Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 08:18:44 -0400 (EDT)
From: David Langston <dlangsto-AT-mcla.mass.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: The classical, the romantic



On Wed, 13 Sep 2000, Howard Hastings wrote:

> is it possible to compare epistemologies while sidestepping "questions 
> of form, genre, nationality or period style"?  THis does not seem to 
> me self-evidently so.

Perhaps I should have said "suspend" or "postpone" such questions.  I
didn't mean we can avoid them altogether.  Perhaps a brief illustration
will help make my case.  William Blake and Jacques-Louis David both depict
the human form using styles and conventions drawn from Classical models. 
Blake is said to be "Romantic," and, following Pat Sloan's suggestion,
David is placed in the "Neo-Classical" category by the art historians. My
point is that their common use of an artistic model tells us little about
the artistic project of either person, and the labels, "Rom." and "Neo-C."
only muddy the waters further, at least at the beginning.  Each of them --
Blake and David -- used that model for specific artistic and ideological
ends (which of course, involve national and generic questions), but those
should be secondary to the epistemological/aesthetic inquiry. 

The more important fact is that both artists used forms which they could
establish a distinct break from the past; both artists considered their
work to be ideologically aligned with the ideals of the French Revolution.
To call David "Neo-Classical" and in the same breath to call Alexander
Pope a "Neo-Classical" precursor to Blake makes it sound as though Pope
and David are aligned along an axis which Blake's "Romanticism" opposes.

I think that is just absurd reasoning by shuffling labels around which
have limited utility to begin with. 

I have been particularly troubled by the tendency to associate the term,
"Romantic" with "transcendent" in the discussions on this list.  Some
artists we might consider "Romantic" were interested in transcendence,
others were radical imminentalists, still others focus on transcendence as
"transcendence downward."  Some "Romantic" artists have greater affinities
with writers we might categorize as "Enlightenment" than they do with
their contemporaries.  There are also trans-national affinities (Poe and
Keats, for instance) which undermine easy associations of a writer with a
particular nation or even language. 

Howard is certainly correct to say that terminology can be helpful in
sorting out historical sequence and making useful disciminations.  But
even then I think that the terms often become themselves points of
contest, and their utility soon assumes a half-life of diminishing
returns. 

For instance, despite the fact that I teach a course ambitiously called
"the Romantic movement," I, for one among many, think the term "Romantic" 
is largely exhausted because it requires such lengthy explanations both to
justify and to draw out the ramifications.  I still use it as intellectual
shorthand, but the term is just as often obscurantist as revealing (thank
you, Paul de Man). 

David Langston






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