Sensory perception and literary narration are sometimes regarded in opposition to each other. Paul de Man, for example, declared that ‘a literary text is not a phenomenal event’ and therefore ‘solicits an understanding that has to remain immanent’. In his study, Christian Jany challenges such a strict division by shifting attention to the interplay between perceptual and narrative processes. The introduction of key phenomenological concepts and, above all, Hegel’s conception of sense perception as a ‘story’ prepare this shift theoretically. The following analyses of scenic descriptions – or scenographies – of perception by Novalis, Rilke, and Proust demonstrate the interplay of perception and narration in practice. The things a Rilkean poem has us see, the subtle resonances of the opening scene of Proust’s Recherche, and the strange fusions of thought and feeling that some ‘blue flower’ generates in Nov
