Scenographies of Perception : Sensuousness in Hegel, Novalis, Rilke, and Proust

Sensory perception and literary narration are sometimes regarded in opposition to each other. Paul de Man, for example, declared that ‘a literary text is not a phenomenal event’ and therefore ‘solicits an understanding that has to remain immanent’. In his study, Christian Jany challenges such a strict division by shifting attention to the interplay between perceptual and narrative processes. The introduction of key phenomenological concepts and, above all, Hegel’s conception of sense perception as a ‘story’ prepare this shift theoretically. The following analyses of scenic descriptions – or scenographies – of perception by Novalis, Rilke, and Proust demonstrate the interplay of perception and narration in practice. The things a Rilkean poem has us see, the subtle resonances of the opening scene of Proust’s Recherche, and the strange fusions of thought and feeling that some ‘blue flower’ generates in Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen are exemplary cases in point of this ambitious study in literary aesthetics.

Christian Jany is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Literary and Cultural Studies, ETH Zürich.