Romantic Aesthetics and Intermediality

The vivid interest for media-theories and especially for the intermediality between text and image ranges among the most stimulating developments within cultural and literary sciences of the last years. Trail-blazing studies have been presented on the controversial occidental history of the relationship between text and image - (Belting, Boehm/Pfotenhauer, Osterkamp Wenzel, a.o.) as well as on the current text - image - debatte within media-theories (G. Böhme, H. Böhme, Hörisch, F. Kittler, Scherpe) and eventually on its origins in aesthetics and literature of German Romanticism, especially E.T.A. Hoffmann (Behler, Hörisch, G. Neumann, Oesterle, Pfotenhauer, Stadler, Steinecke, Vietta, Wenzel). In spite of this vast range of important results and new concepts, one central field has remained largely unexplored which represents a basic desideratum of studies on Romanticism as well as on Media Theories and is therefore launch and goal of the described project. The field considered is the Romantic reception of the question text - life - image in its dialectic development from late antiquity throughout the religious wars up to German classic aesthetics; a kind of deconstructivistic and productive reception of a richt heritage of hagiographic images and discourses, whose original impacts - and this is a basic hypothesis of our project - have still been far more familiar to the collective cultural memory around 1800 than is generally assumed. The analysis of these turns of discourse from theology to aesthetics and from art- and literary-theory to "Universalpoesie" promises thus the documentation of various interdiscoursive relationships in this project. The way in which the relationship between text - picture - life begins to shift into new, transgressive dimensions, the way in which light, colour and sound call static pictures to life and movement and evocate their old magic powers in new contexts and arrangements, and the way in which old theological and new aesthetic taboos are broken and medium becomes message: these ways of presentation make German Romanticism a paradigmatic field of media-theory on the threshold of the Moderne, and they are therefore the essential research-interest of this project.

The vivid interest for media-theories and especially for the intermediality between text and image ranges among the most stimulating developments within cultural and literary sciences of the last years. Trail-blazing studies have been presented on the controversial occidental history of the relationship between text and image - (Belting, Boehm/Pfotenhauer, Osterkamp Wenzel, a.o.) as well as on the current text - image - debatte within media-theories (G. Böhme, H. Böhme, Hörisch, F. Kittler, Scherpe) and eventually on its origins in aesthetics and literature of German Romanticism, especially E.T.A. Hoffmann (Behler, Hörisch, G. Neumann, Oesterle, Pfotenhauer, Stadler, Steinecke, Vietta, Wenzel). In spite of this vast range of important results and new concepts, one central field has remained largely unexplored which represents a basic desideratum of studies on Romanticism as well as on Media Theories and is therefore launch and goal of the described project. The field considered is the Romantic reception of the question text - life - image in its dialectic development from late antiquity throughout the religious wars up to German classic aesthetics; a kind of deconstructivistic and productive reception of a richt heritage of hagiographic images and discourses, whose original impacts - and this is a basic hypothesis of our project - have still been far more familiar to the collective cultural memory around 1800 than is generally assumed. The analysis of these turns of discourse from theology to aesthetics and from art- and literary-theory to "Universalpoesie" promises thus the documentation of various interdiscoursive relationships in this project. The way in which the relationship between text - picture - life begins to shift into new, transgressive dimensions, the way in which light, colour and sound call static pictures to life and movement and evocate their old magic powers in new contexts and arrangements, and the way in which old theological and new aesthetic taboos are broken and medium becomes message: these ways of presentation make German Romanticism a paradigmatic field of media-theory on the threshold of the Moderne, and they are therefore the essential research-interest of this project.