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Optical Devices in Literature around the Year 1800
Smyčka, Václav
The study examines the relationship between literature and optical media (zograscopes, peepshows and magic laterns) in the late 18th century and the first half of the 19th century, in other words before the advent of photography and film. It is based on the theses of the media theorist Friedrich Kittler about the mutual overlap and delimitation between literary imagination, optical devices and anthropological ideas about human fantasy. It examines these relationships in the works of literature writen in Czech and German in the czech lands during this period, focusing in particular on texts by Christian Heinrich Spiess and his role played in them by the magic latern. An analysis of Spiess´ works and examples from other 19th - century Czech and Czech-German authorsshows, that from the end of the 18th century the magic latern became not only a frequent literyry motif, but also a model though which these authors understood the functioning of the human imagination as such. It appears that in Spiess´ thought the pathological state of phantasy is relatedto the normal functioneng of the imagination in the same way as a defect in the projection apparatus is related to its normal operation. However, the magic latern also functions in Spiess´ oevre as a poetological programme. Spiess sees his own writing as criticism of the work of the optical media, but at the same time develops their specific poeticism and attempts to compensate it for it. He also disseminates imagination through multiple intermedial references, ans it thus seemingly trans-medial relationships between literature and optical media well before the announcement of the end of the Gutenberg galaxy.
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