Romantic exteriority the construction of literature in Rousseau, Jean Paul and P. B. Shelley

This dissertation traces in the poetic form of Jean Paul Richter's and Percy B. Shelley's writings a response to a crisis in the eighteenth-century construction of subjectivity most sharply articulated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Jean Paul and Shelley address this crisis through a revisionary practice of metaphor and mimesis in their writing. The first chapter examines the Enlightenment paradox that the two romantic writers are at pains to resolve in their work. Simulation, representation and anticipation appear in Rousseau's thought as dimensions not only of literary texts but of subjectivity in the fallen world of "civil society." Rousseau thus measures the articulation of subjectivity against a standard of authenticity with which it is incommensurate, due to its own historically constructed nature. The succeeding chapter considers Jean Paul's writing as a mirror of time, examining the ramifications for his poetics of a philosophical viewpoint that constructs the interior space of the subject in time and in the modulation of sense perception---a viewpoint that Jean Paul inherits from both Rousseau and J.G. Herder. A brief synoptic reading of the metaphor-complex of the sun in Jean Paul's fictions traces how his employment of metaphor situates the reading and writing subject in time. The third chapter builds on this reading in order to delineate Jean Paul's defense of poetic mimesis in relation to the question of romantic irony and its counter-figure of humor, and to argue for a utopian dimension to Jean Paul's temporalization of mimesis, along the lines of a similar notion in Theodor Adorno's critical theory. The fourth chapter shifts the focus to Percy Shelley's alternative articulation of the relation of poetic metaphor to thought seen as a process of differentiation. A reading in the last chapter of Shelley's "visionary rhyme"---the mythopoetic strand of his writing from The Witch of Atlas to The Triumph of Life---focuses on reverberations in these poems of the conflict between "reason" and "imagination" as Shelley structures this distinction in his Defence of Poetry. I argue that a revisionary approach to the relationship of reason to imagination is what is at stake in these two writers' works.