In »allen Künsten« wird »das Bestreben sichtbar«, »die Grenzen zu überschreiten.« Intermedialität als Basisphänomen der deutschsprachigen Literatur zwischen 1815 und 1848

Abstract

Specialist scholarship on the literature of the Restoration period so far has had little to say about the transcending of traditional artistic boundaries, yet between 1815 and 1848 intermediality virtually assumes the significance of a basic phenomenon that – for all the continuities – differentiates this period from Classicism and Realism. For Heine his own era is one of progressive conversion into sound, and Gustav Freytag, too, complains about the comprehensive revision of Lessing's Laokoon . The strategies adopted are manifold. On the one hand, there is the attempt to respond to the increased pace of life and the feeling of alienation with aesthetic deceleration (ekphrasis, lyrical still lifes, scenic poetic narrative /dramaturgy) or with medial synthesis (› Gesamtkunstwerk ‹, oratorio-symphony, art-song, symphonic poem, thematic overture). On the other hand, there are attempts to represent the new pluralistic experience of reality intermedially – be it through the multiplication of perspectives (optical instruments), new imagistic syntax (multi-pictured compositions, picture cycles) or arabesquely dynamized ensemble art (belcanto-opera, Spieloper ). These observations lead to the question as to what it is that changes social ›mediality‹ as a whole subject. At the same time new insights may be expected in relation to the (still virulent) debate as to how far post-Classicism, late Romanticism, Vormärz , Biedermeier , and early Realism may be discursively differentiated from one another and in how far they merely represent different manifestations of the same basic epoch formation.