Romanticism and the Philosophical Tradition. Co-editor.

2003

The aim of this thesis is to present the fundamental philosophical positions of Early German Romanticism, focusing on the three following writers: J. C. F. Holderlin, Novalis, and F. Schlegel. Chapter 1 begins with an examination of the first-philosophical, or ontological foundations of Romanticism and discusses its appropriation and critique of the work of Fichte, arriving at an elucidation of Romantic ontology as an ontology of differencing and production. The second chapter looks at how epistemology is transformed, in the hands of the Romantics, and due to the attention they paid to language, semiotic theory, and the operations of irony in discourse, into poetology-a theory of knowledge, into a theory of poetic production. In the third chapter a confrontation between the philosophical positions of Romanticism and those of the main currents of German Idealism (Schelling, Hegel) is undertaken; through this confrontation, the essential trait of Romantic thought is arrived at, namely the thought of an incomplete Absolute, as opposed to the absolute as totality in Idealism. The final chapter considers the avenue left open by the notion of the incomplete Absolute, and the Romantics' chief legacy, namely the theory of literature; literature is thus seen as coextensive with philosophy, and analysed under three conceptual categories (the theory of genre, the fragment, criticism) which all betray their provenance from the thought lying at the core of Romanticism: the incomplete Absolute. Finally, in the conclusion a summation of this exposition of romanticism is presented, alongside a brief consideration of the relevance of the Romantic project in contemporary critical/philosophical debates. 5 1794 to 1800. And, to make matters even more limited, I will not be dealing with the traits that the OED defines as "romantic", for the simple reason that, even though there may be ample scope to claim that such traits are in evidence in the literary works of the figures I shall be discussing, I will only concern myself with philosophical and literary-theoretical writing. Thus, when the word "Romanticism" is used, from this point onwards, readers could do well to forget the OED definition altogether, for "Romanticism" in the next two hundred pages or so means something quite different. What, then, is meant, in the context of this thesis, by "Romanticism"? As anticipated by the title, it is the actual task of the thesis to give the full answer to this question. I aim to show what Romanticism, Early German Romanticism, and in particular the philosophy and literary theory of Early German Romanticism "mean". I aim to undertake an exposition of the theory of Early German Romanticism, to present (in a sense which may be complicated later on in the course of the 'presentation') the philosophical and literary-theoretical positions of (Early German) Romanticism. Nevertheless, as an introduction to, and a first exposition of the problem, I propose to circumscribe the limits of "Romanticism" even further, and to demonstrate why it is that "Romanticism" should be a problem, an area, or a field of research worthy of treatment on the level of a PhD thesis (and well beyond it). To begin with, my thesis is concerned primarily with the work of three men, three proper names: Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), and Friedrich Holderlin. "Romanticism" therefore is designated expressly as an umbrella description for what unites the work of all of them, and, as I will have the chance to discuss further, what that Romanticism thus defined pretty much circumscribes the artistic production of the entire 19 th each other in a continuum-which is what I will be doing in what follows. The 'story' I aim to tell, and as I hope to render evident, is not a story based on the unity or the identity of the ideas discussed, but rather on their coextensive ness, their belonging together in a kind of metonymic chain, if you wish, as opposed to a metaphorical unified stratification. In other words, I am not aiming to show that Romanticism, as the umbrella term I am here utilising, is a vertical accumulation of self-same, or metaphorically corresponding, ideas; rather, I propose to view Romanticism as an expansive, 'progressive' (in the quintessentially Romantic sense which I will be treating later) succession of concepts and conceptions. The 'overall' picture, the unity of Romanticism as a whole is something that Romanticism itself does not allow, and I believe that, had I attempted to draw such a unifying, totalising picture and had I not had recourse to the equivocation and resistance to closure that Romanticism always presents itself with (and as), I would have done grave injustice to the insights of all three of these proper names, and also to the continuum, the loose "constellation" they form together. If this appears counter-intuitive, even paradoxical, I would suggest that this appearance would be due to the eccentricity and, at least in some cases, paradoxicality of what constitutes Romanticism. Ultimately, the aim of this thesis is to 'present' Romanticism as precisely such an essentially eccentric enterprise, to demonstrate, in other words, that Romanticism, the philosophical and theoretical Romanticism of Holderlin, Novalis and Schlegel marks a radical departure for philosophy and literary theory. Without wishing to preempt the arguments of the following pages, I ought summarily to indicate where this new departure lies. Once again, it is not here a question of claiming that the radical departure or the eccentric path of Romanticism has not been detected in the past, 10 These two progenitors of Romantic metaphysics are singled out as such by Manfred Frank in his 'Philosophical Foundations of Early Romanticism', in Ameriks & Sturm a, eds. 'The Modern Subject: Conceptions of the Self in Classical German Philosophy' (SUNY, 1995). Frank takes it for granted that Fichte's project is a deeply foundationalist one, but there are growing dissenting voices on that matter among Fichte scholars. See in particular Tom Rockmore's 'Antifoundationalism, Circularity, and the Spirit of Fichte', in Breazeale & Rockmore, eds., 'Fichte: Historical Contexts / Contemporary Controversies', (Humanities Press, 1994). The volume also contains two 'responses' to Rockmore's position, in articles by D. Breazeale, and A. Perrinjaquet. It needs to be noted that Rockmore's antifoundationalist reading of the 'spirit' (as opposed to the foundationalist 'letter') of the Wissenschaflslehre is precisely the reading of the Romantics, Schlegel and Novalis in particular, even though Rockmore makes no reference to them. His radical double reading of a "foundationalist idea of grounded system and an antifoundationalist idea of ungrounded system" (op.cit., p. 110) is then short-circuited by his own insistence that it is a matter of deciding in favour of the antifoundationalist idea, on the dubious grounds of its being at one with contemporary concerns. Without wanting to anticipate too much of the discussion which follows later in this chapter, I wish simply to quote, in response, Schlegel's Athenaum fragment 53: "It is equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two."

Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus, vol. 6 (2009), Karl Ameriks and Jürgen Stolzenberg, eds., 2009

The Jena romantics are both artists and philosophers, but it is not always clear just what the relation between art and theory is. I start by trying to articulate this relation, focusing in particular on the differences between the romantics and Hegel. I argue that the romantics do not view art as sublated by philosophical theory, but rather as intensified by it. For the romantics therefore aesthetic form is more than the presentation of essentially philosophical propositions in an attractive way: instead, artistic style does real (philosophical) work. In romantic literature, for instance, language is set to work presenting its own unpresentable condition (what Jean-François Lyotard calls the postmodern sublime) in a way that can only be effected within the literary work; accordingly, the literariness of the work is not a mere ornament to a philosophical theses, but actually comprises the thesis.

Symphilosophie, 2021

Book review of the collection of essays on the philosophy and literature of Romanticism and their legacies. Published in volume 2 of the journal "Symphilosophie."

2020

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

Romanticism and Time, 2021

Copyright and permissions for the reuse of many of the images included in this publication differ from the above. This information is provided in the captions and in the This book originates from an international conference on 'Romanticism and Time' held at the Université de Lille in November 2018 and organised jointly by the French Society for the Study of British Romanticism (SERA) and the Universités de Lille and Lorraine. Our warm thanks go to the SERA, who set this project in motion, and to the scientific committee of the Romanticism and Time conference,

2018

The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism

Romanticism and the "schools" of criticism and theory For students of English literature from the 1780s through to the mid 1830s, "Romanticism" and the "Romantic period" are not what they used to be-one good reason for a second edition of this volume. To be sure, "Romanticism" as a literary movement or a complex of beliefs and styles of art, and "Romantic" as a descriptor of that type of writing or writer, have long referred to "being like romance": 1 to reworking an aesthetic mode, particularly the European quest-romance of the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, where imagination, desire, and myth-making heighten what we usually take as perceived "reality" to extend its limits with symbolic suggestions that deepen, expand, or transcend everyday human awareness. Such a relocation of "romance," in fact, was already in progress well before 1780. By then "romantic" as a signifier had already strayed from mainly describing supernatural tales of chivalry, including their expressions of love, parodied in Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605-15), to characterize the assertively "natural," but also mythological and idealizing, landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa from the seventeenth century as these came to Britain from southern France and northern Italy (to many, then, the "regions of romance") to become exemplars of grand sublimity within the late eighteenth-century culture of "sensibility" (Eichner, 'Romantic,' p. 5). It has thus seemed proper to connect "Romantic" with William Wordsworth's claim in a revision of his preface to the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads-for many the collection that launched British Romanticism-that these poems, whether written by him or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, take "incidents and situations" based in "common life," including a revivified "nature," and "throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things" are "presented to the mind in [such] an unusual aspect" that readers can now "trace" in them "the primary laws of our nature. .. the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement." 2 This paradoxical "return to nature" that also transfigures its basic impressions to arrive at "what is more integral than nature, within [the] self," therefore became defined by 1970 as JERROLD E. HOGLE