Paul Fleming
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804758901
- eISBN:
- 9780804769983
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804758901.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Following Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's analysis of art's increasing difficulty to both engage and extricate itself from prosaic reality, this book investigates the strategies employed by German ...
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Following Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's analysis of art's increasing difficulty to both engage and extricate itself from prosaic reality, this book investigates the strategies employed by German literature from 1750 to 1850 for increasingly attuning itself to quotidian life—common heroes, everyday life, non-extraordinary events—while also avoiding all notions of mediocrity. It focuses on three sites of this tension: the average audience (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing), the average artist (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller), and the everyday, or average life (Franz Grillparzer and Adalbert Stifter). The book's title, Exemplarity and Mediocrity, describes both a disjunctive and a conjunctive relation. Read disjunctively, modern art must display the “exemplary originality” (Immanuel Kant) which only genius can provide and is thus fundamentally opposed to mediocrity as that which does not stand out or lacks distinctiveness; in the conjunctive sense, modern art turns to non-exceptional life in order to transform it—without forsaking its commonness—thereby producing exemplary forms of mediocrity that both represent the non-exceptional and, insofar as they stand outside the group they represent, are something other than mediocre.Less
Following Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's analysis of art's increasing difficulty to both engage and extricate itself from prosaic reality, this book investigates the strategies employed by German literature from 1750 to 1850 for increasingly attuning itself to quotidian life—common heroes, everyday life, non-extraordinary events—while also avoiding all notions of mediocrity. It focuses on three sites of this tension: the average audience (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing), the average artist (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller), and the everyday, or average life (Franz Grillparzer and Adalbert Stifter). The book's title, Exemplarity and Mediocrity, describes both a disjunctive and a conjunctive relation. Read disjunctively, modern art must display the “exemplary originality” (Immanuel Kant) which only genius can provide and is thus fundamentally opposed to mediocrity as that which does not stand out or lacks distinctiveness; in the conjunctive sense, modern art turns to non-exceptional life in order to transform it—without forsaking its commonness—thereby producing exemplary forms of mediocrity that both represent the non-exceptional and, insofar as they stand outside the group they represent, are something other than mediocre.
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804758901
- eISBN:
- 9780804769983
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804758901.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter focuses on realist attempts to redefine greatness by inverting aesthetics' traditional hierarchies, juxtaposing Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's thesis on the “end of art” with Heinrich ...
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This chapter focuses on realist attempts to redefine greatness by inverting aesthetics' traditional hierarchies, juxtaposing Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's thesis on the “end of art” with Heinrich Heine's declaration of the “end of the Goethean artistic period.” It also explores how realism gives up the demand for genius and instead embraces an age of epigones, of those who come too late. The chapter argues that, rather than a genial exception, the realist artist is an observer and quasi-scientific investigator of the ordinary, the everyday, and the small. It also considers Franz Grillparzer's aesthetic-hermeneutic project, in which he posits an invisible, unbroken thread from the lives of the non-famous to the great mythological figures and claims that the famous can only be understood on the basis of the ordinary. Appealing to a statistical sense of the normal distribution, Adalbert Stifter views the momentous as smaller than the small and proposes “the gentle law,” the law of regularity that lies at the base of both the common and exceptional.Less
This chapter focuses on realist attempts to redefine greatness by inverting aesthetics' traditional hierarchies, juxtaposing Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's thesis on the “end of art” with Heinrich Heine's declaration of the “end of the Goethean artistic period.” It also explores how realism gives up the demand for genius and instead embraces an age of epigones, of those who come too late. The chapter argues that, rather than a genial exception, the realist artist is an observer and quasi-scientific investigator of the ordinary, the everyday, and the small. It also considers Franz Grillparzer's aesthetic-hermeneutic project, in which he posits an invisible, unbroken thread from the lives of the non-famous to the great mythological figures and claims that the famous can only be understood on the basis of the ordinary. Appealing to a statistical sense of the normal distribution, Adalbert Stifter views the momentous as smaller than the small and proposes “the gentle law,” the law of regularity that lies at the base of both the common and exceptional.
Adrian Daub
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- June 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199981779
- eISBN:
- 9780199370085
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199981779.003.0009
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western, History, American
The moribund Hapsburg Empire always invited characterization through musical scenes, and prime among them were scenes of four-hand piano playing. This chapter focuses on a number of texts that ...
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The moribund Hapsburg Empire always invited characterization through musical scenes, and prime among them were scenes of four-hand piano playing. This chapter focuses on a number of texts that utilize four-hand scenes to very different ends and by very different means. As the Hapsburg monarchy fractured into a complicated and increasingly ungovernable patchwork state, a number of historical novelists labored to resurrect for their readers Vienna’s supposed golden age immediately after the defeat of Napoleon: the age of Grillparzer, of Schubert, and of four-hand piano music. Several historical novelists of the years leading up to the Great War turn to scenes of four-hand piano playing, often idealized Schubertiades and cloying domestic scenes, to resurrect what they took to embody Austrian national identity and familial, almost tribal community. Robert Musil parodied savagely this ideologization of the “sonic hearth” as the focal point of a blissfully pre-industrial, unalienated Austria in the many four-hand scenes he builds into his novel The Man Without Qualities. In this work, the “twinned gestures” of four-hand players are revealed to be effects and anticipations of quasi-industrial processes rather than their antithesis. Moreover, Musil suggests that the obsession with four-hand playing sprang from the same willingness to subordinate the body to outside command and domination as would become so central in the Great War that ended both the Austrian Empire and the century-long dominance of four-hand piano playing.Less
The moribund Hapsburg Empire always invited characterization through musical scenes, and prime among them were scenes of four-hand piano playing. This chapter focuses on a number of texts that utilize four-hand scenes to very different ends and by very different means. As the Hapsburg monarchy fractured into a complicated and increasingly ungovernable patchwork state, a number of historical novelists labored to resurrect for their readers Vienna’s supposed golden age immediately after the defeat of Napoleon: the age of Grillparzer, of Schubert, and of four-hand piano music. Several historical novelists of the years leading up to the Great War turn to scenes of four-hand piano playing, often idealized Schubertiades and cloying domestic scenes, to resurrect what they took to embody Austrian national identity and familial, almost tribal community. Robert Musil parodied savagely this ideologization of the “sonic hearth” as the focal point of a blissfully pre-industrial, unalienated Austria in the many four-hand scenes he builds into his novel The Man Without Qualities. In this work, the “twinned gestures” of four-hand players are revealed to be effects and anticipations of quasi-industrial processes rather than their antithesis. Moreover, Musil suggests that the obsession with four-hand playing sprang from the same willingness to subordinate the body to outside command and domination as would become so central in the Great War that ended both the Austrian Empire and the century-long dominance of four-hand piano playing.
