Romantic Irony Research Articles

New philosophies of film: thinking images

Introduction: Why Philosophy of Film Now? Part I: The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn 1. The Empire Strikes Back: From Grand Theory to the New Film Ontology 2. The Bad and the Beautiful: Narrative, Character Engagement, and Genre 3. Artificial Intelligence: Cognitivism Goes to the Movies Part II: The 'Continental'-Romantic Paradigm 4. From Ontology to Appreciation: Cavellian Romanticism 5. Time, Affect, and the Brain: Deleuzian Cinematic Thinking 6. Who's Afraid of Ideology Critique? The New Political Film Aesthetics Part III: Cinematic Thinking 7. From Badlands to New Worlds: Terrence Malick's Cinematic Poetry 8. Cinematic Ideas: David Lynch as Film-Philosopher 9. Beyond Dogme: Lars von Trier's Romantic Irony Conclusion: From Philosophy of Film to Film-Philosophy Filmography Bibliography Index.

Post-Romantic irony in Bakhtin and Lefebvre

Although several writers have noted significant complementary features in the respective projects of Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) and the French social thinker Henri Lefebvre (1901–91), to date there has not been a systematic comparison of them. This article seeks to redress this oversight, by exploring some of the more intriguing of these conceptual dovetailings: first, their relationship to the intellectual and cultural legacy of Romanticism; and second, their respective assessments of irony (including Romantic irony), and, more specifically, of the ironic register as a potential vehicle for socio-cultural criticism. Although the positions Bakhtin and Lefebvre stake out vis-à-vis these issues reveal many similarities – such as extensive use of Socrates in the writings of each – there are also significant differences, not least because Lefebvre’s understanding of Romanticism is more fully developed than Bakhtin’s. Accordingly, the central argument advanced here is that Bakhtin’s fairly disparaging account of Romanticism, together with his scattered and often contradictory remarks on irony, can be subjected to re-envisioning and potential enrichment by reference to Lefebvre’s more considered thoughts, especially the latter’s notions of ‘Revolutionary romanticism’ and ‘Marxist irony’.

Transcendental Buffoonery: Jacob Dousterswivel and the Romantic Irony of Blackwood's

IN OCTOBER 1818, THE ANONYMOUSLY-PUBLISHED PAMPHLET HYPOCRISY Unveiled, and Calumny Detected proclaimed that Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine was vilest production that ever disfigured and soiled the annals of literature--an impressive accomplishment for periodical that was barely one year old. While the indignant author (whom we now know to be Macvey Napier) condemned the magazine for the unmixed love of evil evident in the magazine's personal attacks and harsh reviews, he also criticized its unorthodox style: [T]here is something in the style and manner of the two principal writers that has contributed to give temporary consequence to this Magazine. Nobody will say that this something is comprehension, or judgment, or sincerity, or any other of the virtues either of style or morals.... With good memories, some fancy, and an overflowing bitterness of heart, these writers have hitherto contrived to please the malicious,--to dazzle and astonish the less informed, or, in other words, the greater portion of their readers. They have employed by turns the florid, the prurient, and the obscure style, each of which is calculated to impose upon pretty numerous class.... In these compositions the design seems to be, like that recommended in the art of sinking in poetry, to form labyrinth out of which nobody can get clear but the authors themselves. (1) Conceding that the outrageous and glittering artifice of Blackwood's attracted the attention of considerable (if undesirable) audience, Napier charged that the magazine intentionally defied comprehension and moral standards in favor of stylistic flash; his reference to Alexander Pope's Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry stressed the perceived superficiality and confusion. Two years later, the editor of the London Magazine, John Scott, voiced similar concerns about the baffling style of Maya (as Blackwood's was called), declaring that Blackwood's forms the most foul and livid spot, indicative of an accursed taint in the literature of the day. Like Napier, Scott objected in part to Blackwood's' confounding humor, claiming that the journal assumed the externals of harlequinade and buffoonery and, through its frequent publication of anonymous and pseudonymous pieces, created a mystification ... for dishonest purposes, and under cowardly motives. (2) For readers like Napier and Scott, then, Blackwood's was objectionable not only because its humor treated subjects roughly, but also because its elaborate jokes and ironic tone--the lack of sincerity noted by Napier--intentionally confused its audience. In this essay, I explore the ways that Blackwood's defended its controversial style against such critiques. Although the magazine often resorted to mocking its critics, I contend that striking and systematic vindication of its methods appears in June 1822 review of the German philosopher Jacob Dousterswivel's treatise Theorie der Betrug, or Theory of Imposture. This piece defends the elusive style of Blackwood's by suggesting that it trains readers to stay alert to and aware of the possibility of other, more serious impostures, and in so doing makes them better interpreters of both texts and people. According to the reviewer, Blackwood's' hoaxes are educational tools, not dangerous deceptions. Yet the Dousterswivel review is not straightforward defense of Blackwood's: it is hoax, phony review of book that was never written. The Theory of Imposture is itself an imposture. Not only was there no German philosopher called Jacob Dousterswivel, but the surname alludes to Hermann Dousterswivel, charlatan from Walter Scott's 1816 novel The Antiquary. The sophisticated defense of Maga's style is thus embedded within an especially mystifying example of that style. The complexity of the Dousterswivel hoax and other mystifications perpetuated by Blackwood's leads me to my second claim, which is that the purpose and significance of the magazine's obscure humor and elaborate jokes are best understood within the framework of the aesthetic concept known as Romantic irony. …

