This dissertation demonstrates how Samuel Taylor Coleridge provides a unique vision of reality in which his evolving self-consciousness mirrors, contributes to, and is subsumed by a single universal consciousness. Utilizing the divine power of imagination, he is able to decipher the images from the material world as characters of God's symbolic language of self-revelation; subsequently, through the divine "attribute" of reason, he is able to transform them into a corresponding symbolic language of poetry. He realizes that his creativity is a finite repetition of God's infinite act of creation in which "spirit," God's consciousness in creation, comes to an awareness of itself through the human mind. This study argues that, according to Coleridge, these processes follow a divine intention, and the human faculties and the mind's structure have been molded precisely to achieve a particular understanding of reality that conforms to God's requirements and for spirit's self-actualization. Furthermore, the process by which Coleridge creates and derives knowledge from his poetic expressions follows an archetypal blueprint according to which all natural processes operate. This project illustrates not only how the theory of organicism lies at the foundation of the complex, reciprocal relationship between Coleridge's artistic expression and developing subjectivity, but also how there is an organic interrelationship between an individual's developing self-consciousness and spirit's growing awareness of its cosmic totality. Ultimately, Coleridge's writings reveal that the macrocosmic and microcosmic processes are organically interrelated, interdependent, and symbiotic and that this "truth" is gradually discovered through his experiences of the divine elements of love and beauty in creation.

Dès 1770, Shakespeare est érigé en modèle par les artistes partisans d’une rupture avec l’esthétique classique, jusqu’à devenir une figure tutélaire des romantismes européens, en littérature comme en musique. Hector Berlioz, fondateur du romantisme musical français, est un cas emblématique de ce geste romantique qui consiste à s’emparer d’une figure littéraire pour bousculer les catégories esthétiques existantes et renouveler les formes musicales. Le dramaturge anglais est une référence constante dans son œuvre, depuis sa découverte de Shakespeare en 1827 jusqu’à son dernier opéra, Béatrice et Bénédict en 1862, adapté de la comédie Much ado about nothing. Berlioz s’inspire de Shakespeare tant dans ses œuvres musicales que dans ses écrits critiques et autobiographiques, où les références à l’auteur anglais sont multiples. La relation que l’œuvre de Berlioz entretient avec celle du dramaturge pose à la fois des questions de réception et de transferts culturels, et le problème du passage d’un système sémiotique à un autre. Elle invite tout d’abord à s’interroger sur le processus d’appropriation d’une œuvre littéraire par un compositeur et ses enjeux théoriques, et à situer sa démarche dans le cadre plus vaste de la réception européenne de Shakespeare au tournant du xixe siècle. La référence au dramaturge dans l’œuvre de Berlioz intervient plus précisément dans le cadre de l’élaboration d’une esthétique du sublime, comme le montre l’étude des rapports entre texte et musique. Il apparaît alors que le « système shakespearien » nourrit les réflexions du compositeur sur les formes et les genres musicaux. / As early as 1770, Shakespeare is set up as a model by the artists who consider it necessary to break away from classical aesthetics. His name is so high that he becomes a figurehead for the various forms of European romanticisms, in literature as well as in music. As the founder of the French musical romanticism, Hector Berlioz embodies the romantic approach which consists in seizing a literary figure to discard the existing aesthetical categories and thus bring about new musical forms. Right from 1827, the year the musician discovers Shakespeare, until his last opera in 1862, Béatrice et Bénédict, adapted from the comedy Much ado about nothing, Berlioz widely draws his inspiration from the English playwright and constantly refers to him in his musical, critical and even autobiographical works. The issues raised by this close relationship are threefold : the way Shakespeare’s plays were received, the problem of cultural transfer and the shift from one semiotics to another. First of all it brings forth questions about the process which leads a composer to make a literary works his own and the theoretical aspects at stake. Also, this relationship makes it necessary to see how Berlioz’s approach fits in with the way Europe received Shakespeare at the turn of the 19th century, in so far as the reference to the playwright takes place at a time when a new aesthetics of the sublime is in progress, as shows our study of the relationship between text and music. It so appears that the “Shakespearean system” enriches the composer’s reflexions on musical forms and genres.

Throughout history, there have been playful prefaces to literature (or in classical oratory, before display pieces). But German examples written by authors around 1800 to their own works, together with contemporary, self-authored prefaces to speculative philosophy, constitute a peculiarly paradoxical text type. Once literature was conceived as an autonomous domain rather than as a branch of general learning; as a popular book market took hold; and once systematic philosophy competed with literature’s broad acclaim as well as intellectual independence, the preface became not only a pragmatic, but also a creative and conceptual problem. Hence the preface became complicated as a form, in a broadly Romantic tradition of thought in which every act of genuine reflection was understood to expose epistemological contradiction. After my general, theoretical Preface and my comparative, historical Introduction, I focus on three preface paradoxes and three case studies of remarkably complex textuality: on Goethe, Jean Paul and Hegel. Most notable among their prefatory texts are the prefaces to Werther (1774), to a fictive second edition of Quintus Fixlein (1797) and to Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807). This trajectory is a story that begins with literary creativity and moves towards greater philosophical intricacy. The significance of my study is threefold. First and foremost, considering prefaces in this period of German literature and philosophy complements and augments the negative, subjective Early German Romantic idea of irony, Romantic textual fragmentation, as well as Jean Paul’s and Hegel’s literary and philosophically informed attempts to render both concepts and their manifestation on the page more positive and objective. Fragments are conventionally conceived as additive pieces, fortifying or undermining works. This conception can hold true for prefaces, including those by Goethe, Jean Paul and Hegel. At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, though, a number of writers of fragments argued that their works should be understood as wholes. Precisely some prefaces by Goethe, Jean Paul and Hegel can be read so paradoxically: as unifying, wholesome (in a Sentimental sense) and systematic fragments respectively. Second and third, I show the wider importance of the German preface at the turn of the nineteenth century. Authors around 1800 not only displayed, but discovered and debated a prefatory paradoxicality that we encounter in post-Romantic, post-Structuralist and post-modern literature, theory and philosophy, too. Moreover, I demonstrate the ways in which prefaces by particularly Jean Paul and Hegel influenced especially Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Derrida.