Ästhetik der Faszination? Überlegungen und Beispiele

Abstract

The words ‘fascination’, ‘to fascinate’ and ‘fascinating’ originate in black and white magic. They mean ‘to bewitch’, to cast a spell over someone. In contemporary critical jargon and (consumerist) culture the words have become extremely popular, suggesting unqualified approval. However, their cognitive potential for the description and analysis of specifically aesthetic effects has hardly been explored so far. This is precisely what the present paper attempts to do by first looking at examples of ‘metafascination’ (advertising, Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and Staiger's poetics), and second by tracing the influence of the discourse of fascination on lyrical poetry (poems by John Clare, “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” by Coleridge, and Lawrence's poem “Snake”). Unlike Immanuel Kant's notion of disinterested liking, which expects the recipients to coolly analyse and appreciate the formal qualities of the beautiful object, the aesthetics of fascination emerging after him focuses on the spell-binding effects of art, on its intensity. Thus the critic is caught in the tension between the work of art's powerful appearance and the possible meanings it may contain and provoke. The notion of pleasure propagated by hermeneutic aesthetics does not suffice to explain art's unsettling and powerful presence, its ability to stimulate the recipient's attention. Frequently the fascination represented in the text is bound up with the fascination of the text.