Another Ride on Tristram’s Hobby-Horse

Another Ride on Tristram’s Hobby-Horse Edward J. Kozaczka Thomas Keymer, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: A Casebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Pp. x, 274. $40.00. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Ian Campbell Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Pp. xliii, 605. $11.95. Ian Campbell Ross’s 2009 edition of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, a revised version of his 1983 edition, is a reliable and student-friendly edition of the “most talked-about book of the age” (vii). We would expect this from Ross, who has also written Laurence Sterne: A Life (2001) and published widely on various aspects of eighteenth-century literature and culture. The edition, which follows the first editions of Sterne’s volumes, features a brief introduction in which Ross explains the overwhelming number of literary models and sources that Sterne invokes in his nine-volume masterpiece. He also provides a knowledgeable account of Sterne’s life and other literary works and conveys the extensive influence Sterne had on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers. Ross pays careful attention to the novel’s peculiar typographical features, and what distinguishes his annotations from the ones offered in the Florida edition (1978) is that they situate the work within a historical context without demanding that we read the novel as an extension of the satirical tradition. For these reasons, Ross’s edition is probably the most suitable for teaching, and it would pair effectively with Thomas Keymer’s Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: A Casebook. [End Page 150] Keymer’s introduction reminds us that contemporaneous responses to Tristram Shandy were wide-ranging: many readers understood it as a parody of the conventions of realism established by Richardson and Fielding, while others situated it within the tradition of learned wit and Renaissance satire. Some believed it to be a satire on European expansion and colonialism, others thought Sterne had formalized a brand of sentimental ethics, and a few argued that the novel approximated a version of Romantic irony. And, of course, many thought it was just nonsense. The essays in this casebook demonstrate that our modern responses are equally conflicted. The essays are presented in pairs, and the collection is strikingly coherent and reads as an intense and respectful conversation among Sterne scholars. In the first section, J. T. Parnell and Keymer consider whether we should place Tristram Shandy within the Renaissance tradition of learned wit and fideistic skepticism or instead consider the work as a critique of the emerging genre of the novel. Writing from a literary-historical perspective, Parnell demonstrates how and to what effect writers such as Erasmus, Rabelais, and Montaigne influenced both the form and content of work written by Swift and Sterne. By implicating Sterne in this particular tradition of skepticism, Parnell pushes us to reconsider a number of truths that we have taken for granted in Sterne scholarship. Keymer, on the other hand, wants to read Sterne in the context of the modern novel, though he demonstrates that his method actually corresponds to Parnell’s: “to acknowledge the prominence of the learned wit tradition in Sterne’s writing need not be to deny the deliberacy of its engagement with newer forms. Instead we may find within it a cornucopia of textual relations in which Menippean satire and metafictional self-consciousness coexist and unfold themselves in different intertextual modes, and display, as they do so, a hybridization of traditions and genres that in itself is typically novelistic” (51). To my mind, Keymer’s compromise makes good sense, especially when we consider the essays on performance and print culture. Of these, Peter M. Briggs’s essay describes how Sterne transformed himself from a poor country parson into one of the most celebrated “sensations” of eighteenth-century culture. Not only did Sterne “pose” simultaneously as Yorick and Tristram (writing shandaical letters and acting like an oddball friend of the people), but he also developed networks and “was deliberately courting attacks in the public press, realizing that controversy would help to sell his books” (84). Sterne catered to the new expectations that the eighteenth-century public had of authors: to publicly perform...

