Critique in aesthetic ideology: Aesthetic politics in Romanticism and critical theory

This dissertation addresses an intensely contested issue in the Romantic and postmodern imaginations: the relation of literary aesthetics to political critique. Examining the aesthetic theories of Friedrich Schiller, William Wordsworth, Helen Maria Williams, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as four theorists of the twentieth century, I devise a theory of Romantic aesthetic politics, an aesthetic interpretation of politics for reformist critique. While critics of Romantic ideology have interpreted Romantic theory as an obstacle to political action, I contend that Romanticism extends the possibilities for political action by refusing a narrow field of empiricism. The political force of Romanticism, I argue, is the extent to which it forces a rethinking of the terms of the political. The diverse set of writers gathered in my dissertation converge on one point: not only is all literature necessarily political, they argue, but all politics is necessarily literary. Part One of my dissertation investigates a Romantic theory that champions aesthetic formalism as revolutionary politics. Schiller, Wordsworth, Williams, and Shelley shift the field of the political from its common institutional manifestations--government, war, law--to a field of the symbolic--beauty, metaphor, verse. Each author finds in the aesthetic a model for an anti-absolutist, democratic state. Schiller states this position most succinctly in claiming that it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to freedom. Similarly, Williams reads the early years of the Revolution as an aesthetic-political landscape where symbolism serves as a discursive means to political dispersal and plurality. Part Two of my dissertation examines the resonances of Romantic aesthetic politics in four aesthetic theories of the twentieth century. Romanticism, I contend, informs the aesthetic theories of the Frankfurt School represented by Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, who draw on the radical potential of aesthetic subjectivity and irony in opposition to Lukacsian realism. Against the interpretation of deconstruction as politically quietist, de Man presents the aesthetic nature of politics as the very engine of political change, while Carl Schmitt--denouncer of political Romanticism and a supporter of Nazism--exposes a continuum between absolutist politics and an anti-aesthetic political critique