Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Dickson, Sheila

Titel

The Body-Some Body-Any Body: Achim von Arnim and the Romantic Chameleon

Ist Teil von

• The German quarterly, 2001-07, Vol.74 (3), p.296-307

Ort / Verlag

Cherry Hill: American Association of Teachers of German

Erscheinungsjahr

2001

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Achim von Arnim's work as a scientist proved to him that everything in the material world is constantly exposed to processes of interaction and change. This affected his perception of the human body, which is part of this world but also part of another, spiritual world, to which we can only gain access through art. This article argues that Arnim's presentation of body and soul through the medium of his fictional characters illustrates both his goal of integrating the scientific and the aesthetic, and his concomitant perception of this goal as a problem and a challenge. The fictional body becomes a locus for the constant tension between the empirical and the spiritual. The process of creating these bodies in art becomes the subject of the art and this aesthetic self-reflection also acts as a challenge to the reader to participate in the breaking down of the barriers between reality and imagination through creative self-deception. Arnim's awareness that any artistic creation, whether by the author, his characters, or his reader, will not always be successful is reflected in the highly personal nature of the fictional bodies created in his works. They are an honest reflection of what he considers possible in general, human and specific, personal and historical terms.