Imaginative Didacticism: Emotion, Individuality, and the Function of Trivialliteratur around 1800

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores the history of autonomy aesthetics together with approaches that recuperate ethical and emotional functions of literature to suggest that the dismissal of these functions in the late 18After briefly reviewing sociological histories of the shift between reception aesthetics and autonomy aesthetics, this article discusses two studies by Berys Gaut and Jenefer Robinson. Gaut’s work argues for the importance of ethics in the function of art (which instructs by way of, among other things, exciting the imagination); Robinson’s study uses cognitive science to establish that emotional responses to artworks are neither unreal nor irrational but rather make up a crucial part of what literature has to offer readers. With Gaut and Robinson, we can conclude that reading literature is an emotional, imaginative process, which has as at least one of its functions the cultivation of processes of understanding and ethical development in its readers – what I choose to call ›imaginative didacticism‹. Neither one of them, however, deals with the history of autonomy aesthetics (beyond brief references to Kant) or with the problem ofIn particular, Lafontaine’s novel offers readers a way of exploring new paradigms of individuality and love relationships that arose in the late eighteenth century and that present significant challenges to existing systems of social order, which Lafontaine represents against the backdrop of the French Revolution. Readers wanted and indeedThe article thus concludes by suggesting that we can also see the relation­ship between trivial and canonical literature not as a dichotomy, but as a progression: Lafontaine’s depictions of emotions are explicit and sometimes exaggerated, but they can train readers to be on the lookout for other, more complicated descriptions of emotional states. It therefore argues that literature itself can help to dismantle unproductive dichotomies between critical/cognitive and imaginative/emotional modes of reading and between canonical and supposedly trivial art. This, too, is a function of literature: we can gradually become more sensitive to subtleties of emotion and cognition, we can use previous encounters with easier literature to reflect on more difficult texts, and we can develop both as emotional creatures and as critical readers.