Identifier l’identification. Scènes de lecture du et dans le Sandmann d’E.T.A. Hoffmann

Every interpretation discusses a text. But this seemingly banal statement reflects an imperative to which all interpretations are subjected – at least if they want to be more than just a redundant and more or less learned discourse – namely to discuss something that can also be found in the analysed text itself. The interpreter is expected to engage with the text, to suspend his own certainties and habits so as not to impose them on the foreign text, which hardly ever corresponds to them. If there is one text (among the most widely read and commented upon) that plays on this situation, it is E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novella Der Sandmann, where the narrator forcefully imposes an identification of narrator and reader. The article examines these phenomena of identification and also takes into account the analyses of the novella by Sigmund Freud and Sarah Kofman, who in turn was a reader of Freud

Art · Identification (biology) · Interpretation (philosophy) · Interpreter · Linguistics · Literature · Novella · Psychoanalysis · Reflexive pronoun · Statement (logic) · Computer Science · German Literature and Culture Studies · Linguistic research and analysis · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology