AMIDST THE MASQUERADE OF MIRRORS: THE CARNIVALESQUE PHANTASMAGORIZATION OF LIFE IN PRINCESS BRAMBILLA BY E. T. A. HOFFMANN
Keywords:
E. T. A. Hoffmann, literary fantastic, German romanticism, intermediality, carnivalizationAbstract
E. T. A. Hoffmann is incontestably one of the most remarkable writers in the history of fantastic literature and an indispensable figure who marked German and European Romanticism, bringing to light the formula of the fantastic short story. Hence, this study explores the phenomenon of the classical fantastic in Hoffmann’s novella or capriccio- fairytale Princess Brambilla, focusing on the manner in which the demarcations and contrasts, but also the harmonization of the phenomenon of the fantastic and the characteristics of the artistic and mythical tale, are epitomized on diverse and complex narratological levels. Referring to the theoretical premises of the fantastic theory, the philosophical phenomenon of the grotesque and carnivalization, the paper elucidate the fantastic archetype of the double and the phenomenological and metaphysical dualism of reality as a distinctive topos in the philosophy and aesthetics of Romanticism. That being the case, these premises affirm the idea about the puzzling way in which the phenomenon of carnivalization and the fantastic irrationalization of empirical reality share similar aesthetic strategies of diegetic manifestations in the narrative imagination of Hoffmann.
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