Author, Art and the Market: Rereading the History of Aethetics, The

Comparative Literature, Fall 1996 by Nicholls, Roger A

THE AUTHOR, ART, AND THE MARKET: REREADING THE HISTORY OF AESTHETICS. By Martha Woodmansee. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. xv, 200 p.

The central theme of Martha Woodmansee's book is that the idea of aesthetics as a separate discipline, and of the work of art as a unified, self-sufficient whole, is not a universal human concern but a modern preoccupation which is historically determined and which developed in the course of the eighteenth century. In a series of loosely connected discussions she follows a sequence that begins with Addison's essay on "The Pleasures of the Imagination" in 1712 and culminates in Kant's Critique of Judgment in 1790 and his concept of "aesthetic disinterestedness." Rather than confront the arguments of such works on their own ground, however, she looks for the social, economic, and political circumstances in which they emerged. Essentially what she emphasizes is the growth of a new reading public and the development of literature as entertainment-books, plays, and journals written to meet the new demand-and how this induced a response that stressed instead the value of particular works appealing to cultivated taste. Thus she argues that Moses Mendelssohn, for example, in the middle of the century, still elaborates on the idea that arts and literature may be valued by their capacity to stir our feelings, to move us to laughter or tears. But with the growth of a new literature aimed at sensational effects, such an approach becomes invalid and the stress comes to be put not on the reaction of the audience but on qualities inherent in the work itself to which only the educated and cultivated reader can truly respond. Our modern division into "lowbrow" and "highbrow" has its origins here.

Such arguments are scarcely new and it must be questioned whether the book, however attractively written, really has such a pioneering character as its publicists claim for it. Yet it is certainly true that the emphasis on the work of art in itself, introduced from Germany into England by Coleridge and Wordsworth and taken up again towards the end of the nineteenth century, has had a tremendous effect on studies of literature and art. The emphasis on the close reading of texts belongs not just to "New Criticism," as Woodmansee points out in her notes, but to many other critical schools, including writers as otherwise divergent as Roman Ingarden, Roland Barthes, and Robert Scholes. At the same time the study of aesthetics continues as a separate field of philosophy, looking back to the Greeks for authority, and treated under themes which can be considered independently of the origins and motives and cultural situation of the authors concerned. Yet it is certainly possible to argue, as Woodmansee does, that writers before the eighteenth century are really discussing something different. Art was seen as directly involved in life, supporting particular beliefs or truths, uniting the pleasant with the useful.

Woodmansee is mostly concerned with the situation in Germany, and her book brings many interesting writers to our attention. In studying the growth of the idea of Beauty she refers to the writings of Karl Phillip Moritz, best known as the author of the autobiographical novel Anton Reiser. She expands on the idea that Moritz, one of the first to emphasize that the value of the work of art is intrinsic in the work itself (and that it should arouse in the audience a sense of "selfless pleasure"), may reflect his Pietist background in this. We forget self and our own concerns in appreciating the beauty of a work of art as we do in seeking to understand the love of God. There is a suggestion here of the progressive secularization of life and the way in which the celebration of Art and Beauty might somehow replace God. But this kind of argument is not developed by Woodmansee. She is concerned with particular social issues-the rights of the author to his own publications, for example, and how they might affect the development of ideas. More characteristically, she stresses that the cult of genius of the Sturm und Drang, on which generations of Germanists have looked with awe, occurs at a time when authors are first seeking to make a living from their writing and thus have a financial interest in emphasizing the originality of their own work and their right to protect it under the laws of copyright.

Woodmansee does not deal directly with the major authors. She mentions Kant only in passing, although catchwords from his work form a center of focus. Interestingly, she emphasizes instead the more accessible but very little-known writer J.A. Bergk, who in his The Art of Reading Books (written after Kant in 1799) seeks to direct his reader to a truer understanding of literature. Bergk's emphasis on the reader's need to concentrate on a few great works and to cultivate a capacity for judgment seems surprisingly close to the themes of many twentieth-century textbooks.

In dealing with Schiller Woodmansee does not directly discuss the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. but chooses instead his earlier, antagonistic review of Burger's "Leonore," a ballad which had achieved astonishing success by the time it became the subject of Schiller's attack. Here she argues that Schiller fails to see that Burger's poem uses popular appeal to bring in a greater audience for his own more ambitious purposes, something Schiller himself had attempted in his earlier dramas. Instead, as an advocate now of the "higher arts" he deplores the poem's appeal to immature youth in the name of the dignity of art and the values of the cultivated man. In this way, it is not difficult for Woodmansee to suggest that Schiller's motives spring from jealousy or resentment, or that his newly acquired financial support from aristocratic patrons has allowed him to free himself from earlier reliance on the "market."