The concept of motif in literature and music – the dialectics of iconicity in different medial substances

Abstract The term ‘motif’ is consistently used in musicology and literary criticism, yet it seemingly refers to in many ways very different phenomena. While motif in music usually means a formal, syntactic unit of expression within the structure of an individual piece, literary motifs are mostly understood as units of semantic content, often also connecting a corpus of individual texts. In spite of this, the dialectic relations between the old and the new or the known and the unknown is arguably a constitutive element of both musical and literary motifs, since all individual statements of a certain motif are perceived as both identical with the already known type and as somewhat different from it. This dialectic relation, has deep foundations in human semiotic cognition, for iconicity, is arguably also based on such a dialectic interpretation of the qualities of certain objects of perception – similarity can also be understood as a dialectic complex of identity and difference, relying on human mimetic memory. These essential dialectics then arguably play a crucial role in connecting familiarity and unfamiliarity through the use of motifs, as well as in the mutual projections of form and content upon each other, which eventually makes artistic modelling possible.