After that, I gave a short intro of some of the main topics at stake in Hoffmann's short stories, namely: the opposition ideal vs. reality, as it translates in a series of further oppositions that Hoffmann projects onto his own characters and plots (marital love vs. idealized love; social duty vs. artistic aspirations); the philosophical notions of subjectivism and idealism in relation to the narrative structures adopted by Hoffmann; the representation of female figures as agents in charge of compensating for the frustrated élan of the artist towards the ideal or absolute; Hoffmann's attack to middle-class philistinism. We also discussed some excerpts from Théophile Gautier's text on Hoffmann's short-stories (1836). 

We also discussed the transformative power of Polémon's discourse, Polémon who appears as transfigured and dehumanized after the end of his own tale. In order to contextualize this point, we talked about the sublime in the French reception by Nicolas Boileau (rapture through discourse). One more point that we fixed is the degree of awareness of the narrator throughout the text, as well as the presence of some meta-comments that seem to create a blend of registers (fictional account and "étude").

While in the first preface Nodier gives up the authorship of the texts and affirms that he only translated the work of a Dalmatian poet, in the second one he claims that he has written a "pastiche", whose sources range from Dante to Homer to Shakespeare. The reference to Shakespeare is particularly important and emerges from the para textual elements of the story, namely the epigraphs. As a noble example of the loosening of generic boundaries in drama, Shakespeare is the herald of the possibility to develop new aesthetic solutions; at the same time, his presence is counterbalanced by epigraphs drawn Latin literature, in a way that highlights Nodier's intention to make classicism and romanticism coexist in the textual space of his story. 

Despite the vagueness of its descriptions and the elusiveness of its transitions, the text itself has a clear structure, as Nodier says in his first preface. What complicates the reading of the text is the nature of the matter at stake, dreams, that are elusive by definition. 

Finally, we started to discuss some specific textual elements, such as the blend of different syntactic structures, the massive presence of adjectives, and the blurring of identities enhanced by the textual distance between nouns and subject pronouns. 

In the text, Nodier also positions himself in the flux of history as part of a generation that tries to grapple with the political turmoil that followed the French Revolution and that is attested by the long sequence of political reversals in the early 19th century. In this peculiar moment of transition, Nodier affirms the need for the renewal of aesthetic forms, thus contributing to the formation of a modern romantic taste opposed to classicism.

In the second part of the class, we discussed some important features of the "conte fantastique", namely through Todorov's study on this topic. Todorov underlines the importance of keeping the ambiguity between all the possible outcomes of supernatural manifestations, and defines "modalisation" as a key proceeding of fantastic writing, consisting in the mediation between the events that take place in the story and the reader, generally operated by a narrator that may or may not be directly involved in the supernatural manifestation.