Synopses & Reviews
Shells, leafwork, picture frames, hummingbirds, wallpaper decorations, hems of clothing—such are the examples Kants Critique of Judgment offers for a “free” and purely aesthetic beauty. Menninghauss 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 Kants 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 Kants 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 Tiecks 1797 rewriting of Charles Perraults famous Bluebeard tale (1697) explicitly claims to be an “arabesque” book “without any sense and coherence.” Menninghauss close reading of this capricious narrative reveals a specifically Romantic—as opposed, say, to a Victorian or dadaistic—type of nonsense. Benjamins as well as Propps, Lévi-Strausss, and Meletinskijs 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.
Synopsis
Basing itself on Kant's Critique of Judgment, this book develops a theory of the varieties of nonsense in literature. It elaborates this theory in a close reading of Ludwig Tieck's The Seven Wives of Bluebeard, a work in the genre of the German fairy tale. 'All the richness of imagination', Kant cautions, 'in its lawless freedom produces nothing but nonsense'. He prescribes a rigid antidote: one must severely clip the wings of imagination. In the 1790s, for a brief moment in the history of Romantic literature, nonsense escapes the Kantian imperative that it be disciplined. It finds refuge in the aesthetics of ornament, arabesque, and the fairy tale. Tieck demands license for a book full of contradictory nonsense. According to him, the entire purpose of some literary productions is to introduce a 'new nonsense'. This book proposes that a poetics of nonsense is among the earliest impulses of Romanticism.
Synopsis
Develops a theory of nonsense in literature, through a close reading of Tieck's The Seven Wives of Bluebeard.
Synopsis
Using Kant's Critique of Judgment, this book develops a theory of the varieties of nonsense in literature, elaborated in a close reading of Tieck's The Seven Wives of Bluebeard, a work in the genre of the German fairy tale. In the 1790s nonsense escapes the Kantian imperative that it be disciplined. It finds refuge in the aesthetics of ornament, arabesque, and the fairy tale. Tieck demands license for a book full of contradictory nonsense. This book proposes that a poetics of nonsense is among the earliest impulses of Romanticism.
Synopsis
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." The author's close reading of this capricious narrative, based on Kant's theory of what it means to produce nonsense, reveals a specifically Romantic type of nonsense.
About the Author
Winfried Menninghaus teaches at the Freie Universität Berlin and at Yale University.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: nonsense, Victorian nonsense, Romantic nonsense; 2. Kant on 'nonsense', 'laughing', and 'caprice'; 3. The poetics of nonsense and the early romantic thoery of the fairy tale; 4. Between the addition and subtraction of sense - Charles Perrault's La Barbe-Bleue; 5. 'A book without and coherence' - Ludwig Tieck's The Seven Wives of Bluebeard; 6. Suspensions of 'sense' in Genre theories of the fairy tale; Notes; Bibliography.