The Mirror of Laughter: Mediation, Self‐Reflection, and Healing in E.T.A. Hoffmann's Princess Brambilla

E.T.A. Hoffmann's capriccio Princess Brambilla explores a narrative realm of liminality and metamorphosis that reveals the fundamental instability of our most basic epistemological distinctions. Set during the irreverent days of the Roman carnival, Brambilla delights in a disorienting chaos of masks, costumes, dream images and hallucinations as Hoffmann pulls all the stops in a fantastical narrative of extraordinary complexity. The text unfolds a carnivalesque universe that – in the spirit of Early German Romantic irony – plays with the inescapable mediatory “distortions” brought about by the structures of human consciousness itself. Just as the carnival is a ritual of life‐affirming renewal, Hoffmann's self‐reflexive narrative, too, is a story of change and healing, in which the self comes to understand that it has no access to a stable and unmediated self‐knowledge. If this moment of insight initially appears as a near‐psychotic threat to the very basis of identity, the laughter it triggers is ultimately a laughter of liberation. The self, now reconstituted in the mirror of laughter, the textual movement of meta‐narrative irony, comes to embrace itself as a process of continuous change, a recognition that then allows it to be made whole in the mediatory gaze of another.

Rethinking Conceptions of Unity: Schubert'sMoment musicalin A♭major, D. 780 (Op. 94) No. 2

ABSTRACTA number of scholars have suggested that the sudden harmonic shifts, remote tonal regions and discontinuity of gestures in Schubert's works can be rationalised through certain conceptions of musical unity. Yet what if we were to entertain the possibility that these musical gestures do not coalesce in a greater whole? What other options are available to us for understanding part‐whole relationships? In this article, I suggest that the notion of Romantic irony might transform our understanding of the composer's music by providing an alternative to an aesthetic of unity. Using the Moment musical in A♭ major, D. 780 (Op. 94) No. 2, as a test case, this paper offers a view which resists the pressure to explain idiosyncratic musical events as contributing to a greater whole, demonstrating that conceptions of unity need not accompany tonal hierarchical systems; it also shows how Schubert's use of tonality and large‐scale organisation can coexist with notions of conventional diatonicism and form and need not be understood either as derivative of these customary procedures or as independent of them, inviting us to reflect on larger issues of historical continuity with regard to tonal and formal practice.

Ludwig Tieck’s Herr Von Fuchs (1793) As the Perfect Embodiment of Romantic Irony

This paper deals with a long forgotten German version of Volpone: Herr von Fuchs, written by the pre-Romantic playwright Ludwig Tieck in 1793 and unjustly neglected by editors, critics and theatrical directors alike. As an analysis of the play reveals, Herr von Fuchs is an accomplished and thought-provoking appropriation of a classical piece of drama which privileges the employment of Romantic irony as the best means to question widespread assumptions about political, educational, religious and aesthetic issues. It is the aim of this paper to grant Tieck’s masterful example of creative translation the high recognition it deserves as a most accomplished German adaptation of Ben Jonson’s Volpone.

