Abstract:Maligned by ancient Alexandrian librarians and twentieth-century philologists alike, interpolation has a long history of negative criticism that obscures its ubiquity and utility in the medieval period. This article first tells the story of criticism of interpolation, using the Latin verb interpolare as a through-line across centuries of commentary. In this vision, the consensus is that interpolations must be detected in order to be eliminated. The trouble with this story is that deleting interpolations suppresses the very idea that texts were open to such interruptive revisions; by erasing embedded texts, these editors quietly do away with an important part of medieval textual culture. To get around this problem, the article then proposes an alternative story in which medieval practices of interpolation reflect flexible attitudes toward authorship and textual unity. Drawing on Derrida's idea of the parergon, I argue for the inextricability of so-called extraneous material from the work itself. Ultimately, interpolation is revealed to be an indispensable aspect of medieval textual culture that has been unjustly sidelined because of a long history of misunderstanding it as an attack on textual integrity, rather than as a deep form of interpretive engagement.
{"title":"Interpolation as Critical Category","authors":"Hannah Weaver","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Maligned by ancient Alexandrian librarians and twentieth-century philologists alike, interpolation has a long history of negative criticism that obscures its ubiquity and utility in the medieval period. This article first tells the story of criticism of interpolation, using the Latin verb interpolare as a through-line across centuries of commentary. In this vision, the consensus is that interpolations must be detected in order to be eliminated. The trouble with this story is that deleting interpolations suppresses the very idea that texts were open to such interruptive revisions; by erasing embedded texts, these editors quietly do away with an important part of medieval textual culture. To get around this problem, the article then proposes an alternative story in which medieval practices of interpolation reflect flexible attitudes toward authorship and textual unity. Drawing on Derrida's idea of the parergon, I argue for the inextricability of so-called extraneous material from the work itself. Ultimately, interpolation is revealed to be an indispensable aspect of medieval textual culture that has been unjustly sidelined because of a long history of misunderstanding it as an attack on textual integrity, rather than as a deep form of interpretive engagement.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"53 1","pages":"1 - 32"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42803075","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Eerything here depends on the ways narrative prose can be understood to have its own induced motor functions in matters of pace, juxtaposition, overlap, and recurrence. My goal in moving between media is to locate and specify, in the operations of verbal style, the prose counterpart of cinema's twin frames: the big Frame of the moving screen picture, that is, together (always together) with the little frame of its composite photographic imprints, as those are subject to the traditional understanding of "frame-advance" in the spinning past of the celluloid reel in projection. Movies derive at base from the instantaneous replacement of these so-called photograms—and the continuous rearray of their pixel equivalents since—in generating the actual (if invisible) motion on which pictured movement depends. As with syllabic sequence in syntactic perception, within and across sentences, the two scales of screen "action" are in fact all but simultaneous—and functionally inseparable. Hence my heuristic coinage for the comparable momentum at stake in each "time-based" medium: Fframe-advance.
{"title":"Verbal Fframe-Advance: Toward a Cinematographic Sentence","authors":"G. Stewart","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Eerything here depends on the ways narrative prose can be understood to have its own induced motor functions in matters of pace, juxtaposition, overlap, and recurrence. My goal in moving between media is to locate and specify, in the operations of verbal style, the prose counterpart of cinema's twin frames: the big Frame of the moving screen picture, that is, together (always together) with the little frame of its composite photographic imprints, as those are subject to the traditional understanding of \"frame-advance\" in the spinning past of the celluloid reel in projection. Movies derive at base from the instantaneous replacement of these so-called photograms—and the continuous rearray of their pixel equivalents since—in generating the actual (if invisible) motion on which pictured movement depends. As with syllabic sequence in syntactic perception, within and across sentences, the two scales of screen \"action\" are in fact all but simultaneous—and functionally inseparable. Hence my heuristic coinage for the comparable momentum at stake in each \"time-based\" medium: Fframe-advance.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"53 1","pages":"139 - 160"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47969440","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Where in the realm of the sensible can we locate the impact of large-scale anthropogenic processes on biodiversity? In this article I develop a critical approach I term "biocultural phenomenology," focusing upon the intersection of ecological crisis and literary form. I read psychological and social realisms by Henry James and H. G. Wells for instances of small-scale, granular sensations of widening access to imperial and settler-colonial practices of consumption, prevalent forms of bourgeois sociality, and emerging patterns of feeling. I argue that "everyday" and often mundane feelings that are the focus of dominant strands of historical realism are inextricable from the biocide they produce. This article engages ongoing conversations in environmental humanities and novel studies, current styles of critique, and identifies new possibilities for the history of realism. First, biocultural phenomenology displaces affective responses of mourning and ontological accounts of absence governing conversations about literary form and anthropogenic impacts on nonhuman life. Second, I argue that realist logics in these highly anthropocentric texts that appear superficially unpromising for environmental thought nevertheless bind accounts of phenomenal experiences to emergent systemic behaviors across time. Third, I reframe the critical category of the "everyday" in the history of realism to encompass global multispecies impacts and accreting, complex causal structures across very long timescales.
