Login

Recent searches

No recent searches

Search options

Only available when logged in.
mastodon.online is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A newer server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

Administered by:

Server stats:

10K
active users

mastodon.online: AboutStatusProfiles directoryPrivacy policy

Mastodon: AboutGet the appKeyboard shortcutsView source codev4.4.0-nightly.2025-04-01

#JeanPaul

0 posts0 participants0 posts today
Public
the roamer

I was 22 when I read the once famous but now long forgotten novel The Titan (1803) by Jean Paul (1763 -1825), Germany's belated echo of England's Laurence Sterne.

The chapters in The Titan aren't called "chapters" like in any other book. Instead each is a "Jobelperiode", "Jubilation period" or perhaps "Joohbilation Period". So having finished say chapter 22, the reader turns the page and enters "The Twentythird Joohbilation Period".

The concept was liberating. Style can subvert. Convention has no claim on any of us.

When I encountered the Jobelperiode I knew there was a role for me as a writer. Not a novelist or poet, but a science writer with poetic urgency. Forty years later, I agree with my younger self. I write mostly for my students. Long notes of precise analytical exposition, with the occasional intervention of the unexpected poetic liberty, the confident breach of protocol. Jean Paul's Jobelperiode has stayed with me.

#JeanPaul#style#writing
Public
the roamer

"And while joy itself is hurried, it is preceded by long hope and followed by a longer remembering. Just as in polar spring, the sun's image emerges well before the sun itself appears, and in polar autumn the sky still glows when the actual sun is long gone."

German novelist Jean Paul in his Palingenesien (1798), vol II, p 330. Free translation, by me.

Thank you to @MaxaufderRax and @CitizenWald for bringing Jean Paul back into my reading and for this reference.

#JeanPaul#happiness
Replied to Max-auf-der-Rax
Public
the roamer

@MaxaufderRax @CitizenWald

As a young man, obsessed with absorbing the literary canon, I once spent a two-week holiday in Vienna coffeehouses, reading Jean Paul's Titan. I took extensive handwritten extracts on loose A4 sheets, then folded them up, I still have them somewhere in a box. My current academic writing style still has echoes of the long associative sentences in Jean Paul that I sponged up at those coffeehouse tables many decades ago.

#JeanPaul
ExploreLive feeds
About