Goethe’s Baccalaureus and the concept of romantic irony in Faust

The Baccalaureus‐scene in Part Two of Goethe’s Faust subjects youth and youthfulness to several kinds of irony. It thereby implies the complicated irony present in Faust as a whole, especially insofar as it suggests Romantic irony. Starting with an analysis of that scene, this essay examines and expands on statements about Faust and about irony that were made by major German Romantic ironists: the Schlegels, Schelling, Adam Müller, and Solger. Linking these five authors’ comments on Faust to their various concepts of irony, the essay explains how applying those concepts helps Goethe’s readers understand his main characters, dramatic events, and authorial attitude. It thus describes some of the many ways in which irony informs Faust, proposing readings of the play that illuminate its author’s relationship to German Romanticism.

‘Kinaesthetic, Spastic and Spatial Motifs as Expressions of Romantic Irony in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman and Other Writings’

E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman has attracted a plethora of critical interpretations since it was first published in 1816, the most famous being Freud’s essay on The Uncanny (1919). Many critics have focused on the motif of the eye and the legend of the Sandman who steals children’s eyes when they refuse to go to sleep. The legends of Narcissus, Pygmalion and the Doppelganger, which underpin the narrative of Hoffmann’s novella, have also provided scope for psychological, poststructuralist, feminist, historicist and meta-romantic criticism. This article examines Hoffmann’s motivic preoccupation with kinaesthesia, spasticity, kinetic energy and paralysis. First, it seeks to interpret the conand in-voluted narrative structure of The Sandman as formally symbolic of the Romantic idea of infinite perfectibility, in which the process of becoming is in continuous and creative flux. Furthermore, it will show that the pervasive motif of grotesque bodies and awkward motor-neural movement is dialectically at variance with the spiralling prose form of the novella, thus generating Romantic Irony through this formal inner contradiction. The aim is to interpret this Romantic Irony as a critique of the Romantic poet and his artistic quest. Second, the article demonstrates that Hoffmann’s particular use of kinaesthetic and spastic

Transforming Classicism into Romanticism and Beyond in Goethe’s “The Roman Carnival”

This essay situates “The Roman Carnival,” a short narrative in Goethe’s fictional travelogue, Italian Journey, within the debate about Goethe’s relationship to classicism. I argue that this narrative evokes the structure of a Greek tragedy, but reverses retardation and catastrophe, thus creating an anti-climactic effect at the end. Therefore, this text simultaneously affirms as well as undermines its classical model. Introducing an elusive narrator, stock characters and scenes from the commedia dell’arte, Goethe continues to break classical rules and adds an undercurrent of Romantic irony to the process of signification. This unconventional textual weave of discursively juxtaposed traditions, namely narrative with drama, classical tragedy with popular comedy, and classical with Romantic elements, transforms set categories into a progressive meta-text. This meta-text transcends established formal and philosophical/theoretical paradigms by eliminating their hierarchical and historical order within the new open and multi-directional organization of the narrative.

O ideal e o real: uma abordagem irônica para o conto “Noite de almirante”

This assignment proposes to study the short story of Machado de Assis called “Noite de almirante”, approaching it under an ironic perspective, based mainly on the notion defended by a line of thought known as “romantic irony”, which has as one of its characteristics the view that the human condition would be constantly subject to ambiguity. It is originated by everything that is desired as ideal and of what can be in fact obtained in the real plan. For this study, the main theoretical foundation used was the work Ironia e ironico by Muecke, that exposes the evolution of the concept of irony throughout the time and presents the main characteristics of “romantic irony”, under a viewpoint on which the analysis of the machadian short story was carried out. In “Noite de almirante”, the approach of the short story under an ironic perspective leads us to believe that the intention of Machado de Assis was to utilize the amorous misadventure of his character, Deolindo Venta-Grande, to evidence - but without the need of expressing opinions - all the imperfection of human nature, with its vanity, its selfishness, its illusions and contradictions, that make that life to be constantly intermingled by ambiguities.

