Being Together: Aesthetics and Anthropology from Kant to the Cinema

This study examines Anglophone and German writers who synthesized aesthetics and anthropology in order to resist what they saw as the withering of communal bonds in modern society. As I show, concepts such as harmony, autonomy, and perfection helped counter the alienation and anomie commonly attributed to modern culture, furnishing writers a means of reconciling the free play of individuals with an ordered social whole, the unity of nature with the diversity of its human forms. Recent work on aesthetics and politics, most notably that of Jacques Rancière, has diminished or erased altogether any essentialism that may be latent in aesthetic conceptions of social order; I seek to restore attention to links between aesthetics an anthropology in both literary and theoretical texts, from the natural philosophy of Immanuel Kant through popular pre-Darwinian anthropology in America and Britain to modernist writing by W. E. B. Du Bois, Else Lasker-Schüler, W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, Gottfried Benn and Georg Lukács