Beauty and Instability in Eighteenth
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Transformations of the Beautiful: Beauty and Instability in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century German Literature Arthur K. Salvo Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 © 2015 Arthur K. Salvo All rights reserved ABSTRACT Transformations of the Beautiful: Beauty and Instability in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century German Literature Arthur K. Salvo Transformations of the Beautiful reexamines a problem that emerges during the mid- eighteenth century: the devaluation of the aesthetic category of the beautiful. In opposition to accounts that identify this problem with the rediscovery of the sublime, this dissertation emphasizes the crucial yet underexamined role that historicization played in the destabilization of beauty’s normative status in German aesthetic discourse. Additionally, I demonstrate that literary discourse became a key mode through which the beautiful’s problematic status was negotiated. Assembling literary texts from 1759-1817 that thematize beautiful objects or phenomena in terms of their historicity or instability, and transform them, I argue that these moments constitute discrete instances in which literature responds to the precarious position of beauty in modernity. With recourse to texts by Winckelmann, Schiller, Jean Paul, Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann and Eichendorff, I focus on the specific literary techniques employed by different genres— description, elegy, and narrative fiction—and how they reconfigure the relationship between the modern subject and the beautiful. In so doing I demonstrate how literary texts intervene in aesthetic discourse to reevaluate and generate alternative conceptions of the beautiful. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Description and Recovery in Winckelmann’s “Torso” 12 Chapter 2. Beauty Irrecoverable: Elegy after Geschichtsphilosophie 65 Chapter 3. The Other Side of the Statue: Narrative Fiction Reconfigures the Beautiful 149 Conclusion 236 Bibliography 244 i Acknowledgments First and foremost I would like to thank my advisor, Dorothea von Mücke, for her unending support, enthusiasm and insight. From the inception of this project to its end, I found in her a mentor and champion of my work. She patiently guided this dissertation through its most challenging phases and improved it infinitely with constructive criticism and eye-opening questions. To Stefan Andriopoulos, my second advisor, I owe thanks for his generous intellectual support and advice. My writing benefitted greatly from his careful eye, comments and suggestions. I am especially grateful to Oliver Simons, Eva Geulen, and to my first teacher, Paul Fleming, whose vigorous engagement with my arguments at the defense fostered an immensely productive and rewarding exchange. To Kelly Barry I am also indebted; her courses “Goethe and Myth” and “Literature and Anthropology in the 18th Century” awakened interests that I pursued in the dissertation and her wisdom has served me well. For the duration of my graduate career at Columbia University the Department of Germanic Languages was my intellectual home. I’d like to thank Andreas Huyssen, Bill Dellinger and Peggy Quisenberry for their support and guidance. My fellow graduate students, especially Johanna Urzedowski, Christoph Schaub, Alexis Radisoglou, Patrick Walsh and Alexander von Thun helped me during many stages of the project. A significant portion of this dissertation was completed during a yearlong stay at the Freie Universität Berlin. I would like to acknowledge the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies and the German Studies Association for supporting my dissertation in the form of a research fellowship. During my time in Berlin I participated in an interdisciplinary colloquium where I benefited from constructive ii dialogue with my fellow colleagues. I am particularly grateful to Karin Goihl, who helped make my time in Berlin so productive. Last but not least I would like to express my gratitude to my family and friends. Irina Dumitrescu and Tim Albrecht offered their friendship and shared their experiences with the dissertation process; Tim, especially, was a sympathetic reader, a source of energy and a conversation partner throughout the project. I thank my aunt and uncle, Nona and Peter Mullen, for great company, distractions when I needed a break, and for always welcoming me into their home. My sister, Adelaide Davids, and my parents, Harriet and Kemble Salvo, have been a wellspring of support, love and encouragement throughout my entire graduate career and especially during the dissertation phase. Finally, I thank my wife, Sophie