Becoming Mikhail Lermontov: The Ironies of Romantic Individualism in Nicholas I's Russia

Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841) is one of Russia's most prominent poets - and one of its most puzzling. In this radically new interpretation, David Powelstock reveals how the seeming contradictions in Lermontov's life and works can be understood as manifestations of a coherent worldview. By bringing to light Lermontov's operative version of Romantic individualism, Powelstock is able to make sense of the poet's relationship to romantic irony, his highly modern concept of the reader (both real, and implied in the text), and his vexed passion for his predecessor Alexander Pushkin - a relationship that is almost always treated sentimentally, but is here given its true competitive edge. Furthermore, Powelstock offers the most persuasive account ever given of Lermontov's exceptionally odd treatment of, and success with, women - both in real life and in fiction - and of his cruel overlapping of these two planes. Clarifying what has remained perplexing for so long, and correcting what has been misinterpreted, Powelstock's work illuminates Lermontov's views of dignity, death, love, nature, society, and ethics - and, finally, gives us an intellectual biography that is deeper and more subtle than any written before.

MUCH ADO ABOUT SOMETHING; OR, COSÌ FAN TUTTE IN THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION: A COMMENTARY ON AND TRANSLATION OF AN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY EPISTOLARY EXCHANGE

ABSTRACTAmong the gems buried in Johann Friedrich Reichardt’s short-lived Berlinische musikalische Zeitung is a ‘Musikalischer Briefwechsel’ that appeared over three volumes in September 1805. The text, cast as an epistolary exchange between the fictional characters Arithmos and Phantasus, argues the merits of Mozart’s Così fan tutte. (The opera had recently returned to the Berlin stage after a thirteen-year absence.) The exchange has received little scholarly attention, and yet it is a remarkable document for the glimpse it gives both into Berlin’s musical politics and, most of all, the reception history of Mozart’s opera.The authorship of the ‘Briefwechsel’, which appeared pseudonymously, has been attributed to Georg Christian Schlimbach, a frequent contributor to the journal. This article, in contrast, argues that Reichardt himself makes the more likely author: the correspondence more closely reflects his personality, his ambitions for the advancement of opera in the Prussian capital and his theory of art. Indeed, arising from his defence of Mozart’s opera is an extraordinary claim in the history of Così’s reception: that the work exemplifies romantic irony. E. T. A. Hoffmann is famous for his terse praise of the opera’s ‘ergötzlichste Ironie’. Reichardt, however, goes further by showing how the opera amalgamates, in quintessentially romantic fashion, the opposing forces of the comic and serious. Employing a Shakespearean conceit, he argues that Mozart’s music amounts to more than ‘much ado about nothing’.Reichardt’s move is the more significant given that he builds his reading not on Da Ponte’s libretto but on German adaptations by Bretzner and Treitschke, translations that modern scholarship has widely faulted for lacking the original’s subtlety. Thus, although Così fan tutte has generally been viewed as a work that runs counter to romantic tastes, Reichardt’s ‘Briefwechsel’, along with some newly discovered material, provides a basis for revisiting that claim about the opera’s place in nineteenth-century thought.

Beckett's Sublime Ironies: The , , and the Remainders of Romanticism

This essay theorizes the status of Romantic irony in Beckett's work according to its relationship with the sublime, which takes three different forms. First, in the "German Letter," irony is conceived of as the way to the sublime. I argue that a diagnostic account of this process emerges in , where Romantic irony is framed as the symptom of a moribund condition. Finally, I suggest that in Beckett works to ironize the rhetoric of Romanticism, whilst the Romantic irony of his narrators is constituted by an aspiration to repeat an irrecoverable sublime encounter.

