E.T.A. HOFFMANN: THE FANTASTIC AS A WAY OF DEFINING THE WORLD
E.T.A. HOFFMANN: THE FANTASTIC AS A WAY OF DEFINING THE WORLD

Summary/Abstract: Celebrating 250 years since the birth of the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann and following the” multum in parvo” approach to reception, this article proposes a retrospective” reading” of the most significant discursive and thematic coordinates of a literary heritage insufficiently valued by a sometimes-ungrateful posterity. The essay emphasizes Hoffmann's choice of the fantastic, understood as the aesthetic encounter between early German Romanticism and the magical realism of supernatural intrusion into a daily life dominated by mundane events and bourgeois philistinism. Such a literary choice—generated, as will be seen by certain milestones of the writer's existence, a life precarious in its very foundations—also imposes a new status on writing. Furthermore, it suggests, with all due nuances, the idea that all literature reveals itself, in one way or another, through the fantastic.Last but not least, our brief retrospective includes several references to Hoffmann’s texts that hold weight within a hierarchy of universal literary values, addressing specific themes and identity motifs (the theme of fractured reality and dualism: the coexistence of two worlds, the double, and madness; the automaton/existential mechanics and the living doll; the” uncanny”, animated objects, occultism, alchemy, satanism; the syncretism of the arts, etc.).Among many other notable characteristics, the ambiguity of fantasy ensures the contemporary relevance of the writer E.T.A. Hoffmann and guarantees him a long-lasting posterity.

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