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Leibniz's monadology, especially its theorem of the fold, may serve as a poetics for the readability of Baroque texts. The representational uncertainty and playful metaphors of Baroque expressions may then be understood as results of a universal philosophy of implication and explication that concerns both the texts and the soul. This philosophy defines a structural knowledge and a resultant dynamic access to the world, in the modality of infinite receptivity. Whatever is repeatedly folded in, exists already hidden in existing folds.

Scholars have long considered Heinrich Wölfflin a pioneer in ‘Baroque studies’. Surprisingly little attention has been paid, however, to typological patterns and their importance for revising a classic-biased historiography. Reassessing the ‘invention’ of ‘Baroque’ literature and civilization in German literary criticism before, during and immediately after the First World War involves 1) outlining the interdisciplinary conditions and impulses that mark the beginning of ‘Baroque studies’ (before 1900), 2) examining closely the structure of typological approaches (1900–1933), and 3) discussing the problems of ‘Baroque form’ and ‘style’, as well as their anthropological derivatives. Early-twentieth-century critics furthered the invention of a ‘Baroque man’ to describe and to legitimize themselves.

Hauff's last novella, Das Bild des Kaisers , combines a poetological critique of Romanticism with multiperspectival remembrances of Napoleon. Hauff's manner of writing can be categorized in the sense of Fülleborn and Stockinger as Early Realism (Frührealismus). Hauff's novelistic ekphrasis turns Jacques-Lous David's painting into a narrative ‘Bild des Kaisers’; his representation of post-1821 German attitudes towards Napoleon are indebted to his critical reading of French literature.

Peter Huchel is mainly known for his poetic descriptions of nature. Apart from his poems on his experience as a soldier in World War II, the political contents of his poems are usually neglected, even though Huchel found himself since the 1950s in permanent conflict with the authorities of the GDR. “An Taube Ohren der Geschlechter” subtly reflects this conflict and should be considered as an explicitly political poem. Evoking the terrible destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C., described by Appianus and Polybius (whom the poem mentions directly), Huchel concealed a political message in his poem. Assuming the voice of the Greek historian he compares the “Empire of Evil” with Appianus's and Polybius's Roman Empire that was doomed even at the apogee of its power. Referring to the fall of Carthage (which reminded Scipio that no empire is eternal), and the subsequent fall of Rome, Huchel assures us that communist power in the GDR, which seemed so well established in the 1960s, will also find its demise.

Primo Levi's short stories are not as well-known as his works about his experience in Auschwitz, although some of them are remarkable. Lavoro creativo and Nel Parco illustrate how in the twentieth century the supernatural is introduced into literature by way of metafictionality. The supernatural events in these texts relate to Levi's opera omnia and Weltanschauung .

Rabelais and Castiglione are major figures in the literature of the Renaissance, and they share an interest in humour and a talent for engendering it. Though Rabelais is by far the greater comic writer, it is clear that he was aware of Castiglione's work, and respected it to the point of quoting him on at least one occasion. Where they differ is in the degree of restraint which the Italian imposes on his material, as contrast the Frenchman's deliberate flouting of social if not literary convention. At the same time, Rabelais fully appreciates the didactic value of humour, whilst Castiglione's wit is not immune to the occasional flight of moral irresponsibility.

The figure of the hermaphrodite from Ovid's Metamorphoses reappears in the Renaissance alchemical tradition, initiated by the famous Hypnerotomachia poliphili (1499). In the latter, the hermaphrodite seems to be a mere fragmentary trope but represents much more than a biological being or a cipher of desire. An entire poetic mode, a mode of writing and thinking, characterizes alchemy and ambivalence. A reading of Francesco Colonna's “strife of love in a dream” can profit from Sarah Kofman's analysis of ambivalence, metals, and writing in key texts of Shakespeare and Freud. The hermaphrodite, as we learn, is a trope, and more than that: it opens up a poetics that exceeds the double-sexed creature itself.

As is well-known, Goethe blended a quotation from the classical Historia Augusta into the beginning of the fifteenth Roman Elegy , changing it, however, significantly. The shift from the Latin “mosquitoes” (culices) to “fleas” is especially striking. Contrary to assumptions, this change of insect species appears to be motivated by sexual symbolism. Following the interpretatio obscena that the humanist scholar Adrianus Turnebus made of culices , the shift is possibly related to Goethe's problems concerning homosexuality.

The role of hearing in Rilke's Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge has not received as much attention as the protagonist's visual apprenticeship. Malte's obsessive musings on the urban soundscape and the fragile ear represent reflections on aesthetics and interiority that run through the notebooks and take up a broader concern with noise and nervous illness around 1900. Malte tries to imagine himself as a saint capable of attaining a state of inwardness by shutting out the city's noisy distractions, but Rilke's novel shows the futility of the attempt. Malte ends up telling us how his encounter with noise entails a fragmentation of interiority.

Themes of isolation and urban alienation dominate Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things (1987), Don DeLillo's short-story “The Angel Esmeralda” (1994), and DeLillo's Underworld (1997). Individual as well as collective memory arises from violence, war, and despair in a not merely fictional, post-human urban landscape. Unexpected images and revelations lie scattered in each corner of Auster's and DeLillo's geography of horror. DeLillo's New York underworld and Auster's imaginary country are peopled by characters and groups that practise their own art, speak or write in their own language, and worship their own miracles, thus building a secret legacy. The isolated individuals of these underworlds create their own rituals, beliefs, and myths: a whole collective memory emerges in a post-human landscape.

Grabbe played a decisive role in the German Shakespeare reception, and his Faust has affinities with Hamlet. Comparing their language, their attitude to the world, and their concepts of subjectivity and history, we gain insights that go beyond the characters themselves. Faust's and Hamlet's subjectivity, their different concepts and perceptions of reality, and Grabbe's way of referring to them suggest that the genesis of his Hamlet-Faust derives from his own Shakespeare interpretation, which differs from the accepted, mainly romantic view of Hamlet. Grabbe's Faust becomes plausible if we regard Hamlet, Don Juan and Faust as its source, and Grabbe's own hero type as its inspiration.

Walter Benjamin's “Unpacking my Library – A Talk about Collecting” occasions reflections on the meaning of fin-de-siècle and contemporary collecting and memory. In late nineteenth-century bourgeois culture collecting lost its traditional sense because desiring a totality could no longer serve as the basis of collecting. Solitary individuals had to face a universe of unstable signs in which the accumulated objects no longer possessed an original purpose or religious meaning. For Benjamin, collecting opens “above an abyss”. The absence of a purpose or order in the collected objects turns collecting into an irrational passion, a work of hermeneutics.

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