Centering the Marginal: Leonardo Lisi on Scandinavian Modernism

Abstract

in the introduction to his excellent monograph, Leonardo Lisi argues that a return to the “original philosophical context of literary aesthetics” enables us to understand the formal elements of literature as constituent representational aspects of “fundamental forms of knowledge and experience, and thereby of the fundamental conditions for our being in the world” (p. 8). this sentiment emerges out of a particular frustration with the limitations of dominant theories describing european modernist aesthetics and the realization that our theoretical conceptions do not exhaust the possibilities offered to us by literary and philosophical texts themselves. Lisi takes pains to make a few distinctions to illustrate this point. He argues that the “consensus” on modernist aesthetics has created an unwieldy opposition between an aesthetics of autonomy