Ästhetik der Faszination? Überlegungen und Beispiele
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Hans Ulrich Seeber
Abstract
The words ‘fascination’, ‘to fascinate’ and ‘fascinating’ originate in black and white magic. They mean ‘to bewitch’, to cast a spell over someone. In contemporary critical jargon and (consumerist) culture the words have become extremely popular, suggesting unqualified approval. However, their cognitive potential for the description and analysis of specifically aesthetic effects has hardly been explored so far. This is precisely what the present paper attempts to do by first looking at examples of ‘metafascination’ (advertising, Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and Staiger's poetics), and second by tracing the influence of the discourse of fascination on lyrical poetry (poems by John Clare, “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” by Coleridge, and Lawrence's poem “Snake”). Unlike Immanuel Kant's notion of disinterested liking, which expects the recipients to coolly analyse and appreciate the formal qualities of the beautiful object, the aesthetics of fascination emerging after him focuses on the spell-binding effects of art, on its intensity. Thus the critic is caught in the tension between the work of art's powerful appearance and the possible meanings it may contain and provoke. The notion of pleasure propagated by hermeneutic aesthetics does not suffice to explain art's unsettling and powerful presence, its ability to stimulate the recipient's attention. Frequently the fascination represented in the text is bound up with the fascination of the text.
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- Patrick D. Murphy, Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Distance Learning: How Literature Teaches Ethics
- Ästhetik der Faszination? Überlegungen und Beispiele
- Medusa's Gaze and the Aesthetics of Fascination
- Zur Frage der Präsenz ‘starker Frauen’ und der Dekonstruktion des Patriarchats in der Englischen Renaissancetragödie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von John Websters The Duchess of Malfi
- Beyond Beginning: Walter Scott's (Para)textualisation of Scottishness
- ‘Not all of them are Paddies’: Irish-Americans and the (Un-/Re-)Embracing of Irish Identity
- Christina Sanchez, Consociation and Dissociation: An Empirical Study of Word-family Integration in English and German
- Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, with additional material from A Thesaurus of Old English, ed. Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels & Irené Wotherspoon
- Philip Durkin, The Oxford Guide to Etymology
- Britons in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Nick Higham
- The Old English Boethius. An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae, ed. Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine with a chapter on the Metres by Mark Griffith and contributions by Rohini Jayatilaka
- László Sándor Chardonnens, Anglo-Saxon Prognostics, 900–1100: Study and Texts
- Christoph Schubert, Raumkonstitution durch Sprache: Blickführung, Bildschemata und Kohäsion in Deskriptionssequenzen englischer Texte
- Udo J. Hebel, Einführung in die Amerikanistik/American Studies
- Civilizing America: Manners and Civility in American Literature and Culture, ed. Dietmar Schloss
- John Wrighton, Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry
- Nine Eleven: Ästhetische Verarbeitungen des 11. September 2001, ed. Ingo Irsigler & Christoph Jürgensen; 9/11 als kulturelle Zäsur: Repräsentationen des 11. September 2001 in kulturellen Diskursen, Literatur und visuellen Medien, ed. Sandra Poppe, Thorsten Schüller & Sascha Seiler
- Patrick D. Murphy, Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies
- Eingegangene Schriften
