KATHARINA ANNA KROSNY UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON (PhD 2003) THE CAPACITY FOR WONDERMENT: TRANSFORMATIONS AND TRANSFIGURATIONS OF THE AESTHETE FIGURE IN SELECTED WORKS OF ENGLISH AND GERMAN FICTION FROM 1891 TO 1927 ProQuest Number: U642987 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest U642987 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 The Capacity for Wonderment -j ABSTRACT The thesis argues that, from the early nineteenth century onwards, primarily in response to the ever more assertive inroads of science, technology, and industrialisation, key thinkers and writers within British and German culture upheld the cardinal importance of art and the aesthetic. That reaction was the expression of and response to an urgent sense of cultural crisis. The thesis begins with an introduction that offers a brief historico-cultural survey of England, Germany, and Austria in the nineteenth century. There follows a lengthy chapter which summarises the theories of art advanced by both English and German thinkers from the Romantics to Pater and Nietzsche. The contention here is that aesthetic theory moves beyond the confines of the, as it were, technical discussion of a particular discipline and becomes, rather, the governing discourse for the expression of the central philosophical concerns of modernity. Chapter 3 then concentrates on two major figures whose oeuvre embraces, in both essayistic and narrative modes, the full range of epistemological and cognitive issues to do with aestheticism - Oscar Wilde and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Various chapters of detailed analysis follow which explore seven seminal texts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, texts in which the theme of art is tested experimentally against the lived experience of a protagonist who provides the psychological, moral, social, and existential context for the aesthetic life. Chapter 4 concerns Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Chandos-Brief and explores a crisis of language that can be overcome only by the temporary fusion of subject and object in the revelatory moment of the epiphany. Chapter 5 investigates the ethical dimension of art as The Capacity for Wonderment 2 presented by Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Chapter 6 looks at James Joyce’s rendering of the aesthetic theories of Thomas Aquinas in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and its view of art as a means of spiritual and social liberation. Chapter 7 deals with aesthetic enjoyment as an anaesthetising rather than emancipating experience in Robert Musil’s Die Verwirrunoen des Zoqiinqs TorleR. Chapter 8 presents Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kroger and Per Tod in Venedia as explorations of the cognitive and ethical incompatibility of life and art. Chapter 9, finally, shows Virginia Woolf, in To the Lighthouse, expanding the focus of epiphanic experience from the artist to comprehend the multiple perceptions and creations of fiction as an inevitable part of human existence. The Conclusion continues the argument into the 1930s with a brief discussion of Walter Benjamin, who sees the forms of modern art as symptomatic of the health and sickness of the political culture of Europe as a whole. The Capacity for Wonderment THE CAPACITY FOR WONDERMENT Key to Text References — 4 Key to Periodicals — 5 Note on Plates — 6 Plate I: Die Musik II— 7 Plate II: Schubert am Klavler— 8 Foreword — 9 I Introduction — 10 The Aesthete: Artist, Dandy, Everyman — 10 Model Aesthetes: Hofmannsthal and Chandos — 27 Klimt’s Images of Music-making: The Aesthete Liberated and Confined — 41 Beyond the Artwork: The Aesthete in Fin-de-siècie London and Vienna — 52 II The Tradition of Theoretical Reflection on Art In England and Germany — 72 From Enlightenment to Fin-de-siècie Aesthetics — 74 Pater— 103 III Artists, Critics, Aesthetlclans — 124 Wilde — 125 Hofmannsthal — 142 IV Eln Brief— 164 V The Picture of Dorian Gray — 206 VI A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — 233 VII Die Verwirrungen des Zogllngs TorleR — 258 VIII Tonlo Kroger & Der Tod In Venedig — 296 IX To the Lighthouse — 322 X Conclusion — 356 Bibliography — 361 Aesthetics and philosophy — 361 Aestheticism - Decadence - 1890s - Fin de siècle — 363 The Dandy— 366 Literary, cultural, social, and political history— 367 Literary, cultural, social, and critical theory— 369 Hugo von Hofmannsthal — 372 James Joyce — 378 Thomas Mann — 382 Robert Musil — 386 Oscar Wilde — 390 Virginia Woolf— 394 Additional primary literature — 397 Additional secondary literature — 399 Art history — 401 The Capacity for Wonderment KEY TO TEXT REFERENCES EB Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘Bin Brief, Gesammelte Werke: Erzahlunqen. erfundene Gesprache und Briefe. Reisen. ed. by Bernd Schoeller (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1979), pp. 461-72 DG Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. by Donald L. Lawler (New York: Norton, 1988) HKK W. H. Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck, HerzensergieRunoen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997) L Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. by Stella Nichol (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992) P James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. ed. by Seamus Deane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992) R Walter Pater, The Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) T Robert Musil, Die Verwirrungen des Zoglinos TorleR (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohit, 1978) TK Thomas Mann, Tonio Kroger, ed. by John J. White and Ann White (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1996) TV Thomas Mann, Der Tod in Venedig. ed. by T. J. Reed (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1996) The Capacity for Wonderment KEY TO PERIODICALS BIS Browning Institute Studies CL Comparative Literature DVjs Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geisteswissenschaft FfMLS Forum for Modem Language Studies GLL German Life and Letters GQ German Quarterly GR Germanic Review HB Hofmannsthal-Blatter HF Hofmannsthal-Forschungen MAL Modern Austrian Literature MLR Modern Language Review MR Modern Philology NGS New German Studies OGS Oxford German Studies PL Philosophy and Literature PM LA Publications of the Modern Language Association of America REL Review of English Literature VWQ Virginia Woolf Quarterly WW Wirkendes Wort YFS Yale French Studies ZfdPh Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie The Capacity for Wonderment 0 NOTE ON PLATES The following plates, ‘Die Musik II’ and ‘Schubert am Klavier’, are reproduced from Gottfried FliedI, Gustav Klimt (Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1994), pp. 46/7. Gustav Klimt was commissioned to produce the pictures as supraporte paintings for the Viennese palace of the industrialist Nikolaus Dumba, Palais Dumba, on the fashionable Parkring. Die Musik II’ dates back to 1898, ‘Schubert am Klavier’ to 1899. The paintings were destroyed in a fire in 1945. ‘Schubert am Klavier’ is sometimes also referred to as Hausmusik’. The Capacity for Wonderment PLATE I m 4 M g f^ .n . KU\T Die Musik II (Music II, 1898) The Capacity for Wonderment PLATE II I Schubert am Klavier (Schubert at the Piano, 1899) The Capacity for Wonderment 9 FOREWORD It is perhaps appropriate to begin with some indication of what this thesis does and does not claim to achieve. At its centre of attention are several works of modernist prose from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. All of them are classic' texts, in that all of them have received abundant critical attention. It has, therefore, not been my aspiration to offer revolutionary new readings of these texts, as that would hardly be possible. But I do, nevertheless, make two claims for my work. One is that I invite these texts to, as it were, listen to each other in a genuinely comparative enterprise, which, as far as I am aware, has not been done before. Secondly, I provide an extensive context for this interpretative procedure, one that draws attention to the richness and profundity of aesthetic theory in both Germany and England from the early nineteenth century on. It is, I hope, in this combination of both contextual and comparative reading that the contribution of my thesis resides. The Capacity for Wonderment -|Q Chapter I - Introduction INTRODUCTION THE AESTHETE: ARTIST, DANDY, EVERYMAN In his treatise Le peintre de la vie moderne’, published in 1863, Charles Baudelaire defines the dandy-artist, the hybrid offspring of the Regency wit and the Romantic poet, in his dualistic existence as observateur passionné and parfait flâneur. The keen eye of the critic as artist, artist as critic, now finds itself transposed from the insulated work-place of the studio and the sheltered, synthesising playground of the salon into the heterogeneous crowds of the modern city/ With the Romantic’s submissive empathy and the dandy’s acute social vision replaced by a blend of analytical sensibility and detached voyeurism, Baudelaire likens his creation to a child or convalescent, a creature freshly discovering its surroundings following a glimpse of the oblivion and annihilation of the senses entailed in non-life or death. For Baudelaire, the child and the convalescent are aesthetes