledge are intertwined with social and political agendas, rather than form- ing part of some natural teleology. The thesis breaks new ground in viewing the texts within a more expansive discourse context as literary interventions within a broad, cross-society engagement with enlightenment, in its various streams and factions. The texts studied, I argue, represent thought experiments, not merely reflecting and re-artic- ulating the influences of literary peers and historically significant events, but instead testing the real-world application of key enlightenment ideas. The driving force for this thesis is the need to locate their work more rigorously in relation to enlightenment thought of their time than has previously been attempted. This is not so much a question of retrieving past influences, as one of viewing their work as being in dialogue with contemporary thought. Moving away from attempts us- ing Kleist’s letters to theorise the relation between Kleist and Kant, this investigation instead turns to aspects of Kant’s philosophy to illuminate the texts. Hoffmann’s rela- tionship to enlightenment, too, is explored beyond the prism of Romanticism. Taking a more comparative approach than previous work on the two writers, I identify not only thematic commonalities, but also a parallel aesthetic, in which multiple narratives co- exist and where ‘truth’ is manufactured by the dominance of one particular narrative. The notion of Mündigkeit, central to Kant’s famous definition of Aufklärung of- fers a useful guiding concept for the investigation and captures the emancipatory prom- ise of self-realisation and the positive trajectory of human progress at the heart of the miscellany of moral and political theories and philosophies collectively known as ‘en- lightenment’. The latter refers not to the historical period, but rather to a process of in- tellectual emancipation and an assemblage of ideals and values. As an intellectual movement, enlightenment was not, as is often assumed, monolithic, but encompasses conflicting notions of reason, freedom, and how its goals were to be achieved. Not only are the certainty and consequences of this intellectual emancipation evaluated in the texts, but I have also identified a radical questioning of the paradigms of thought which condition our understanding of narratives. Both Kleist and Hoffmann’s texts are narrat- ively complex, often with shifts in focalisation, jumps in time, occasionally, figures whose identity changes leave the reader uncertain whether they are dealing with more than one character, and depictions of events which resist clarification through conven- tional understandings of time, space and causality. This project seeks to reconcile these ‘blind spots’ with a broader critique of enlightenment, in which absolute knowledge is shown to be illusory and truth simply reflective of constellations of power. The spatio- temporal and causal frameworks foundational to rational understanding and used to make sense of the world are revealed to be inadequate. !7 Declaration I confirm that no portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in sup- port of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning. Copyright Statement i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and s/he has given The University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for adminis- trative purposes. ii. 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