Hoffmannian variations: The figure of E. T. A. Hoffmann in Baudelaire, Wagner, Freud and Kofman (Charles Baudelaire, France, Richard Wagner, Sigmund Freud, Sarah Kofman).

摘要

As an author of the uncanny, E. T. A. Hoffmann has enjoyed an uncanny afterlife which traverses national, linguistic and disciplinary boundaries. Initially written off by many as a quirky iconoclast, Hoffmann became a potent symbol of the rift nature of the Romantics' modern man. This dissertation investigates the ways in which the Hoffmann-figure was crucial to the development of such other quintessentially modern figures as Baudelaire, Wagner and Freud. Since, however, the Hoffmann-figure evinces a kind of excess which survives it encounters with each of these figures, the methodology of a traditional influence study or a Bloomian insistence on the overcoming of anxiety prove insufficient means to analyze his role for these authors. Hoffmann was more of a lightning rod to which crises involving the rift self were drawn. In exploring these crises, the figure of the double and of the mother are central to this study. Both call into question the authenticity of the self through the threats of usurpation and dissolution. Chapter I examines the trope of the predecessor double in prefaces to Hoffmann's works by Jean Paul and Sir Walter Scott. Chapters II through III pursue Hoffmann's presence in the works of Baudelaire, Wagner, and Freud. With each resultant variation on the Hoffmann-figure, the unease with doubling and the tension surrounding the figure of the mother increase. The final chapter marks the point at which this tension reaches its peak. In her work on doubling and the figure of the mother, Sarah Kofman embraces the dangers which inhere to the Hoffmann-figure and incorporates them into the way in which she rewrites herself. In her autobiographical writings, Kofman sounds the depths of the usurping threat of the double, weaving together an intertext that is itself uncanny, doubled and Hoffmannseque.