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Forest
Pyle, "'The Power is There': Romanticism as Aesthetic
Insistence"
In spite of the recent prevalence on
historical and sociological concerns in Romantic
scholarship, the aesthetic insists: indeed, its very mode
is one of insistence. The essays by Balfour, Ferris, and
Swann collected for this issue address the question of
"Romanticism and the Insistence of the Aesthetic" by
turning in various forms to Romantic versions of the
relationship between the aesthetic and power, whether as a
form of violence or a force of possibility. In readings
that address Kant (Balfour, Ferris) and Shelley (Balfour,
Swann, Pyle) and that include discussions of Keats,
Wordsworth, and Schiller, these essays demonstrate that to
read is not to take refuge from but to subject oneself to
the adventures of power and force that are inextricable
from the aesthetic. Redfield's response to these essays
stresses their emphasis on the predicament of
reading—the ways in which they "exemplify the diverse
legacy of deconstruction"—and argues for the
importance of their intervention in Romantic studies.
[go to
introduction]
Ian
Balfour, "Subjecticity (On Kant and the Texture
of Romanticism)."
The essay argues that the dynamics of the
subject, as conceptualized especially by Kant, are such
that the word "subjectvity," with its psychological and
individualistic connotations, is inadequate to them.
The aesthetic subject, in the domains of both production
and experience, is shown in Kant's Critique of
Judgement to exceed what is merely "subjective".
Some attention is given also the the poetry and critical
prose of the British Romantics, especially Keats, to
articulate a dynamic similar to that found in Kant.
[go to
essay]
David
Ferris, "Aesthetic Violence and the Legitimacy of
Reading Romanticism."
An examination of aesthetic violence in de
Man and Schiller, in particular, the role of such violence
in sustaining the aesthetic practices on which the
historical and political reading of Romanticism is
founded.
[go to
essay]
Karen
Swann, "Shelley's Pod People."
The reader of Shelley’s poetry
repeatedly comes upon beautiful slumbering human forms that
exist in charged non-relation to a social world. A close
reading of these forms as they appear in “The Witch
of Atlas” suggests that they represent a fantasy of
“the aesthetic” as that which is radically
closed to human concerns. In contemporary accounts,
Shelley himself is often represented as one who is not of
the world, who is only minimally attached to life. I would
argue that the Shelley circle’s posthumous
constructions of “Shelley” as an other-worldly
or unworldly figure are informed by an attentive reading of
Shelley’s poetry, which figures the aesthetic as that
which does not matter in terms of human economies of desire
and exchange.
[go to
essay]
Marc Redfield, "Response: Reading the
Aesthetic, Reading Romanticism."
This essay responds to essays by Ian
Balfour, David Ferris, and Karen Swann that examine the
centrality of the question of the aesthetic both within
Romantic studies and within the academic institution of
literary and cultural criticism. They may also all three be
said to exemplify the diverse legacy of deconstruction, and
more particularly that of Paul de Man. David Ferris
mounts for inspection de Man’s analysis of aesthetic
education as founded in a violence it must also conceal.
Karen Swann draws attention to those strange, beautiful
human forms one encounters now and then in Shelley’s
poetry—figures suspended between life and death,
within landscapes of wreckage and loss—and she
elaborates de Man’s severe emphasis on aesthetic
monumentalization into a rich reading of the kind of
biographical material—memoirs, anecdotes,
letters—that is so often marshalled as an antidote to
textual complexity. Ian Balfour emphasizes the way Kantian
aesthetics and Romantic writing generally render inadequate
psychological and individualist notions of the subject.
These three essays all, in their different ways, show that
the aesthetic fulfills itself in turning against itself;
that it succeeds through failure; that it ruins even as it
reproduces the monumental artwork, the monumentalized
artist, the psychological subject, and the space of
pedagogical and political formation within which modern
subjects come to pass. These essays also suggest that
the uncertain, conflicted phenomenon that we go on
stubbornly calling “Romanticism” continues to
have so much to tell us precisely because it names a
literary-historical displacement of the aesthetic.
[go to
essay]
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