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

  • Magdolna Orosz
Published/Copyright: June 3, 2008
Semiotica
From the journal Volume 2008 Issue 170

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.

Keywords:: works of art/literary texts as dynamic systems; German Romanticism; E.T.A. Hoffmann; narrative self-reflectivity; intertextuality
Published Online: 2008-06-03
Published in Print: 2008-June

© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Foreword
  2. Introduction: The concept of emergence in philosophical and semiotic context
  3. Conceptual knowledge as emergence
  4. Representation as emergence: Evoking and encoding past and history
  5. Emergence and reference in Whitehead's Process and Reality
  6. ‘The emergence of an organic form out of a fluid medium’: The dynamic concept of work of art in German Romanticism
  7. On a special case of meaning-emergence in the literary text: The function of semantic formations with ‘contradictory’ sense-orientation in the process of poetic meaning-evolution
  8. Did the gods go crazy? Emergence and symbols (a few laws in the symbolism of objects)
  9. Emergence as a phenomenon of cultural history and language
  10. Introduction: From linguistic semiotics to cultural semiotics: Semiotic and narrative studies in China
  11. Anxieties of modernity: A semiotic analysis of globalization images in China
  12. I Ching and the origin of the Chinese semiotic tradition
  13. Fictional narrative as history: Reflection and deflection
  14. The voice of ten years of history: A narrative-semiotic approach to the Eight Revolutionary Model Plays
  15. The narrative strategy of Chinese avant-garde novels: The case of Mo Yan
  16. Présentation
  17. Semiotic research in Morocco: An inventory
  18. Barthes ou Eco
  19. Semiotique de la reception et approche semantique du texte litteraire
  20. La dimension interprétante de l'expérience onirique dans la tradition onirocritique musulmane
  21. Social context, language, and semiosis in Wole Soyinka
  22. Le corps comme non-signe dans la tradition arabo-musulmane
https://doi.org/10.1515/SEM.2008.048
Keywords for this article
works of art/literary texts as dynamic systems; German Romanticism; E.T.A. Hoffmann; narrative self-reflectivity; intertextuality

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Foreword
  2. Introduction: The concept of emergence in philosophical and semiotic context
  3. Conceptual knowledge as emergence
  4. Representation as emergence: Evoking and encoding past and history
  5. Emergence and reference in Whitehead's Process and Reality
  6. ‘The emergence of an organic form out of a fluid medium’: The dynamic concept of work of art in German Romanticism
  7. On a special case of meaning-emergence in the literary text: The function of semantic formations with ‘contradictory’ sense-orientation in the process of poetic meaning-evolution
  8. Did the gods go crazy? Emergence and symbols (a few laws in the symbolism of objects)
  9. Emergence as a phenomenon of cultural history and language
  10. Introduction: From linguistic semiotics to cultural semiotics: Semiotic and narrative studies in China
  11. Anxieties of modernity: A semiotic analysis of globalization images in China
  12. I Ching and the origin of the Chinese semiotic tradition
  13. Fictional narrative as history: Reflection and deflection
  14. The voice of ten years of history: A narrative-semiotic approach to the Eight Revolutionary Model Plays
  15. The narrative strategy of Chinese avant-garde novels: The case of Mo Yan
  16. Présentation
  17. Semiotic research in Morocco: An inventory
  18. Barthes ou Eco
  19. Semiotique de la reception et approche semantique du texte litteraire
  20. La dimension interprétante de l'expérience onirique dans la tradition onirocritique musulmane
  21. Social context, language, and semiosis in Wole Soyinka
  22. Le corps comme non-signe dans la tradition arabo-musulmane
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