E.T.A. Hoffmanns Spätwerk: Queer Readings

How does E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), the famous author of German romanticism, the master of the “unheimlich”, deal with the construction of gender and gender discourses at his time? How is it possible to understand and interpret the many hybrid figures and the ambivalent situations that populate his work? And how do these tropes interact with the social values and norms of his time for what concerns masculinity and femininity and the discourses on family, sexuality, desire and love? The present doctoral thesis argues that the late texts by Hoffmann, which are taken into consideration in the analysis, represent a critical challenge to the values and norms mentioned above. The exaggerations, the deformations and the parody of masculinity and femininity and of the relationship between men and women deconstruct the representations and the stereotypes of femininity and masculinity that were formed by mid eighteenth and were consolidated in the nineteenth century. Hoffmann’s texts point out the difficulties of these structures instead of showing their positivity; love relationships for instance are often represented with irony and satire; transgressions, crossing boundaries, hybrid figures and disorienting narrative structures question the codified sexual roles and the traditional genres. The theoretical and methodological reference points of the dissertation are located in gender and in queer studies in connection with the analytical tools of narratology. In the traditional literary criticism the gender and the sex of the characters and of the narrating voice were not considered important categories. This position changed when gender studies received their establishment in literary criticism in the late twentieth century. Taking gender into consideration as a useful category of analysis of texts opens up new perspectives both from the point of view of the thematic analysis of the text and of the point of view of the narrative discourse. In this sense narrative structures and strategies are not neutral, that is they are not only formal elements, but they carry sense, as they embody social, economic and political conditions.