ABSTRACT
The preface to Bennett’s monograph Hugo von Hofmannsthal: The Theaters of Consciousness1 points ahead to the most critical challenge facing both the author and reader of this text. Bennett describes his argument as ‘proceeding from the interpretation of a relatively small number of texts’ (p. xi) to the proposal of ‘as complete and balanced a picture of Hofmannsthal’s career as the limits of my [i.e. Bennett’s] interest and competence permit’ (p. xiii). One is immediately invited to ask questions about the degree to which the selectiveness of Bennett’s activity as an interpretative critic is compatible with the-albeit qualifiedcomprehensiveness of his project as a scholar of Hofmannsthal’s entire writing career. It appears, however, that the tension between the book’s identity as a thematically unified collection of studies of specific texts and its claims of totality, once raised in the preface, is subsequently assumed by the author to be a fairly unproblematic aspect of his stated methodology.
