Walter Benjamin and the antinomies of tradition
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Abstract
During the first half of the 1920's, Benjamin completed two major studies: one was an extended essay on a single work, Goethe's novel The Elective Affinities: the other, The Origins of German Trauersoiel , was a more formal, "scholarly" treatise in literary history and philosophical aesthetics, built upon an entire genre. In methodological terms, both were exemplary "Romantic" critiques in the sense he had defined in the dissertation. Proceeding from intrinsic, formal properties, they seek to unfold the immanent "idea" latent in their objects. The first explicates a single work of art from within; the second, by identifying the content and formal principles uniquely characteristic of TrauerspieL or German baroque tragic drama, dispels classicistic prejudices and sets a modern genre in its rights. At the same time, however, Benjamin was continuing to pursue his own immanent critique of romanticism itself. Each of these works proceeds against a danger latent in early Romanticism, dangers that had emerged from the romantic movement as its decay products: whereas the Goethe study attacks the vitalist cult of symbolic expression and myth, the Irauerspiel study turns its fire against the aesthetics of affirmative idealism. The implicit coordinates of Benjamin's project, in other words, were still set by the constellation that had guided his break with the youth...
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Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Boston University
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