Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images (review)

Abstract

Brad Prager, Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007. viii + 287pp. Kant marks boundary line, an abyss, in the words of Philip Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, with regard to the construction of the modern subject that divides it with the past. (Rene Wellek and Jane K. Brown might also have been evoked.) Kant's conception of the mind forecloses the possibility of direct experience of the thing-m-self or absolute certainty about God or the order of the world. Writer s and artists responding to Kant are compelled to account for the limits of vision and the active role of the imagination in the construction and representation of the world. Brad Prager, author of book on filmmaker Werner Herzog (Wallflower, 2007) and the co-editor of volume on visual studies and the Holocaust (Camden House, 2008), applies Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy to visual aesthetics in German romanticism. Specifically, Prager looks at selection of romantic painters and novelists writing or referring to the visual arts, and how each implies model of perceptual aesthetics that conceives the outside world as an imaginative construction of our own malting. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Prager integrates philosophy literature, and the visual arts to lay out model of romanticism as a system against systems (227), an open ended discourse that speaks to the modern and post-modern. Prager begins with discussion of Lessing's Laocoon, both as it stands in relation to the classicism of Winckelmann, and as it expresses conception of art that contrasts with the romantics. For Lessing there is distinction between the plastic and verbal arts related to the former's inability to capture the dynamic character of experience. Lessing nevertheless sees fixity in the object that makes it independent of the mind .The romantics, by contrast, do not grant such generic distinction. For them the ideas that represent the verbal and those that represent the visual both occur in the same field of the imagination, and so are indistinguishable from each other. Prager next turns to Wackenroder's fictional Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders and Tieck's Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen. While the former sympathizes with classicism, the aesthetic value of the friar derives from the divine inspiration of the artist, not the formal qualities of the art. The real work is created by revelation, the material object disappearing under the gaze of the religious beholder. Looking at this from the secular side, Tieck's Franz Sternbald develops these themes; the phantasm becomes sign for the unattainable ideal. In this way, Prager argues, Franz Sternbald can also be read as an anti-Bildungsroman in which the growth of the artist remains unfulfilled. He extends this theme in the next chapter, in his discussion of the Clemens Brentano's Godwi. …