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  • Middling Romanticism: Reading in the Gaps, from Kant to Ashbery by Zachary Sng
  • Seán M. Williams
Zachary Sng. Middling Romanticism: Reading in the Gaps, from Kant to Ashbery. New York: Fordham University Press.

Since Zachary Sng's monograph takes the "middle" as its subject and the literature and thought of a German "golden age"—Romanticism—as its main case in point, it is tempting to judge the work according to the Horatian maxim of aurea mediocritas. And there is much for the likes of Horace or indeed Goldilocks to enjoy here: the spirit of deconstruction runs through the book, but [End Page 323] is held in check and is admirably accessible; there are classical allusions, etymologies, and word plays, though these are always put to critical use. Sng himself begins with Aristotle, who extols the virtues of moderation—and yet repeatedly questions the manifold ways of expressing it. Thus for Sng, to adopt a middling position becomes first and foremost a linguistic act, examined over the course of six main chapters.

The first four chapters are thematically structured, attending to aesthetics (the sublime), mediatization—in the sense of both print media, and power relationships on the fall of the Holy Roman Empire—politics, and love. While a range of authors from the English and especially German canons are considered in each, the study of Kleist straddles Sng's analysis of political representation from structural and subjective perspectives (chapters 2 and 3). In closing, Sng focuses on Hölderlin in chapters 5 and 6: with an interpretation mediated by the thought of Benjamin and Heidegger, and with a view to Hölderlin's legacy in the poetry of the late John Ashbery. No one would finish reading Sng's book and conclude that to middle is a pragmatic, compromising, or common-sensical sort of thing to do. Middling is redefined as a complicating, theoretical, if admittedly arbitrary interpretative attitude—of Romanticism.

Having written about beginning to write after one has finished—prefacing—and in a self-consciously unsystematic way, I'm sympathetic to Sng's concern with the middle as a form, and his invocation of the Romantic as a critical mode rather than a mere, reductive object of scholarly investigation. We also share a fundamental curiosity regarding the same texts. Examining Hegel's preface to Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807), for example, Sng writes: "To read the Preface as a beginning or an ending is, of course, to read it as a philosophical reflection on the idea of beginning and ending. It is both those things, but also a statement about the middle, and in particular, about the key term, mediation (Vermittlung)." This emphasis is true. Sng does not think through its implications for Hegel's texts in any structural or material, i.e., textual and argumentative, depth, though. Instead, he attends to other poststructuralist interpretations of Hegel's thought as a whole. Doing so itself turns out to be middling, however, and therefore critically rewarding. For Sng implies a middle ground that is neither the synthesis of the Hegelian system as it is so often (mis)represented—as closure—nor an opposing "syncretism" of a post-Hegelian model, as proposed in certain secondary literature. In between those two poles is a space that, to Sng's mind, is contradictory. Hegel might well agree. That is an insightful yet also a dissatisfying conclusion (albeit an intermediary one, for a section that is but one part of the wider book). If in this third chapter Sng advances his introductory thesis that to middle is to paraphrase with polysemous speech, then adding to contradict to the inductive definition for good measure, we are still left with a core question. What does contraction actually mean: in a Hegelian sense, or otherwise? At times I wanted this book to stop moving from one author to another and drill down into a given position.

Fixity and movement are themselves tropes that should be called into question, of course. Not least with respect to Romanticism. That age is often (self-) characterized as a midpoint between the classics and modernity, or between the early modern and modern epochs (the Sattelzeit, to employ Koselleck's...

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