Theorie des Romans. Die Spengung der platonischen Höhle

This theory of the novel "Bursting the Platonic Cave" builds on the underlying thesis that, since "Don Quixote" and Romanticism and again in the postmodernism of Vladimir Nabokov and Salman Rushdie, the other "gone-wild" side of the modern European novel - with its formal elements of the fantastic, the grotesque and an emplotment that runs counter to the model of progressing history - has shattered and denied the concepts of reality and time which had been dominant in philosophy and aesthetic theory since Plato, Aristotle and St. Augustine, and has thereby confirmed the autonomous aesthetic reality of the novel against any kind of external authorization and functionalization. This "Romantic complex" has inevitably remained concealed up to now, just because the theories of the novel could not utilize it for Platonic ontology and their respective historical self-definition. The powerful aesthetics of Romanticism, however, released the novel from all normative predeterminations and therefore proves to be a standard against which aesthetic theory must be measured. "Bursting the Platonic Cave" refrains from putting up just another perspective of the philosophy of history, instead focuses on the problematic relationship between reality and fiction, revises conventional interpretations and assessments borrowed from other scientific disciplines, turns away from the dominance of Platonic ontology and Realism within aesthetic theory, and thereby attempts to offer a reorientation for narratology and the theory of the novel.