Emeritus Bookshelf

Enlightenment critics were the first to conceive the modern principle of the aesthetic, the view that art entails a double reflection: a reflection of the world, and a reflection on the process by which that reflection is accomplished. The Enlightenment aesthetic is constitutively aware of the difference between what it knows and how it knows it. However, its posterity has reduced "neoclassicism" and "Augustanism" to a naive imitation of classical texts and an unselfconscious representation of the world. Two modern movements, Romanticism and modernism, have appropriated these Enlightenment innovations as their own. Romantic ideology has imposed on the eighteenth century a dichotomous periodization: imitation versus imagination, the Enlightenment mirror versus the Romantic lamp. Modernist ideology--structuralism and poststructuralism--has dichotomized narrative "telling" and imitative "showing," form and content, structure and history.