Edgar Pankow
Literatur Geschichte. Honor de Balzac und E.T.A. Hoffmann und die Genese von Traditionen im lixir de longue vie
Balzac's reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann may be regarded as a paradigm for the formation and configuration of literature and history. The works of Hoffmann played a complex and often overdetermined role in the early stages of Balzac's career as a writer and as author of the Comdie humaine. With respect to Hoffmann, Balzac paradoxically situates himself both as successor and antagonist. Thus, in one of his crucial early writings, the lixir de longue vie, he challenges the notion of a direct literary heredity. Yet, in the very same narrative, Balzac figures himself as a writer whose self-invention takes place as if designed by Hoffmann, namely as an uncanny and phantasmagoric event. With the lixir de longue vie Balzac elaborates a self-referential model for configuring literature and history that reaches beyond the framework of easily identifiable literary sources and motifs still informing most historical approaches to the intertextual realtionship of the two writers.
Arcadia International Journal for Literary Studies, Walter de Gruyter
Print ISSN: 0003-7982
Volume: 39, 07/2004
Pages: 27 - 54
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