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  • The Return to Aesthetics in Literary Studies
  • Claudia Breger

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, interrelated movements for a “New Formalism” and a return to aesthetics have acquired significant influence in fields of literary study that seemed to have largely bidden farewell to these paradigms’ predecessors in the preceding decades.1 The call for a panel stream on “Defenses of the Aesthetic” at the 2012 GSA conference references a broad range of prominent contributions in German Studies alone.2 Often, this return to aesthetics has been articulated through the “repudiation of the concept of culture,” and in response to the “apparent exhaustion of cultural studies.”3 With different inflections, both critics and proponents of the aesthetic turn have explained the renewed interest in “broadly held human values,” beauty, pleasure, and the canon of “Western civilization”—specifically the Enlightenment, Romanticism and selected modernists like Theodor W. Adorno—with the legitimation crisis of the humanities in the neoliberal university or boredom with the “well-oiled machine of ideology critique.”4

What do—or should, or could—these turns, which have been brought forward “also as calls for renewed disciplinary clarity and coherence,”5 mean for the German Studies Review, as the outlet of an association closely associated with the preceding cultural turn, and programmatically committed to an interdisciplinary investigation of “things German”? My suggestion—developed here in necessarily rather abbreviated fashion—is that we engage both with and within these new, or renewed, paradigms. While a critical look at the politics of knowledge production entailed in their various articulations does seem in order, scholars committed to culture and transdisciplinarity do not have to reject the bid to revitalize the study of the arts wholesale. Rather, the heterogeneous field of contemporary aesthetics and neoformalism offers a range of productive impulses. In building on them without repudiating culture, we can develop complex paradigms that respond to growing frustrations with prefix fetishism (see Lutz Koepnick’s contribution to this volume), without sacrificing the critical reflexivity, and egalitarian ethos, of transdisciplinary culture studies.

A critique of the aesthetic turn (“engaging with”) can begin by situating it as part of what I have (not just polemically) called the twenty-first-century episteme of affirmation—notably a very transdisciplinary phenomenon.6 Variously intertwined with the [End Page 505] renewed interest in aesthetics, the past fifteen years have also seen the proclamation of “affective,” “cognitive,” “ethical,” “evolutionary,” “neurological,” and “religious” turns. Although different in important respects, these twenty-first-century paradigms share orientations associated with the end of (capital T-) Theory.7 To be sure, they are no less theoretical —in the sense of speculative and generalizing —than the post-modern, linguistic, or cultural-studies paradigms they aim to replace. However, the new paradigms have variously challenged the forms of critical reflexivity that may have united the diverse branches of late twentieth-century Theory.8 Without simply ignoring the latter’s legacy, they have generally opted for countering deconstructive gestures and (re)affirming the positivities of experience, feeling, nature, art, or tradition despite all skepticism.

Affirmation is not necessarily to be understood here in the sense of political quietism. Affiliated with various political positions, the new approaches have, in fact, also facilitated new forms of radicalism, for example through the assumption—more or less implicitly underlying much work in affect studies—that affect is somehow “always already sutured into a progressive or liberatory politics.”9 These attempts at politicizing affirmation, though, have been haunted by characteristic ambivalences.10 Crucially, the various twenty-first-century turns have articulated welcome challenges to the sometimes stifling negativity of postmodernist approaches, and opened up intriguing new avenues of investigation. However, their productivity has been hampered by the proliferation of oppositional gestures that pit affect against signification, good feelings against bad ones, or affirmation and appreciation against critique. While Eve Sedgwick had a point in challenging the prevailing “paranoid” “hermeneutics of suspicion” a decade ago,11 a “healthy” dose of skepticism may still be required for understanding the continued weight of sociosymbolic regimes of difference and inequality that block universalist solidarity, and the ways in which our feelings bind us to “compromised conditions of possibility.”12

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