Exemplarity and mediocrity : the art of the average from bourgeois tragedy to realism / Paul Fleming.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fleming, Paul, 1968-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

German literature--18th century--History and criticism.

German literature.

German literature--19th century--History and criticism.

Aesthetics in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (361 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Following Hegel's analysis of art's increasing difficulty to both engage and extricate itself from prosaic reality, Paul Fleming investigates the strategies employed by German literature from 1750 to 1850 for increasingly attuning itself to "idian life—common heroes, everyday life, non-extraordinary events—while also avoiding all notions of mediocrity. He focuses on three sites of this tension: the average audience (Lessing), the average artist (Goethe and Schiller), and the everyday, or average life (Grillparzer and Stifter). The book's title, Exemplarity and Mediocrity, describes both a disjunctive and a conjunctive relation. Read disjunctively, modern art must display the "exemplary originality" (Kant) that only genius can provide and is thus fundamentally opposed to mediocrity as that which does not stand out or lacks distinctiveness; in the conjunctive sense, modern art turns to non-exceptional life in order to transform it—without forsaking its commonness—thereby producing exemplary forms of mediocrity that both represent the non-exceptional and, insofar as they stand outside the group they represent, are something other than mediocre.

Contents:

Exemplarity and mediocrity

Common heroes : the making of an exemplary audience (Lessing on bourgeois tragedy)

Mediocre artists : the aesthetic education of the dilettante (Goethe and Schiller)

Average life : the art of prosaic reality (Grillparzer and Stifter).

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [175]-222) and index.

ISBN:

9780804769983

0804769982

OCLC:

793166860