Discuss Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffman's writing style.

Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffman (or E. T. A. Hoffman) was a German romantic writer who lived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. His writing is marked by the distinct way in which he interweaves the ordinary and the fantastic. He bounces between highly detailed, psychologically oriented tales grounded in ordinary events and disorienting, bizarre, and at times grotesque departures from reality. This is done in such a way that it often is ambiguous whether the reader is expected to understand these aspects as fantastic elements of Hoffman's stories or commentary on the madness of Hoffman's characters. Hoffman is also considered an early writer of horror, due to the way in which he depicted the mad, grotesque, and terrifying aspects of fantasy, going beyond the kind of darkness traditionally present in fantasy tales and taking these themes to an extreme in which they become more deeply troubling.
While most of Hoffman's work explores the fantastic, some of his stories are also early examples of what would eventually develop into science fiction, such as The Sandman and Automata.
Hoffman was a very deliberate artist, using satire to provide commentary on a wide range of politically and culturally relevant questions. In part, he focused significantly on the question of what it means to be an artist and how to embody romantic ideals as an artist. This, in addition to the fact that he was a painter and composer while also being a writer of novels, short stories, ballets, and operas is no doubt part of why his works have been so appealing to other artists. He inspired such well-known works as Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker. Hoffman calls for artists to be self-aware as they create but to avoid the self-conscious tendency to write in an attempt to please an audience, making it clear that he believed true art needed to exist for its own sake.