La Femme chez Heinrich Heine et Charles Baudelaire: le langage moderne de l'amour (review)

Reviewed by: La Femme chez Heinrich Heine et Charles Baudelaire: le langage moderne de l’amour Catherine Witt Boyer, Sophie . La Femme chez Heinrich Heine et Charles Baudelaire: le langage moderne de l’amour. Paris: L’Harmattan (Allemagne d’hier et d’aujourd’hui), 2004. Pp. XI + 322. ISBN 2-7475-7822-4. Halfway through his Memoirs (1854) Heinrich Heine – a German Jew by birth, a Parisian by adoption – starts to badger the French on account of their stubborn habit of mispronouncing his name. First noting that its Gallicized version sounds something like Monsieur Enri Enn ("bei den meisten heiße ich Mr. Enri Enn"), he goes on to explain that more extreme mispronunciations include the infamous Monsieur Un rien ("von vielen wird dieses in ein Enrienne zusammen gezogen, und einige nannten mich Mr. Un rien.") While this side-note typifies the notorious sarcasm of the German poet, a deeper irony transpires in what can be read as the uncanny premonition of Heine's effacement from French literary memory. And yet, upon his arrival in Paris shortly after the events of July 1830, the thirty-three year old Heine, a fervent Republican sympathizer, had received an enthusiastic welcome not only as a political exile, but also as the author of the Reisebilder [Travel Pictures] (1824), an album combining fiction, essay, and journalistic gossip, and the much celebrated collection of lyric poems entitled Buch der Lieder [Book of Songs] (1827). He soon befriended the most renowned artists in the city, including Musset, Gautier, Hugo, Sand, Berlioz, and Meyerbeer, and his own work was praised by prominent critics such as Philarète Chasles and Nerval, who, in an issue of the Revue des deux mondes (July 1848), flatteringly portrayed Heine as "un Voltaire pittoresque et sentimental, un sceptique du xviiie siècle, argenté par les doux rayons bleus du clair de lune allemand." Banville's Mes Souvenirs (1882) is perhaps one of the last books written in French to evoke the German poet's significant influence on the literary and artistic circles of the time. Today Heine's work appears to be of interest almost exclusively to German, British, and North American scholars. While comparative approaches tend to concentrate on his affinities with contemporary practitioners of romantic irony (Blake, Byron, Carlyle, Schlegel, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, among others), Heine is typically likened to Baudelaire on account of his self-proclaimed anti-bourgeois aesthetics and his treatment of subversive themes such as revolutionary politics, the underworld of nineteenth-century Paris, and dangerously seductive women. Sophie Boyer's book, La Femme chez Heinrich Heine et Charles Baudelaire: le langage moderne de l'amour, attempts a synthesis of these trends. As such it assumes a familiarity with the poetry and critical writings of Baudelaire and Heine, and, in the latter's case, with the current state of critical debates (reference to recent scholarship on Baudelaire is lacking). Largely based on her doctoral dissertation (completed at McGill University in 2001), Boyer draws on a wide selection of the poets' works in verse and prose to examine the parallel modes in which both represent women as simultaneously fascinating and repulsive figures of otherness (the prostitute, the corpse, [End Page 154] the vampire, the statue, and the sphinx). The purported aim of this study is at least double: from a rhetorico-poetic standpoint, it intends to elucidate the process of allegorical figuration of the female body and its inscription within what Boyer calls (in deliberate avoidance of the notion of lyric tradition?) "le discours amoureux de la modernité" – a language governed by the rules of eroticism and seduction; from a socio-historical standpoint, it looks at the gaze of the male beholder – "véritable baromètre des mentalités masculines" (10) – as the indicator of a more general shift in attitude towards love and death in the mid-nineteenth century. Chapter 1 takes as its point of departure a damning letter Baudelaire had intended to send to Jules Janin in response to an article deriding the gloomy atmosphere of Heine's love poetry. Baudelaire's defense of his fellow poet is taken as a programmatic statement for a renewal of lyricism based on the figures of...

