Affecting Grace: Theater, Subject, and the Shakespearean Paradox in German Literature from Lessing to Kleist by Kenneth S. Calhoon (review)

Abstract

Kenneth S. Calhoon, Affecting Grace: Theater, Subject, and the in Literature from Lessing to Kleist. Toronto: Toronto UP, 2013 xii + 2O9 pp., 12 ills.Reading this erudite and whimsical book is a bit like spending time with a hummingbird: it delights and startles when the author darts from one topic to another, but the pattern and topic are not easy to discern. To begin with, the study ranges wider than the title suggests. straightforward phrase German literature from Lessing to in the subtitle is belied by the book's contents, which include more than literature, more than literature, and more than the eighteenth century. term is understood principally as theatricality (which is the book's main theme), and although four of the seven chapters do indeed deal with the plays of Shakespeare, Lessing, and Kleist, one chapter, Architectural Fantasies, takes Goethe's essay Von deutscher Baukunst as its touchstone, while another is devoted to Schiller's poem Der Spaziergang (the seventh chapter deals with Meissen porcelain). In this study, form yields quickly to function, but it is function of a highly sophisticated philosophical sort derives from a close reading of literary and theoretical texts. plays of Shakespeare, Lessing, and Kleist provide the frame and the impetus for a sometimes idiosyncratic but always lively preoccupation with theatricality in architecture, painting (with discussions of Bernardo Bellotto, Francesco Guardi, Adolph Menzel, and Jean-Jacques Le Veau), Mozart opera, and Meissen porcelain, all set against the eighteenth-century turmoil in aesthetics, philosophy, politics, religion, psychology, and society.But to return to the title: Calhoon chooses the word subject to link and theatricality and to signal his philosophical persuasion and theoretical sweep. He knows and cites the of Kant, Freud, Nietzsche, and Benjamin, passing by way of Auerbach and Elias into the present, where he demonstrates his close familiarity with critics from Agamben to Zizek. Calhoon coins the phrase Shakespearean Paradox for the reception of Shakespeare in the eighteenth cen- tury, but he has more in mind than an association of paradox with Shakespeare, metaphysical poets, and New Critics, or than the philosophes (and Lessing, too), for whom the paradox captures their new view of the world. Instead, he is thinking of what he calls the paradox that the literary world had begun to embrace Shakespeare just as it was firming up the broad but pronounced antiBaroque sensibility found, pivotally, in Lessing's critical and dramatic works (7). And finally, the actual title of the book, Affecting Grace, is characterized as follows: The performer's crafted innocence of his audience is an affected grace-a means of counteracting the visual exposure is both the state of man and the condition of the theater (4). …