Die poetische Konstruktion des Selbst

The study analyses early Romantic models of individuality and their relevance in the literature and philosophy of aesthetic modernism after 1945. Starting with Novalis, the self as a work of art is delineated in the way it manifests itself in figural constellations of androgynity, role-change, sex-change and various forms of love. Authors like Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Wolf and Michel Foucault have directly taken their bearings from Novalis in plumbing the potentialities of a liberated creation of the self under the conditions dictated by modern power constellations.