[T]he essentially human characteristic of general intellectual curiosity interests itself in the demonstration of previously unremarked interconnecti… - John Barth

There is a popular misconception of the Romantics as rebelling against all formal constraints in favor of untrammeled freedom (as in their fondness for "wild" gardens" around those "broken" columns), and indeed we have heard Schlegel's Julius explicitly rejecting "all that … we call 'order'" in his Lucinde project. But it is clear that in fact he and his creator have a veritable passion for form — in Wallace Stevens's famous phrasing, a "rage for order" — and that what they're rejecting is only certain "conventions" of order and form. I prefer to think of Schlegel as a "romantic formalist" — a term that I apply to myself as well — and I will venture to say that the principal difference between Romantic romantic formalism and Postmodernist romantic formalism is that the latter, more than the former, inclines to the ironic (though impassioned) reorchestration of older conventions — including the classical and the neoclassical — rather than to their rejection in favor of "new" forms.

[R]eading a splendid writer, or even just a very entertaining writer, is not a particularly passive business. An accomplished artist is giving us his or her best shots, in what she or he regards as their most effective sequence—of words, of actions, of foreshadowings and plot-twists and insights and carefully prepared dramatic moments. It's up to us to respond to those best shots with our minds and hearts and spirits and our accumulated experience of life and of art.

Life teaches the storyteller his themes and subject matter; literature teaches him how to get a handle on them: what has been done already, what might be done differently, what's a story anyway, and what is to be found in the existing inventory of situations, attitudes, characters, tonalities, forms, and effects accumulated over four thousand years of written literature.