MODERN LITERATURE AND VISIBILITY: ON ABSTRACTISM AND DISTORTION IN ROMANTIC LITERATURE

Abstract

The medial relation between realism and photography is widely discussed. This article argues that also the romantic art can be conceived, at least partially, through its position towards visibility. It will analyze this subject in a historical context where the social differentiation and the optical media result in a questioning of observation and perspective. This paper investigates the literary balanced mediation between the outer and inner world in Goethe, the abstraction of the visible in favor of a more pure, infinite and absolute sphere in Novalis and the textual phantasmagoria as a transforming instrument of prosaic reality and impulse for perspectivism in E.T.A. Hoffmann.