May 31, 2007
In Romanticism (1996) in Aidan Day outlines a common position on romanticism:
the earlier, politically radical work of the first generation British 'Romantic' writers is better termed late Enlightenment. Their mature, conservative writings may be called Romantic .... The most important item in such a way of defining the literary productions of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain is that ... Romanticism is identified above all as being a politically conservative, sometimes reactionary tendency of thought and attitude. (p. 182)
It's an interpretation that I struggle with: the aesthetic is political,or rather it is the equation of the aesthetic with the ideological that troubles me. The stable, centred subject can efface problems for instrumental rationality with projections of artistic reconciliation. The aesthetic, or more accurately aesthetic discourse, has lost its critical edge.
I accept that in modernity the aesthetic is neither knowledge nor justice--it is different. The diremption between epistemology and ethics that founds philosophical modernity is not ideologically reconciled in aesthetics
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