Burwick examines the debate over illusion from Johnson to
Coleridge in England, Diderot to Stendhal in France, and Lessing to
A. W. Schlegel in Germany.
Although few critics still define illusion in contrast to
reality, the essential distinction is between illusion as perceived
reality and as hallucination or delusion. The concept of illusion
as debated in contemporary critical theory has been shaped by
developments that took place during the transition from
Enlightenment to Romantic thought. Burwick provides a commentary on
illusion in contemporary criticism, emphasizing the ways in which
such critics as Husserl and Heidegger, Gadamer and Gombrich,
Derrida, and Adorno have dealt with the subjective dimensions of
aesthetic response. He describes two extreme positions that were
asserted in the eighteenth century, the "perfect illusion" in which
the work of art is perceived as reality and the insistence on a
skeptical distance. He deals with various arguments that locate the
source of illusion in the acting, in the audience, in the play, in
the imagination, and in the staging effects.
Burwick devotes a chapter to two of the foremost Romantic
critics of the drama Samuel Taylor Coleridge and August Wilhelm
Schlegel. After clarifying the prominent issues discussed by their
contemporaries and immediate predecessors, he shows the radical
differences between the criticism of Schlegel and Coleridge, thus
dispelling the charge that Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare are
marred by plagiarism of Schlegel's ideas.
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