Vol. 22 No. 20 · 19 October 2000
pages 21-22 | 2628 words
Missing Mother
Graham Robb
- Romanticism and Its Discontents by Anita Brookner
Viking, 208 pp, £25.00, September 2000, ISBN 0 670 89212 2
Trying to define Romanticism has always been a typically Romantic activity, especially in France. The word romantisme first appeared in the year of Napoleon’s coronation (1804) and soon began to acquire a large retinue of definitions. Mme de Staël associated it with the misty, melancholy North and declared Romanticism to be primarily an effect of climate. Victor Hugo and his followers allied it to the vanished monarchy, then to the departed Napoleon, and finally to ‘liberalism in art’. Stendhal and Baudelaire produced more durable definitions by linking it to the present. For Stendhal, ‘Romanticism is the art of offering people the literary works which, in the present state of their habits and beliefs, are likely to give them the greatest possible pleasure. Classicism, by contrast, offers them the literature which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their great-grandfathers.’ For Baudelaire, ‘whoever says Romanticism, says modern art.’
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Letters
Vol. 22 No. 21 · 2 November 2000
From Anna Levy
In his review of Anita Brookner's Romanticism and Its Discontents (LRB, 19 October), Graham Robb speculates as to whether 'some of the more ambitious forms of modern literary criticism will come to be seen as a late flowering of the Romantic spirit'. He doesn't tell us which these 'more ambitious' forms are, but the idea opens up some curious perspectives, involving as they do the assumption that you can fairly extend labels such as 'Romantic' to those who interpret literature as well as those who write it. Were one to take Deconstruction as one of the more ambitious forms of modern literary criticism, would those who practise it, academics to a man and woman, feel comfortable at being classed among the contemporary Romantics, merely from the fact of their allegiance? I ask because it has often seemed to me sufficient for a writer to have been writing at a certain point in literary history for them to come down to us as a Romantic, whatever their philosophy may have been and however difficult it may be to force the content and tendencies of their writing into the appropriate mould.
Anna Levy
Montreal
Vol. 22 No. 22 · 16 November 2000
From William Flesch
Anna Levy (Letters, 2 November) wonders whether practitioners of Deconstruction would feel comfortable being classed as Romantics. In the US at any rate the answer is yes: Paul de Man repeatedly described Deconstruction as the inheritor of the Romantic legacy, and his brand of Deconstruction claimed to be a recovery of the most unnerving and powerful insights of Romanticism from Rousseau to Kant to the Schlegels to Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley. Although de Man avoided psychoanalytic approaches to literature, many of his friends, colleagues and followers – among them, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Neil Hertz, Thomas Weiskel, Cynthia Chase, Cathy Caurth (even Laura Quinney) – compared Deconstructive approaches to the Romantic sublime with Freudian accounts of the formation of the psyche so as to argue that psychoanalysis was also a legacy of Romanticism. The watershed book Deconstruction and Criticism (1979), comprising essays by Bloom, de Man, Derrida, Hartman and J. Hillis Miller, was originally conceived as a series of Yale School readings of Shelley's The Triumph of Life; what de Man offers as pure critical exegesis of the poem is his most powerful single statement of his style of Deconstruction. Whether the New Historicist theory deriving from Foucault is also Romanticist is another question.
William Flesch
Brandeis University<br />Waltham, Massachusetts
