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The form of the fragment is central to the poetics of early German Romanticism. Through the publication of unsigned fragments in the journal Athenaeum (1798-1800), Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Von Hardenberg (Novalis), August Schlegel, and Friedrich Schleiermacher constellated their wide-ranging interventions in philosophy, literary and art criticism, theology, hermeneutics, history, politics, and ethics, among other fields of concern. These fragments emerged from and intersected with the larger community of writers and thinkers of which they were part in Jena in the 1790s, bearing witness to the ideal of a Romantische Poesie that would unite modernity’s separated forms of knowledge and practice.
What is the relevance of the romantic fragment to contemporary poetry and poetics? And how has the form and function of the romantic fragment been transformed by the centrality of fragmentation to modernism? Picking up the thread of a particular formal practice inaugurated in Jena in the 1790s, this two-day graduate student conference will bring together scholars of romantic, modernist, and contemporary poetry and poetics to consider the legacy and reinvention of the fragment as a form of writing over the past two centuries and into the present.