{"title":"What Does Biodiversity Loss Feel Like? Realism in the Age of Extinction","authors":"Adrienne Ghaly","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Where in the realm of the sensible can we locate the impact of large-scale anthropogenic processes on biodiversity? In this article I develop a critical approach I term \"biocultural phenomenology,\" focusing upon the intersection of ecological crisis and literary form. I read psychological and social realisms by Henry James and H. G. Wells for instances of small-scale, granular sensations of widening access to imperial and settler-colonial practices of consumption, prevalent forms of bourgeois sociality, and emerging patterns of feeling. I argue that \"everyday\" and often mundane feelings that are the focus of dominant strands of historical realism are inextricable from the biocide they produce. This article engages ongoing conversations in environmental humanities and novel studies, current styles of critique, and identifies new possibilities for the history of realism. First, biocultural phenomenology displaces affective responses of mourning and ontological accounts of absence governing conversations about literary form and anthropogenic impacts on nonhuman life. Second, I argue that realist logics in these highly anthropocentric texts that appear superficially unpromising for environmental thought nevertheless bind accounts of phenomenal experiences to emergent systemic behaviors across time. Third, I reframe the critical category of the \"everyday\" in the history of realism to encompass global multispecies impacts and accreting, complex causal structures across very long timescales.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"53 1","pages":"33 - 57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48743761","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This paper explores rapper Lil Wayne's use of the language of food and consumption through the lens of critical theorizing about poetic imitatio ("imitation") from antiquity through the staggered Renaissances across Europe. I suggest that Lil Wayne's use of consumptive imagery points to a poetics of artistic engagement—what I term a "poetics of cannibalism"—that has lurked in the background of theorizing about imitatio for millennia. Scholars have recognized a range of deep-seated traditions going back to antiquity analogizing literature to physical bodies, literary reception to "consumption," and the notion that competitive poetics is inherently violent. But rarely are these traditions merged in discussions of imitatio. This study sheds light both on the tradition of theorizing about imitatio and on Lil Wayne's place in it. More broadly, the paper interrogates the role food plays in mimetic arts and in discussions of poetics and reception.
{"title":"Lil Wayne, Imitatio, and the Poetics of Cannibalism","authors":"Andrew Mcclellan","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper explores rapper Lil Wayne's use of the language of food and consumption through the lens of critical theorizing about poetic imitatio (\"imitation\") from antiquity through the staggered Renaissances across Europe. I suggest that Lil Wayne's use of consumptive imagery points to a poetics of artistic engagement—what I term a \"poetics of cannibalism\"—that has lurked in the background of theorizing about imitatio for millennia. Scholars have recognized a range of deep-seated traditions going back to antiquity analogizing literature to physical bodies, literary reception to \"consumption,\" and the notion that competitive poetics is inherently violent. But rarely are these traditions merged in discussions of imitatio. This study sheds light both on the tradition of theorizing about imitatio and on Lil Wayne's place in it. More broadly, the paper interrogates the role food plays in mimetic arts and in discussions of poetics and reception.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"53 1","pages":"109 - 137"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42156969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What is the Matter? A Meditation on Illegible Writing","authors":"W. Stables","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2021.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2021.0013","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"52 1","pages":"285 - 309"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66404132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This article argues for the privileged position of genre at the middle scale in literary analysis, showing how genre categories locate texts within literary-historical contexts and thus reveal the processes of literary change. Examining two major recent methodological developments in literary studies—the new formalism and the digital humanities—it calls for disentangling the terms "form" and "genre" to recognize the different scales on which they operate. The essay proposes a method of generic reading that focuses on changes both among genres—the emergence of new genres, the implementation of existing ones, or the decline in previously significant ones—and within particular genres. To demonstrate this method, it considers the genre of the epistolary pamphlet and the particular uses to which it was put during the early abolitionist debate of the turn of the nineteenth century. Generic reading incorporating computational analysis shows how this genre helped to establish a news environment that was ongoing, cyclical, dialogic, and ephemeral. More broadly, this method shows how shifting genre categories drive literary change over time.
