Abstract
An overview of some central ideas and movements in nineteenth-century literary theory, criticism and aesthetics, after the heyday of Romanticism. This lecture centers on the development of psychologistic approaches, either in the direction of idealist aesthetics, or of psychoanalysis and anthropology.
Highlights
On the authority of the higher and universal principles of life itself, we must convict the movement of heresy
Baudelaire's is a Classical spirit: he is pessimistic, he does not believe, like the Romantics, in the innate goodness of man. He has a deep concern with original sin
The task of the poet is more fundamentally civilizing than the task of the politician or the scientist: for Baudelaire, true civilization does not consist in the advance of technology, but in the removal of the traces of the Original Sin
Summary
This results in a very inadequate view of both literary history and criticism: there is practically no place left for them in Croce's theory He does say that criticism is concerned with the study of poetic forms and motives as vehicles for intuition, but he tends to identify the structure of the poem to the previous intentions of the author, and, as such, as something secondary and previous to the actual intuition which consists in the creative process. The very idea of art being a refinement of perception, he claims, is more classical than Romantic: it is concerned with representation, and not just with expression of purely subjective feelings This idea that the Romantic movement has ended and that the new age has more than one trait in common with neoclassicism is shared by T. The poet, works on the public side of language: poetry is something constructed in the poem, not an ineffable emotion which the author tries to convey through an imperfect medium
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