The Art of Recollection in Jena Romanticism

Laurie Ruth Johnson

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9783110910544
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This study examines the ways in which memory is understood and aestheticized in Romantic texts, and argues that these works reveal serious doubt about the explanatory ability of the philosophical, psychological and aesthetic discourses against which modern thought is constructed.

The Jena Romantics represent the experience and presentation of memory as privileged and creative, but also as not always capable of giving reliable information about the actual past. But rather than depicting signifiers with no stable referents, their portrayal of memory and remembering as creative displays a belief that meaning is accessible through its representations. This belief results in an emphasis on originality over imitation, but also blurs distinctions between memory and historiography. The form of the fragment embodies the dilemmas and possibilities that the Romantics associate with memory.

The book includes a survey of theories of memory and how they contribute to a specifically Romantic model for memory that can lead to new interpretations of Romantic fragments; chapters on eighteenth-century aesthetic and psychological theories of memory that precede and influence Romantic texts, and on understandings of memory in critical and idealist philosophy; interpretations of the poetic and philosophical production of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel; and a conclusion that demonstrates the persistence of the Romantic model for memory in contemporary memory theory and cultural production.

Table of contents

• I. Introduction: Memory and its Objects in Early Romanticism
• II. Reconciliation and Fragmentation: The Early Romantic Memory Model
• 1. The Ambiguity of Memory and the Form of the Fragment
• 2. Memory For and Against History: Reciprocal Movements, Conflated Narratives
• 3. The Remembering Subject: Body, Mind, and Memory in the »Belated Present« of Fragmentary Representation
• a. Memory as Material and Transcendent
• b. The Importance of the Fragment for Representing Early Romantic Conceptions of Memory
• III. From Recollection to Depiction: An Incipient Crisis of Memory and Representation in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory
• 1. Constructions of Memory as Metaphorical and Material in the Mid- to Late Eighteenth Century
• 2. Aesthetics and History, and the Historiographic Function of Art: Schiller and Herder
• 3. Aesthetic Autonomy Versus Traumatic Memory: Lessing and Moritz
• Conclusion
• IV. Reconstructing Origins: Remembrance in German Idealism
• 1. The Problem of »Enacting« the Origin of Consciousness
• 2. Critical Philosophical and Idealist Definitions of Memory
• 3. Constructions of Memory in Fichte and Schelling
• Conclusion
• V. Novalis’s Conceptualizations of Memory and Its Role in Literary and Philosophical Production
• 1. »Gedächtnis« and »Erinnerung« as Components of Novalis’s Theories of Consciousness and Poesy
• 2. Literary Reconstructions of Individual and Collective Memory
• a. Heinrich von Ofterdingen
• b. Die Lehrlinge zu Sais
• c. Hymnen an die Nacht, Geistliche Lieder, Die Christenheit oder Europa
• 3. Memory as Indispensable and as Unstable: The Reciprocities of Consciousness and Their Implications for Memory in Novalis’ s Philosophical Fragments
• 4. Memory as Metaphor? Implications of Novalis’s Theory of Memory for a Philosophy of History
• Conclusion
• VI. Memory and History in the Fragments of Friedrich Schlegel
• 1. The Creation of a Philosophy of History as a Mnemonic Act
• 2. The Relevance of the Fragment Form for Schlegel’s Theory of Memory
• 3. Constructing Relationships Between Present and Past Self and Between Self and Other in the Philosophical Fragments and in Lucinde
• 4. Historiography as Fragmented Recollection Rather Than as Narrative Documentation
• Conclusion
• VII. Conclusion: Early Romanticism and Later Theories of Memory and Representation
• Bibliography
• Index of Names