Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary theory
|
Buy Now
In Praise of Nonsense - Kant and Bluebeard (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R3,184
Discovery Miles 31 840
|
|
In Praise of Nonsense - Kant and Bluebeard (Hardcover)
Series: Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
|
Shells, leafwork, picture frames, hummingbirds, wallpaper
decorations, hems of clothing--such are the examples Kant's
"Critique of Judgment" offers for a "free" and purely aesthetic
beauty. Menninghaus's book demonstrates that all these examples
refer to a widely unknown debate on the arabesque and that Kant, in
displacing it, addresses genuinely "modern" phenomena. The early
Romantic poetics and literature of the arabesque follow and
radicalize Kant's move.
Menninghaus shows parergonality and "nonsense" to be two key
features in the spread of the arabesque from architecture and the
fine arts to philosophy and finally to literature. On the one hand,
comparative readings of the parergon in Enlightenment aesthetics,
Kant, and Schlegel reveal the importance of this term for
establishing the very notion of a self-reflective work of art. On
the other hand, drawing on Kant's posthumous anthropological
notebooks, Menninghaus extrapolates an entire Kantian theory of
what it means to produce nonsense and why the "Critique of
Judgment" defines genius precisely through the power (as well as
the dangers) of doing so.
Ludwig Tieck's 1797 rewriting of Charles Perrault's famous
Bluebeard tale (1697) explicitly claims to be an "arabesque" book
"without any sense and coherence." Menninghaus's close reading of
this capricious narrative reveals a specifically Romantic--as
opposed, say, to a Victorian or dadaistic--type of nonsense.
Benjamin's as well as Propp's, Levi-Strauss's, and Meletinskij's
oppositions of myth and fairy tale lend additional credit to a
Romantic poetics that inaugurates "universal poetry" while
performing a bizarre trajectory through arabesque ornament,
nonsense, parergonality, and the fairy tale.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
|
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.