| This study develops a conception of the “liberal” political meaning of autonomous literature between the French Revolution and the middle of the nineteenth century through close examination of writings by Goethe, Pushkin, Hoffmann and Heine. The first chapter unfolds the category of “aesthetic liberalism” in three parts: through the theoretical debates of critics and defenders of aesthetic autonomy (P. Bürger and Adorno, among others), comparing these positions with aesthetic-political writing from around 1800 (Schiller, Goethe, and F. Schlegel); through elaborating a philosophical tradition of liberal thought that is distinct from later-nineteenth-century forms of democratizing liberalism, using concepts of liberty and the relation between the public and private sphere from Kant, Arendt, Berlin, and Rorty; and finally through discussion of the function of literary irony in articulating this “liberal” autonomy.; The second chapter looks at Goethe's Faust through the light cast upon it by Pushkin's “Scene from Faust.” This comparative analysis reveals a distinction between the metaphysical notion of absolute autonomy emblematized by the character Faust and the ironical formal autonomy of the drama. The latter concept of autonomy is further developed in the fourth chapter with analysis of a motif of aesthetic appropriation in Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. The implicit model of autonomous aesthetic reception in the novel frames my argument that Goethe is at pains to present art and literature within a non-socializing space of fellowship and individual Bildung.; The third chapter examines Hoffmann's review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Hoffmann redescribes the vocabulary of Werkästhetik to associate the symphony with an idea of Romanticism that undermines the usual framework for understanding romantic aesthetics as art-religion. Chapter Five further develops this reevaluation of German Classicism and Romanticism with a reconstruction of Heine's shift from a critique of Goethean Neoclassicism and Romanticism as quietist to a critical reclamation of aesthetic liberalism. This chapter examines Heine's major literary-philosophical essays and the arguments he develops for the position of the aesthetic in relation to emancipatory politics. Close analysis of Heine's use of irony in late poems such as Atta Troll are examined as formal illustrations of a liberal politics of aesthetic autonomy. |
