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Instruments of Wonder — Wondrous Instruments: Optical Devices in the Poetics of the Marvelous of Fontenelle, Rist, Breitinger, and Hoffmann
Author(s) -
Gess Nicola
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
the german quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.11
H-Index - 10
eISSN - 1756-1183
pISSN - 0016-8831
DOI - 10.1111/gequ.12047
Subject(s) - poetics , wonder , poetry , subject (documents) , object (grammar) , spectacle , focus (optics) , art , aesthetics , literature , reflection (computer programming) , philosophy , computer science , optics , epistemology , physics , linguistics , law , library science , programming language , political science
This paper argues that many poetic conceptions of the marvelous from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century foreground optical devices, drawing attention to the mediality of these devices as well as the mediality of the literature that draws inspiration from them. In light of writings by Fontenelle and Rist that cast the marvelous in optical terms, this paper examines discourses surrounding the wondrous nature of optical devices and the aesthetics of spectacle to which they give rise. It then traces Breitinger's shift of focus from the object observed to the observing subject and uses this shift as a framework for locating aporias of self‐reflection in a crucial text on the marvelous by E.T.A. Hoffmann.