Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Why – in a world that condemns untold millions to poverty, exploitation, and oppression, and that often appears more inclined to blow itself up than to address potentially catastrophic social conflicts humanely and constructively – are you bothering to read this? More to the point, why – when your attention, energy, and commitment would seem indispensable to hands-on political and ethical actions that could help engage the problems confronting us – do you waste time on art, aesthetic experience and, in particular and perhaps most inexplicably, imaginative literature? Before even beginning to approach these questions substantively, you may sense, given the context of this volume of essays, the suggestion of a formally parallel or allegorical relation between the Romantic moment and our own. But the suggested comparison goes deeper than mere parallelism or allegory, for Romanticism actually inaugurates the modern status of the very questions posed above. Indeed, what has come to be called High Romanticism has come also to be understood as the point of departure for the question of “aesthetics and politics,” the notion that in modernity the artistic-aesthetic and the sociopolitical, in a push–pull dance-tension of retreat and involvement, somehow help shed light on or perhaps constitute – even as they paradoxically may seem also to compete with or negate – one another. Of course the ... log in or subscribe to read full text