The Urge for Totality

226 pages Although conceptions of the unity, integrity, or wholeness of the work of art stretch back to antiquity, the emergence of the aesthetic as a theoretical category in eighteenth-century German thought is closely bound up with the rise of middle-class models of human subjectivity that are int...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Twentieth century literature 2007-06, Vol.53 (2), p.224-231
Main Author: Ackerman, Alan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aesthetics
Analysis
Antiquity
Authors
Business
Critical Theory
Essays
German language
German romanticism
Language history
Literary Theory
Literature and Literary Studies
Mass media
Poetry
Reviews
Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von (1759-1805)
Smith, Matthew Wilson
Subjectivity
Technological change
Theater
Theory
Theory and Philosophy
Works
Writers
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Summary:226 pages Although conceptions of the unity, integrity, or wholeness of the work of art stretch back to antiquity, the emergence of the aesthetic as a theoretical category in eighteenth-century German thought is closely bound up with the rise of middle-class models of human subjectivity that are intrinsically related to the material process by which cultural production is rationalized as existing entirely for itself-the process, in short, whereby artifacts become commodities. From its very outset, the total work of art has been marked by clashes between mechanical and organic form, technology and technophobia, mass reproduction and the aura of originality, individual genius and the Volk, commerce and communisnji.The first key to understanding the history of the form is to understand that these contradictory impulses are not markers of some vague or hopelessly ambiguous lineage but rather opposing elements of an internal dialectic.
ISSN:0041-462X
2325-8101
DOI:10.1215/0041462X-2007-3005