Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/121
2008
414
BRAD PRAGER: Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007. viii + 287 pp. $ 75.
121
2008
Marc Redfield
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Besprechungen / Reviews B RAD P RAGER : Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007. viii + 287 pp. $ 75. From its own day through to ours - and particularly in the wake of Walter Benjamin’s pioneering dissertation Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (1920) - German Romanticism has tended to be interpreted as a literary movement bound up in complex fashion with post-Kantian German philosophy. Since the major figures of so-called first-generation or «Jena» Romanticism attended Fichte’s seminars, took copious notes, and wove figurative elaborations, parodies, and critiques of «critical philosophy» into their texts, no special pleading is required to understand Romanticism as a hybrid phenomenon: a literary movement energized and perhaps even defined by its proximity to poetry’s ancient antagonist, philosophy. And in recent years the Konstellationsforschung school of Dieter Henrich and Manfred Frank has emphasized the conceptual incisiveness of the engagement with Fichtean philosophy that characterized the «constellation» of writers that shone so brightly (if so briefly) at or around Jena in the late 1790s. Brad Prager only sporadically refers to such critics. He shares their point of departure, but he redefines the parameters to the point that the Jena circle, centered on the Schlegels and Novalis, barely flickers into view in his study. Instead of following out webs of public and private communications with an eye toward making Jena Romanticism into a corporate reflection on and critique of Fichte, Prager offers a general thesis - that Romanticism figures and reflects on the «self-producing subject» of idealist philosophy - and then goes on to study texts and paintings by nine late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century German writers and artists who moved in a variety of circles or contexts (though since the world of letters was small, they tended to know each other, to the point of even occasionally editing or writing about each other). The guiding thread is Prager’s interest in vision and the visual arts. After providing an introduction on Kant, Fichte, and the beginnings of idealist philosophy, Prager offers chapters on Lessing’s Laokoon (1766); on Wackenroder’s Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1796-97) in conjunction with Tieck’s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (1798); on Brentano’s strange novel Godwi (1801); on paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and Joseph Anton Koch; on paintings by Philipp Otto Runge; on Kleist’s stories «Die heilige Cäcilie» (1810) and «Der Findling» (1811); and on Eichendorff’s novella Das Marmorbild (1819). A brief conclusion reinvokes the post-Kantian philosophical tradition and characterizes Romanticism as an «inwardly directed movement» driven by the undecidability of «the question of whether the world figures the self or the self figures the world» (227). The more heterogeneous one’s clutch of examples, the thinner one’s unifying principle tends to get; and obviously the risk Prager has taken here is that his close studies of his chosen authors and texts will be linked to each other by a Romantic inwardness CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 357 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 357 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 358 Besprechungen / Reviews of near gossamer abstraction - an empty dance of «self» and «world» stripped of the textual and conceptual complexities that emerge when, say, one is examining in detail how Novalis argues with and tropes on Fichte. Two separable impulses seemed to have animated this book: on the one hand, a desire to write about visual as well as literary texts; on the other hand, a firm (and as noted above, quite traditional, and quite defensible) conviction that German Romanticism needs to be understood in relation to Kant’s «Copernican revolution» in philosophy. Prager seeks a connecting body for these two wings of his text in the metaphor of reflection, which he presses toward a literally visual register by reminding us of Fichte’s fantasies of an eye that could see itself seeing. (Here Prager cites a helpfully authoritative remark by Dieter Henrich: «Der Gedanke eines Blickes, der sich selbst erfaßt, hat Fichte von 1801 an und während der letzten dreizehn Jahre seines Lebens unverändert fasziniert.» [Henrich, «Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht,» Subjektivität und Metaphysik: Festschrift für Wolfgang Cramer, eds. Dieter Henrich and Hans Wagner (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1966) 209, cit. Prager 9]). The figure of reflection is unquestionably bound up with that of eye and gaze, and in principle there probably was a way for Prager to have woven a densely coherent meditation on seeing and thinking by way of his chosen novels, paintings, and stories. In practice, however, the close readings tend to have a somewhat distant relationship to the Fichtean problematic with which the book begins, as Prager himself admits: «My aim was not to produce the perfect template, in which all things Romantic become transformations of Fichtean idealism, but rather to show the pervasiveness of the Romantic uncertainty surrounding representation, as well as the many nuanced responses» (227-28). Fair enough. But inevitably the result is a conclusion with somewhat attenuated content. The value of Prager’s study will therefore depend on the quality of its individual acts of close reading of those various «nuanced responses» to that rather abstractly couched predicament, «the Romantic uncertainty surrounding representation.» Delivering close and interestingly contextualized readings of a suite of texts is really as much as most literary studies aspire to provide, and Prager’s readers will profit from his knowledgeable and keen-eyed studies of ekphrastic figuration and aesthetic meditation in his chosen texts and paintings. The discussions of Friedrich, Koch, and Runge will be of particular interest to a literary audience; let me also single out Prager’s innovative reading of the ways in which Brentano’s novel (or anti-novel) Godwi «examines the limits imposed on the process of signification» (192). And though I have quibbled over the abstracted thinness of this book’s overarching theme, thinness is not simply bad; it can cut like a knife. Noting that «visual aesthetics, like all cultural practices of interpretation, is […] essentially rhetorical» (230), Prager reads his paintings and novels as texts that reflect back to us our own inability to see ourselves seeing. Thus Romanticism, making its narratives and images out of the shards of that Fichtean dream of pure vision, tells us a version of the story of our modernity. Brown University Marc Redfield CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 358 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 358 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38
