The aesthetic foundations of German Romanticism according to the fragment philosophy of Novalis and how this is evidenced in his work Heinrich von Ofterdingen

By

ABSTRACT

The research portrays Novalis' fragment philosophy of German Romanticism in his work Heinrich von Ofterdingen. It explores the idea of German romanticism and provides different critical views of various analysts on the work presented by Novalis in his novel and poetry Heinrich von Ofterdingen.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACTII

Fragment Philosophy of German Romanticism in Heinrich von Ofterdingen1

Narcissus Figure2

The Atlantis Myth3

The Act of Self-Embracement5

The Reflection of Novalis' real-life lover Sophie von Kuhn7

REFERENCES10

German Romanticism

German Romanticism was the prominent and evident movement in the late 18th and 19th century, in the context of German art, culture and philosophy. The initial German Romantics made efforts for creating a new fusion of philosophy, science and arts by looking into the M
This research discusses the fragment philosophy presented by Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) in his work Heinrich von Ofterdingen.

Fragment Philosophy of German Romanticism in Heinrich von Ofterdingen

For Novalis, in the case for the romantics, presentation or mediation, functions on two different levels-the ontological and epistemological. The world is, reality is, being is, only insofar as it is mediated.

Novalis has written this novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, as a reaction against the classical novel Bildungsroman, Wilhel meister Lehrjahre written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethes. He intended to transcend Wilhel meister Lehrjahre, by defining romanticism in his poetic fragment (Deborah, 2006, 151). In Wilhelm Meister, Novalis observed that all characters are variations of one complete individual, but came to redefine this phenomenon as the depiction of the transcendental idea, and understood this expression of the interaction between the subjective and the universal as the sole purpose of the novel (Deborah, 2006, 144).

Narcissus Figure

Narcissus mythology explains that Narcissus figure was the one who was extremely proud about his personality and always disdain the person who loved him. It is said that once he was shown his reflection in a pool, where he fell in love with his reflection, not realising that it was just an image which he was looking at. He fell so much in love with the reflection that he dies near the pool.

The myth of Narcissus has become a subject of terrible fascination deeply rooted in the human experience, providing both a moral lesson warning against vanity and pride and a philosophical irony of beginning to know oneself only upon the threshold of expiration. It is the latter analysis that lends itself to negating the tragic element of death in some novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth century's, marking the physical death of the female protagonist as the beginning of a unifying, transcendent journey. As the most extensive treatment, Ovid's depiction of Narcissus in Metamorphoses serves as the model on which subsequent interpretations are based and seems to strike a balance between the myth's multiple meanings, whereas later renditions overemphasize the simplified moral message.

This character is portrayed in Novalis' book as his passionate ...