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Abstract
This dissertation investigates why painting is important to European literature of the modern period in a way it never was before. While literary historians have pointed out the age-old interdependence of painting and poetry, the emergence of an enormous corpus of non-fictional prose-texts about painting in the middle of the nineteenth century is a little studied subject. The lack of generic cohesion in this tradition of critically, philosophically, or theoretically inspired and highly self-reflexive literary texts forestalls formalist historical analyses; the European spread of this "aesthetic criticism," moreover, demands a comparative historical hypothesis, rather than national literary histories. Combining literary scholarship and the history of art with the recent methodological advances in social history, this dissertation proposes a "socio-aesthetic" approach, aimed at a social understanding of aesthetic innovation, to make sense of aesthetic criticism as a literary tradition, both in its eighteenth-century French origin and in its varied European manifestations to the present day.
The erosion of history, subjectivity, and representation in the aesthetic criticism of Pater, Valery, and Van Ostaijen are read as socio-historical responses to the changed conditions of artistic and critical production in the decades around the turn of the century. Painting was then at the forefront of artistic innovation, and both journalistic criticism and aesthetic philosophy became increasingly important in the understanding and legitimation of the formal transformations in modern art and of the function of art itself. Revising the mechanisms of cultural history, debunking the myth of individual creative genius, and promoting art as a vehicle for social change, were some of the tasks which these aesthetic critics assumed. The challenge they thereby launched at European establishment culture put them in increasingly complex and politicized relations to the legitimating philosophies of bourgeois consciousness.
Pater's subversive humanism, Valery's scientific method of cultural production, and Van Ostaijen's political phenomenology of art prefigure the cultural critique of the most recent aesthetic criticism, which interprets painting as a political challenge to the violence of Western logocentrism. Having articulated the central ethical, epistemological, and socio-political questions raised by modern art, aesthetic criticism now accomplishes the end of metaphysics.
