Heidegger and the Romantics: The Literary Invention of Meaning

In this study, Vandevelde examines the literary invention of meaning as understood by Heidegger and the romantic poets. The mimetic model has dominated the understanding of poetry and literary production in the west since the time of the Plato. This book examines two powerful attempts to free the understanding of poetry or literary production from the model of mimesis. The first attempt examined is the one made by early German romanticism, especially Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. The second is the one made by Martin Heidegger in the following century. The goal is not, however, to argue for a simple filiation between Heidegger and the romantics, but rather to examine in the similarities and differences of their respective projects the possibility to re-think the old quarrel between literature and philosophy which has been settled in favor of philosophy. By bringing to the fore the power or potentiality that lies dormant in any work both the early German romantics and Heidegger in their own way question the very boundaries of discourses. Such a move has radical ontological and epistemological consequences. Both projects in their respective manner claimed that the work is in its essence a process instead of an entity. As a result the reading and interpretion of literary works are no longer merely extrinsic to the work but they amount to a continuation of the very work completing it as it were. Such an activity is neither merely literary nor merely philosophical, but thinking in action.