{"title":"The Scale of Genre","authors":"R. King","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2021.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2021.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article argues for the privileged position of genre at the middle scale in literary analysis, showing how genre categories locate texts within literary-historical contexts and thus reveal the processes of literary change. Examining two major recent methodological developments in literary studies—the new formalism and the digital humanities—it calls for disentangling the terms \"form\" and \"genre\" to recognize the different scales on which they operate. The essay proposes a method of generic reading that focuses on changes both among genres—the emergence of new genres, the implementation of existing ones, or the decline in previously significant ones—and within particular genres. To demonstrate this method, it considers the genre of the epistolary pamphlet and the particular uses to which it was put during the early abolitionist debate of the turn of the nineteenth century. Generic reading incorporating computational analysis shows how this genre helped to establish a news environment that was ongoing, cyclical, dialogic, and ephemeral. More broadly, this method shows how shifting genre categories drive literary change over time.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"52 1","pages":"261 - 284"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46631429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:My aim in this essay is to take seriously the idea that the activity of criticism entails a distinct form of thinking. I develop my argument through an engagement with Gilles Deleuze's and Félix Guattari's What is Philosophy?, a text in which the two authors look back on their life's work to interrogate fundamental aspects of their shared discipline. For my purposes, to pose and answer the question "What is criticism?," two components of the book's project seem especially important. The first is that it is not just a book about philosophy but about thinking, and about the specific practices that characterize different forms of thought. Deleuze and Guattari hold up philosophy alongside science and art as three ur-forms of thought. Significantly, these three forms of thought can be seen to serve as the three major coordinates marking contemporary debates about criticism. What happens, I want to ask, when we subtract from criticism its affinities with these other practices of thought? What remains of criticism once we identify its specific differences from science, art, and philosophy? My claim is that the distinctiveness of critical thinking can be found precisely in its difference from these three other major practices. Secondly, What is Philosophy? is a book designed to interrogate the doxa of its authors' discipline. In a similar way, the aim of my own essay is to push against the institutional doxa of "critical thinking" by drawing out the virtues of a genuinely critical thinking.
{"title":"Critical Thinking","authors":"Audrey Wasser","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2021.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2021.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:My aim in this essay is to take seriously the idea that the activity of criticism entails a distinct form of thinking. I develop my argument through an engagement with Gilles Deleuze's and Félix Guattari's What is Philosophy?, a text in which the two authors look back on their life's work to interrogate fundamental aspects of their shared discipline. For my purposes, to pose and answer the question \"What is criticism?,\" two components of the book's project seem especially important. The first is that it is not just a book about philosophy but about thinking, and about the specific practices that characterize different forms of thought. Deleuze and Guattari hold up philosophy alongside science and art as three ur-forms of thought. Significantly, these three forms of thought can be seen to serve as the three major coordinates marking contemporary debates about criticism. What happens, I want to ask, when we subtract from criticism its affinities with these other practices of thought? What remains of criticism once we identify its specific differences from science, art, and philosophy? My claim is that the distinctiveness of critical thinking can be found precisely in its difference from these three other major practices. Secondly, What is Philosophy? is a book designed to interrogate the doxa of its authors' discipline. In a similar way, the aim of my own essay is to push against the institutional doxa of \"critical thinking\" by drawing out the virtues of a genuinely critical thinking.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"52 1","pages":"191 - 209"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42833064","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Jacques Rancière's poetic concept of anachrony provides a critical tool for probing the many times of premodern poetry. By suggesting the way poems "take time against the grain," anachrony helps us to entertain them as "modes of connection," as "events," that can become present in times other than when they were first created. In Rancière's terms, anachronous poems make leaps in time, and activated once more, engage publics in various new places, about questions foreign to their first era. My test case in this essay: The Ballad of the Hanged Men and The Testament of François Villon. By examining literary translations of Villon's poetry in a growing transnational context, I argue for the unpredictable timeliness of this poetic fiction. In this argument, numerous creators compose Villon anew, including, for example, Édouard Glissant and his poems, other Black poets in the US, as well as writers in Enlightenment and modern-day Europe, in Japan around 1900, too. Such an understanding of Villon's poetry leads to a model of premodern fiction that encompasses the many instances it makes history.
{"title":"A Timely Villon: Anachrony and Premodern Poetic Fiction","authors":"Helen Solterer","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2021.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2021.0014","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Jacques Rancière's poetic concept of anachrony provides a critical tool for probing the many times of premodern poetry. By suggesting the way poems \"take time against the grain,\" anachrony helps us to entertain them as \"modes of connection,\" as \"events,\" that can become present in times other than when they were first created. In Rancière's terms, anachronous poems make leaps in time, and activated once more, engage publics in various new places, about questions foreign to their first era. My test case in this essay: The Ballad of the Hanged Men and The Testament of François Villon. By examining literary translations of Villon's poetry in a growing transnational context, I argue for the unpredictable timeliness of this poetic fiction. In this argument, numerous creators compose Villon anew, including, for example, Édouard Glissant and his poems, other Black poets in the US, as well as writers in Enlightenment and modern-day Europe, in Japan around 1900, too. Such an understanding of Villon's poetry leads to a model of premodern fiction that encompasses the many instances it makes history.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"52 1","pages":"311 - 334"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43147508","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay follows Primo Levi's journey home to Italy after the liberation of Auschwitz, as narrated in his 1963 memoir The Reawakening [La tregua]. Levi's repatriation convoy bound for Italy under Soviet guard traveled inexplicably east instead of south, traversing and being detained within the landscape of the Pripet Marshes. As Europe's largest wetlands, the nearly impassible Pripet Marshes had stalled a Nazi advance into Russia and saw partisan fighting in both World Wars. This essay examines Levi's journey into the Pripet Marshes through two temporal frames--both its haunted legacy of genocidal pogroms, as well as its near future: the site of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Traumatic overlays resonate across Levi's memoir of the cease-fire interval after the war, an uneasy peace Levi terms a "parenthesis of unlimited availability" (p. 206). Thinking through Levi's writing on the afterlife of trauma, Freud's concept of the "uncanny" is employed alongside trauma theory to illuminate a traumatic anamorphosis emerging from Levi's text. This essay pursues an ecological reading of trauma to gather traces strewn across human, nonhuman, and inhuman landscapes of annihilation.
