ICARO GONÇALEZ FERREIRA

Examining the composition's process and reception of Goethe's poem Hermann und Dorothea (1797) allows to illustrate the reciprocal relations between the poetic and reflective production of Weimar Classicism and the philosophical elaboration of Jena Romanticism and Hegelian Idealism - a concrete case in which artistic creation, aesthetic reflection and speculation fertilise each other in tackling a series of problems: the establishment of a theory of poetic genres on a speculative basis, overcoming a normative, inductive and classificatory perspective; the awareness, resigned or excruciating, of the distance between the present and Antiquity, the source of the supreme models in art; the challenges in the modern re-actualisation of these models, in confrontation with the experience of history.