THE FUNCTION OF THE AESTHETIC IN EAST CENTRAL EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR by LETITIA ILEANA GURAN (Under the Direction of Mihai I. Spariosu) ABSTRACT My dissertation attempts to define the aesthetic from a historical and functionalist perspective in the light of the current debate about the profile of the concept, which takes place in the United States and East Central Europe. The opening chapter addresses the multifaceted nature of the category of the aesthetic, which can be regarded as a philosophical field, as a manner of reading and interpretation, and as an identity-building strategy. Due to the fact that during the past six decades the aesthetic concept has often been misconstrued by its opponents and has acquired reactionary connotations, one of my goals is to provide an alternative perspective on this debate. Instead of seeing the aesthetic as the quintessence of the formalist, apolitical, Eurocentric, male-chauvinistic, imperialist, and colonialist mode of interpretation, my study pleads for a reevaluation. In the first two chapters, my dissertation focuses on the post-1947 evolution of the aesthetic in East-Central Europe, characterized by an intense exploration of the ethic and utopian potentialities of the concept. Philosophically speaking, there are two positions characterizing the aesthetic debate in the United States and East Central Europe. The first attitude grounds its argument about the possibility of bridging the gap between aesthetics and ethics in re-reading Kant from an Adornian perspective. The second position originates in Nietzsche and challenges the Kantian, hierarchical relationship between reason, morality, and art, proposing instead a new aesthetics, free of any constraints. Finally, there are scholars who do not belong to either orientation and try to found an alternative, globalizing perspective on the aesthetic, grounded in its anthropological, liminal functions, and also in its trans-national potential. Such studies are presented in my dissertation as the alternatives that the field should follow if it is to escape the sometimes, sterile polemics that shaped the debate so far. INDEX WORDS: East Central Europe, the aesthetic, modernism, cultural criticism, communism, postmodernism, revalidate, Kant, Nietzsche, Adorno. THE FUNCTION OF THE AESTHETIC IN EAST CENTRAL EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR by LETITIA ILEANA GURAN B.S., University of Bucharest, Romania, 1991 M.A., University of Georgia, 2001 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2005 © 2005 LETITIA ILEANA GURAN All Rights Reserved THE FUNCTION OF THE AESTHETIC IN EAST CENTRAL EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR by LETITIA ILEANA GURAN Major Professor: Mihai I. Spariosu Committee: Ronald Bogue Thomas Cerbu Betty-Jean Craige Katarzyna Jerzak Marcel Cornis-Pope Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School University of Georgia May 2005 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express my deep gratitude to my professors, friends and family without whose support and care this study could not have been completed. I would especially like to thank my adviser, Dr. Mihai Spariosu for trusting me as a graduate student, helping me obtain my MA, and progress this far with my dissertation. I am also very grateful to the members of my reading committee, Dr. Ronald Bogue, Dr. Thomas Cerbu, Dr. Betty Jean Craige, and Dr. Katarzyna Jerzak for their constant encouragement and support during my six years in the MA. and Ph.D. programs at the University of Georgia. Their inspiring courses, constructive suggestions on my term papers, appreciation of my teaching, conference presentations, and graduate student work, and their comments during various stages of this dissertation meant a lot. I wish to address special thanks to Dr. Marcel Cornis-Pope from Virginia Commonwealth University for his bibliographical suggestions and clarifying discussions about East Central European literature and also for his contribution in publishing some of my work. To Dr. Mircea Martin from the University of Bucharest, Romania I owe a lot for his inspiring role in my intellectual education. Last, but not least, I would like to thank Paulo Oneto, Seungjae Lee, Sabina de Rochefort, Simona Manolache, Nicu Herăscu, Ileana Popa, and all my friends who believed in me and offered me intellectual and emotional support. I owe most to Florin Tudorică for his unconditional love, understanding and cooperation during the past two years. Without him and the constant reassurance from my family I could have never accomplished this. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................... iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................. 1 The Ethic Possibilities of Aesthetics .................................................................. 10 Alternative Modern Aesthetics........................................................................... 13 Alternative Perspectives: East Central Europe................................................... 14 Faces of New Aestheticism; Reasons for Preserving the Aesthetic................... 18 2 THE AESTHETIC DOCTRINE IN EAST CENTRAL EUROPE ...................... 22 Identity Strategies for Hard Times ..................................................................... 24 Intelligentsia: A Distinct East Central European Class...................................... 38 Toward an East Central European Aesthetic Paradigm ..................................... 42 Theoretical Implications..................................................................................... 70 Maximalist Est-ethics ......................................................................................... 72 The Departure from East Central European Aesthetics...................................... 76 Aesthetic and Est-ethic Criticism ....................................................................... 80 3 RECASTING MODERNISM AND THE AESTHETIC ..................................... 88 The Second “Taming” of Modernity.................................................................. 92 A Counter-perspective on the History of Modern Romanian Aesthetics........... 94 The Tradition of Modern Aesthetics in Romanian Criticism........................... 111 The East Central European Alternative............................................................ 135 New Faces of the East Central European Alternative ...................................... 145 vi Postmodern Subjectification and Aesthetics in the Age of Ethics ................... 161 4 NORTH AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES ON THE AESTHETIC..................... 174 The Perspective of Cultural Criticism .............................................................. 175 Revalidating the Aesthetic in Contemporary Theory and Criticism ................ 189 Postmodern and Poststructuralist Aesthetics.................................................... 203 Anthropological Approaches to Literature and the Aesthetic .......................... 208 Other Ways of Revalidating the Aesthetic ....................................................... 215 5 CONCLUSION................................................................................................... 224 APPENDIX..................................................................................................................... 234 Nietzsche: at the Origin of Re-Thinking the Role of Art ................................. 234 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................. 252 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION When I began preparing this study on the function of the aesthetic after the Second World War, I was aware that I was going against the grain of mainstream scholarship in literary criticism today. What drove me forward was both the fact that the category of the aesthetic has recently returned to the forefront of the North American debate in the humanities1 and the fact that in East Central Europe2, the polemic about its paradoxical role during communism was in full bloom. Both instances suggested that the category of the aesthetic, far from being inconsequential in today’s world, was instead carrying an impressive potential for cultural and theoretical reconceptualization. On a more personal note, my interest in the theme was sparked by my upbringing and education in Romania, one of the East Central European countries, where the belief in the “resistance through the aesthetic” was quite popular until 1989. Understanding the extent to which this cultural stratagem was the result of a myth, a strategy of surviving communism, or a legacy of a much older tradition still active in Western cultures, had existential significance for me. Since my topic demanded a comparison between the functions of the aesthetic in East Central Europe and the Western world, I first chose as a structuring principle of my approach a perspective focused on the semantic and functional variations of the concept. Later I realized that addressing the aesthetic today implied engaging in equal respects its well-known history and its controversial aspects that led to the post-World War II 2 opposition between traditional aesthetics and postmodernism, cultural studies, and postcolonial criticism. The