{"title":"Primo Levi's Chernobyl: Ecology and Trauma in The Reawakening","authors":"A. Slater","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2021.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2021.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay follows Primo Levi's journey home to Italy after the liberation of Auschwitz, as narrated in his 1963 memoir The Reawakening [La tregua]. Levi's repatriation convoy bound for Italy under Soviet guard traveled inexplicably east instead of south, traversing and being detained within the landscape of the Pripet Marshes. As Europe's largest wetlands, the nearly impassible Pripet Marshes had stalled a Nazi advance into Russia and saw partisan fighting in both World Wars. This essay examines Levi's journey into the Pripet Marshes through two temporal frames--both its haunted legacy of genocidal pogroms, as well as its near future: the site of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Traumatic overlays resonate across Levi's memoir of the cease-fire interval after the war, an uneasy peace Levi terms a \"parenthesis of unlimited availability\" (p. 206). Thinking through Levi's writing on the afterlife of trauma, Freud's concept of the \"uncanny\" is employed alongside trauma theory to illuminate a traumatic anamorphosis emerging from Levi's text. This essay pursues an ecological reading of trauma to gather traces strewn across human, nonhuman, and inhuman landscapes of annihilation.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"52 1","pages":"335 - 361"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42765182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The following essay tries to square the circle formed by two opposing yet inextricably entangled ways of thinking about aesthetics: as a subfield of philosophy and as the product of a uniquely dateable historical event. This invites us to interrogate the relationship between philosophy and history generally, disciplines that have eyed each other with suspicion from the moment both set about professionalizing their standards and methods in Enlightenment Europe—the very moment that witnesses the advent of aesthetics itself, most notably in David Hume and Immanuel Kant. I argue that this relationship was already fully dialectical even if that idea did not come to formal self-consciousness until Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel placed it at the center of his own philosophical system. What made aesthetics loom so large in Enlightenment circles was the degree to which problems of beauty, sublimity, and taste put philosophy to the test of historical experience. But the reverse was true as well. In putting philosophy to an historical test, aesthetics opened the way for Hegel’s effort to put history to the test of philosophical reason. I hope that aesthetics will come into sharper focus when seen as both a philosophical discipline and an historical dilemma. Aesthetics’ dual status as discipline and dilemma reveals more clearly not only why it emerged when and where it did but also how the eighteenth century of Hume and Kant foreshadowed the historical, philosophical, and aesthetic program that took shape in Hegel.
{"title":"Squaring the Circle: Aesthetics and Its History","authors":"Christopher Braider","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2021.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2021.0010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The following essay tries to square the circle formed by two opposing yet inextricably entangled ways of thinking about aesthetics: as a subfield of philosophy and as the product of a uniquely dateable historical event. This invites us to interrogate the relationship between philosophy and history generally, disciplines that have eyed each other with suspicion from the moment both set about professionalizing their standards and methods in Enlightenment Europe—the very moment that witnesses the advent of aesthetics itself, most notably in David Hume and Immanuel Kant. I argue that this relationship was already fully dialectical even if that idea did not come to formal self-consciousness until Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel placed it at the center of his own philosophical system. What made aesthetics loom so large in Enlightenment circles was the degree to which problems of beauty, sublimity, and taste put philosophy to the test of historical experience. But the reverse was true as well. In putting philosophy to an historical test, aesthetics opened the way for Hegel’s effort to put history to the test of philosophical reason. I hope that aesthetics will come into sharper focus when seen as both a philosophical discipline and an historical dilemma. Aesthetics’ dual status as discipline and dilemma reveals more clearly not only why it emerged when and where it did but also how the eighteenth century of Hume and Kant foreshadowed the historical, philosophical, and aesthetic program that took shape in Hegel.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"52 1","pages":"211 - 237"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47282097","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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