Aesthetic experience in everyday worlds: Reclaiming an unredeemed utopian motif

New Literary History

Volumn 37, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 299-318

  Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 50949119108     PISSN: 00286087     EISSN: 1080661X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2006.0035     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. Regarding the use of the concept "everyday worlds" and its history, see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, "Everyday-World and Life-World as Philosophical Concepts: A Genealogical Approach," New Literary History 24, no. 4 (1993): 745-61
2. Luiz Costa Lima, in "The Autonomy of Art and the Market," Literary Research / Recherche Littéraire 39-40 (2003): 95-109, has discussed the historical reasons for the astonishingly stable association of such programs with the tradition of the political Left
3. William Morris, "The Aims of Art," in The Collected Works of William Morris; With Introductions by His Daughter May Monis . . . (London: Longmans, Green, 1915), 23:94
4. John Dewey, "Experience as Aesthetic," in The Philosophy of John Dewey, vol, 2, The Lived Experience, ed. John J. McDermott (New York: Putnam, 1973), 528
5. See Peter Burger's, Theorie der Avantgarde [Theory of the Avant-Garde] (Frankfurt am Mairr: Suhrkamp, 1974), a book that has become a historical classic of criticism itself
6. If, thirty years ago, an author like Bürger was still trying to hold on to the avant-garde's programs as aesthetically viable, the discussion has since then switched toward more historically oriented case studies. See, as two outstanding examples, Christina Kiaer, "The Russian Constructivist Flapper Dress," arrd Jeffrey T. Schnapp, "The Romance of Caffeine and Aluminum," both in Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 185-243 arrd 244-69, respectively
7. There is a lorrg, mainly Frerrch tradition of the comparison between religious experience arrd aesthetic experience, stemming from the Durkheirn school via Georges Bataille to the work of René Girard. Walter Benjamin's variatioirs oir this point in "The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproduction" were probably irrspired by the same line of traditiorr. See Gumbrecht and Michael Marrinan, eds., Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 195-280 (and see in particular the contributions by the medievalists Horst "Wenzel arrd Stepherr G. Nichols)
8. See a similar description of the act of "historicizing" in my book The Powers of Philology; Dynamics of Textual Scholarship (Urbarra: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 54-67
9. See the forthcoming volume by Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, eds., The Re-Enchantment of the World; Secular Magic in an Age of Rationality (Starrford, CA: Starrford University Press, forthcoming)
10. Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, trarrs. John Farrell (Stanford, CA: Starrford University Press, 2005)
11. First published in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1950)
12. The reflectiorr of this essay goes back to notes from the early 1930s arrd to lectures that Martirr Heidegger gave at Freiburg (1935) and at Frankfurt am Mairr (1936). See the excellent interpretation by Arrdrea Kerrr, "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes: Kunst und Wahrheit zwischen Stiftung und Streit," in Heidegger-Handbuch: Lehen, Werk, Wirkung, ed. Dieter Thomä, 162 (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2003)
13. Bill Browrr, "Thing Theory," Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 5
14. See also Brown, "The Secret Life of Thirrgs: Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism," in Aesthetic Subjects, ed. Pamela R. Matthews and David Bruce McWhirter, 397-430 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003)
15. Martin Jay, "Drifting into Dangerous Waters: The Separation of Aesthetic Experience from the Work of Art," in Aesthetic Subjects, 19 (hereafter cited in text)
16. See Brown, who tentatively associates the present "digitization of the world" and our renewed intellectual fascination with things and thingness ("Thing Theory," 16)
17. For a more complex description of this "oscillation" as the core of aesthetic experience under contemporary conditions, see Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004)
18. See my contribution to Landy and Saler's forthcoming volume, The Re-Enchantment of the World, "Gators in the Bayou: What Have We Lost in Disenchantment?"
19. See Karl Heinz Bohrer, Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)
20. and, by the same author, Der Abschied: Theorie der Trauer: Baudelaire, Goethe, Nietzsche, Benjamin (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkarnp, 1996)
21. Paul Valéry, "Eupalinos ou l'architecte," in Oeuvres, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 2:79-147
22. Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology" (1955), in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 3-35. On the missed epistemological opportunity, see 34-35
23. "If . . . Being of beings did not prevail-in the sense of the being here and thus objectivity of the inventory of objects-not only would the airplane engines fail to function, they would not exist. If the Being of beings, as the being here of what is present, were not manifest, the electric energy of the atom could never have made its appearance, could never have put man to work in its own way-work in every respect determined by technology." Heidegger, "What Is Called Thinking?" trans. J, Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 254
24. Pablo Neruda, "Sobre una poesía sin pureza," in Cahallo verde para la poesía 1 (Madrid: Concha Méndez y Manual Altoaguirre, 1935), 5 (my translation)
25. About the specific type of aesthetic experience offered by team sports, see chapter 3, section 6 of my book In Praise of Athletic Beauty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)
26. Niklas Luhmaim, "Das Kunstwerk und die Selbstreproduktion der Kunst," in Stil: Geschichten und Funktionen eines kulturwissenschafflichen Diskurselements, ed. Hans Ulrich Gurnbrecht, Karl Ludwig Pfeiffer, and Armin Biermann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkarnp, 1986), 620-72 (see esp. 650)