Salvo, who has patiently read every word of this dissertation, served as a sounding board for new ideas, inspired me with her intellect and buoyed me with her love, care and humor. To her and to my parents I dedicate this dissertation. iii Introduction “Sublimity Triumphant over Beauty?” In January 1983, Jean-François Lyotard presented a lecture at the Kunsthochschule in Berlin. Later published as “Das Erhabene und die Avantgarde” in Merkur, and reprinted in French and in English translation, the essay was to inform nearly three decades of philosophical-aesthetic and art-theoretical inquiry.1 In the lecture, Lyotard constructs a relationship between the aesthetic category of the sublime and avant-garde abstract expressionist art, tracing the origins of the latter to the rediscovery and re-theorization of the sublime during the eighteenth century by Burke and Kant. In the sublime’s ability to exceed pure sensual apprehension, its resistance to representation, Lyotard sees the seeds of conceptual art, which gestures towards the unrepresentable.2 Lyotard’s connection of avant-garde visual art with the sublime has contributed to a very specific understanding of the history of aesthetics. This account proceeds from the following proposition: if eighteenth-century theories of the sublime contain the origins of avant-garde modernism and abstract expressionism, and if the latter artistic movements articulate a manifest aversion to the beautiful, then a departure from or subordination of the beautiful can be found retroactively in the eighteenth-century sublime as well. In short, Lyotard’s essay on the avant-garde has given rise to the notion that the eighteenth- 1 Here I refer to its English translation, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” in: Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). 2 As Lyotard writes, summarizing his own argument, “I have tried to suggest that at the dawn of romanticism, Burke’s elaboration of the aesthetics of the sublime, and to a lesser degree Kant’s, outlined a world of possibilities for artistic experiments in which the avant-gardes would later trace out their paths.” Ibid., 101. 1 century reconceptualization of the sublime precipitated a devaluation of the aesthetic category of beauty.3 The prevalence of this account in contemporary scholarship is evidenced by works that—despite offering vastly different evaluative appraisals of the beautiful—nevertheless explicitly assign a usurpatory role to the sublime: Carsten Zelle’s Die Doppelte Ästhetik der Moderne (1995) refers to the emergence of the sublime as the “Krise des Schönen”4; Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (1999) attributes beauty’s de-potentialization to a conceptual differentiation from the sublime during the eighteenth century; and Arthur Danto’s The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (2003) states that “Beauty had been put on the defensive as early as the eighteenth century, when the concept of the sublime first entered Enlightenment consciousness […]”5. It is precisely this notion that I wish to complicate in my dissertation. If we return to Lyotard’s essay, however, and examine the prime example supporting his thesis, we can also observe another means of explaining the deflation of the beautiful. Lyotard, as well as Danto after him, structures his argument around Barnett Newman’s works of visual art and, above all, his programmatic essay “The Sublime is Now” (1948). The essay title itself is an assertion of the sublime’s timeliness, a call for its 3 Although Lyotard never formulates this precise claim about the beautiful in this essay, he approaches it, employing similar formulations such as “classical poetics,” which suggest an aesthetic of the beautiful. “Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe this contradictory feeling—pleasure and pain, joy and anxiety, exaltation and depression—was christened or re-christened by the name of the sublime. It is around this name that the destiny of classical poetics was hazarded and lost; it is in this name that aesthetics asserted its critical rights over art, and that romanticism, in other words, modernity, triumphed.” Ibid., 92. 4 Carsten Zelle, Die Doppelte Ästhetik der Moderne: Revisionen des Schönen von Boileau bis Nietzsche (Stuttgart and Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 1995), 7. 5 Arthur Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago and La Salle: Carus Publishing Company, 2003), 147. 2 centrality in contemporary artistic production. In Lyotard’s reading of Barnett’s body of work, the “now” is also expanded to incorporate a theory of the sublime as “event.” But the key question that should be posed to Newman, and by extension to Lyotard, is this: Given the sublime’s conceptual origins