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Book Information | About the book | Reviews | |||||||||||||
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Reconstituting
the Body Politic Enlightenment, Public Culture and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy Jonathan M. Hess |
The concept that art must have no instrumental function is a doctrine traditionally traced back to Kant's Critique of Judgment. In Reconstituting the Body Politic, Jonathan Hess proposes that this concept of autonomous art marks not a withdrawal from the political realm but the ultimate embodiment of Enlightenment political culture, a response to a crisis in the institution idealized by Jürgen Habermas as the bourgeois public sphere. Hess explores the moment in late 18th-century Germany that witnessed the emergence of two concepts that marked the modern era: the political concept of the public sphere and the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy. By considering the extent to which, at its very inception, the concept of aesthetic autonomy is inextricably intertwined with the emergence of the concept of the public sphere, he offers both a historical study of the political conditions that produced this concept and a contribution to contemporary literary and political theory. | "Hess's
book is a major achievement, major not only with respect to its substance
but also with respect to the clarity of its organization and the consistency
of its focus. It not only says important things, it also says them in such
a way as to provoke clear and pertinent responses."—Benjamin Bennett,
Kenan Professor of German, University of Virginia Jonathan M. Hess is an assistant professor in the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. |
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| Kritik:
German Literary Theory and Cultural Studies $44.95s cloth / ISBN 0-8143-2788-5 340 pages / 6 x 9 3 illustrations 1999 contents > introduction [partial] > extract > index > |
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