Mythic Imagination and Indeterminacy in Novalis’s Henry of Ofterdingen

초록

This essay is going to examine the meaning of indeterminacy which is created by a mythic imagination and the idea of a fragment in Novalis’s unfinished novel, Henry of Ofterdingen. The story shows how the dynamics of myth and imagination are explored in Romanticism as a Europe-wide phenomenon. One of the interesting points about mythic imagination is that it is essentially related with the process of interpretation, but Novalis does not provide the sense of completeness in the story. Intriguingly, the story itself is fragmentary in that the author did not, or could not, finish it. Yet, this essay is going to claim that the sense of incompleteness in the story is not a failure, but rather refers to the Romantic way of representing the wholeness. At the same time, it will be mentioned in what sense there is a continuity between T. S. Eliot and Romanticism. By discussing the myth as the source for a creative imagination and the indeterminacy as the wholeness in Henry of Ofterdingen, we may see how the investigation of Novalis’s novel may help us to understand the fragmentary aspects of Eliot’s works.

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