The Strange Case for Women's Capacity to Reason: Judith Sargent Murray's Use of Irony in “On the Equality of the Sexes” (1790)

This tropological analysis of “On the Equality of the Sexes” (1790) argues that Judith Sargent Murray deployed a series of ironic reversals, including an example of Kenneth Burke's “dialectical” irony, to make her famous case for women's capacity to reason. As such, the article elucidates this trope's peculiar rhetorical potential within the context of eighteenth-century debates on female education and investigates how it can function in conjunction with romantic irony. Significantly, Murray deployed romantic irony in order to question her era's commonplace ideas about women's intellectual capacities and conventional female education. She then employed dialectical irony in order to sidestep relativism, playing off and departing from the expanded field of possibilities that romantic irony opened up. In so doing, she cast doubt upon commonly held doubts themselves, questioning the subversiveness normally associated with learned ladies. Through this series of ironic turns, readers were invited to change their previous beliefs and then presented with a clear means of moving forward—thereby opening a path for elite European American girls to be educated in traditionally masculine domains.

Kierkegaard's Recurring Criticism of Hegel's ‘The Good and Conscience’

Kierkegaard was, at least during his early years, an avid reader of Hegel's philosophy. For example, his dissertation, The Concept of Irony, constitutes a careful study of, among other things, Hegel's account of Socrates in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, and of Hegel's discussion of Romantic irony in both the Lectures on Aesthetics and the book review of Solger's Posthumous Writings. Similarly, in connection with the analysis of Antigone in Either/Or and the discussion of universals and particulars in the unfinished Johannes Climacus or De Omnibus dubitandum est, Part Two, there is clear evidence that Kierkegaard consulted the relevant parts of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Based on these examples, Kierkegaard's use of Hegel can almost always be characterised as ad hoc. He goes directly to specific passages or discussions in Hegel's texts, which are of special interest in connection with works that he himself is writing. Thus, when working on The Concept of Irony, the first part of which is concerned with Socratic irony, Kierkegaard goes specifically to the section in Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy that treats Socrates, without feeling any obligation to read the book from cover to cover.

‘Mankind's old dichotomy’: Gwen Harwood's romantic ironist

Poet Gwen Harwood's 'Professor' sequences engage strongly with German Romantic philosophy. His sequences introduce the topic of irony in the poems and this concept of Romantic irony is tracked as the formal and thematic adventure.

Romantic Globalization: Martin Kippenberger's Metro-Net

This article proposes a conceptual framework for an emerging aesthetics of globalization by analyzing a sculptural installation created by Martin Kippenberger (1953–1997). Metro-Net is a global sculpture the elements of which can found in Germany, Greece, Japan, and the USA and which also includes segments without a fixed location. Consisting of nonfunctional subway entries, Metro-Net celebrates a global connectedness and simultaneously frustrates the visitor's desire to be elsewhere. These mutually contradictory modes of reception evoke the notion of Romantic irony which declares a nonconceptual truth to emerge out of the infinite back and forth between equally tenable positions, thus becoming fruitful for a concept of aesthetic globalization. (KH)

The Promiscuity of Print: John Clare's "Don Juan" and the Culture of Romantic Celebrity

This essay offers a new reading of John Clare's "Don Juan," a hard-hitting and deliberately vulgar denunciation of English society and letters. In his extended Byronic performance, Clare harnesses Byron's famed sexual appetite and strong Romantic irony to dramatic effect, defiantly redeploying the machinery of literary celebrity that had produced him as "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet." Tracing Clare's imaginative and textual investments in prostitutes and boxers, figures located at the margins of London's criminal underworld, I show how the compulsive misogyny of "Don Juan" and its obscene sexual punning form part of a concerted, if not entirely coherent, response to a culture increasingly organized by the spectacle of celebrity.