A Reconsideration of the Romantic Fragment

This article argues that Schlegel's fragment-practice allows not only a diagnosis of various scientific and epistemological contexts but also an alteration of their rules. What Hans Blumenberg calls the "Copernican comparative" leads Schlegel to entertain and reject the notion of a cl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Germanic review 2017-10, Vol.92 (4), p.407-425
Main Author: Weatherby, Leif
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Communication
Copernicanism
fragment
German literature
Irony
Kant
Novalis
Romanticism
Schlegel
Schlegel, Friedrich von (1772-1829)
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Summary:This article argues that Schlegel's fragment-practice allows not only a diagnosis of various scientific and epistemological contexts but also an alteration of their rules. What Hans Blumenberg calls the "Copernican comparative" leads Schlegel to entertain and reject the notion of a classification of literary forms. In its place, the notion of writing as a kind of general science of communication that includes its own materiality arises. Exploiting the properties of such a communication-which is fragmentary in general structure, and shot through with the capacity for irony-allows the practice of the fragment to do more than critique the categories of sciences like the geology Novalis learned in Freiberg. The fragment's "unworking" action as conceived by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy produces concrete second-order traces in the structure of communication itself, producing and potentially changing the interface between signification and being.
ISSN:0016-8890
1930-6962
DOI:10.1080/00168890.2017.1370953