‘The emergence of an organic form out of a fluid medium’: The dynamic concept of work of art in German Romanticism

Abstract

This article argues in favor of the idea that works of art in Early German Romanticism, as conceived of by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, were conceptually considered as an integrated whole, consisting of very different and diverging elements that determine each other in a dynamic process. In this respect, the aesthetic views of this literary movement can be related to some basic postulations about dynamic systems, chaos, order, and emergence. The assumptions of system theory as well as of chaos theory can lead to their application to postmodern works of art that can be described by the categories of nonlinearity, self-reflectivity, irreversibility, and self-organization. Moreover, it can be supposed that these categories apply also to Romantic works of art. The article demonstrates it through the analysis of some late narrative texts of E.T.A. Hoffmann, who could be considered a very modern or an avant la lettre postmodern author.