Nicholas Halmi

Romanticism, the Temporalization of History, and the Historicization of Form

Since the beginning of its academic study around 1870, Romanticism has been defined simultaneously as a historical period (chronologically restricted) and as a stylistic type (chronologically open). This paradox, consisting in the difficulty of reconciling historical temporality with the systematization of knowledge, can be traced back to the “temporalization” of history in the second half of the eighteenth century, when transhistorical aesthetic classification was destabilized and literary history developed as a distinct critical practice. But the troubled historical consciousness manifested in aesthetic theory of the time — nostalgia for an irrecoverable past — also expressed itself artistically in forms at once engaged with and detached from history, notably stylistic simulacra of the past and, in poetry, failed or ironized revivals of the classical gods.

The Very Model of a Modern Epic Poem

An epic‐length poem without a determinate plan, and therefore remarkably accommodating of contingency, Byron’s Don Juan is founded on a distinctly modern understanding of reality as a subjectively realizable potentiality. But just as traditional and novel literary forms can coexist with each other, so can existing and emergent concepts of reality, however uneasily. In Don Juan the tension between this new concept of reality and that presupposed by the theory of artistic mimesis manifests itself in Byron’s flouting of the same epic conventions to which he professes his adherence.

The Anti-Historicist Historicism of German Romantic Architecture

Nineteenth-century German architecture was characterized by a conflict between the availability of multiple historically derivative styles and the demand for the establishment of a culturally appropriate normative one. This conflict resulted from an aesthetic historicism that posited the cultural specificity of architectural styles while simultaneously abstracting them from their original contexts. Because the same aesthetic, ideological, and functionalist claims could be and were advanced on behalf of different styles, the prolonged debate among German architectural writers and practitioners about which one should be favored proved irresolvable so long as it was assumed that a style must be historically referential.

Telling Stories about Romantic Theory

Like Tilottama Rajans Dark Interpreter, The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol reflects dissatisfaction with M. H. Abramss logocentric intellectual history on the one hand and Paul de Mans deconstructive rhetorical analysis on the other. But the nature of the subject determined that Genealogy could not be a work of specifically literary theory. Thus the books principal methodological models came from the discipline of conceptual history. While sharing with much of Rajans work a basic concern with the systematic organization of knowledge in the Romantic period, Genealogy recounts how the Romantic concept of the symbol reacts to the modern transition from theoria (philosophical contemplation premised on the truth of self-evidence) to theory (the questioning of the truth of self-evidence).

Byron Between Ariosto and Tasso

“I think I can explain myself,” wrote Byron in Don Juan, “without / That sad inexplicable beast of prey— / That Sphinx, whose words would ever be a doubt” (9.50).1 I too hope not to need the Sphinx, but I shall not be able to explain myself without elaborating on the implied promise to situate Byron between Ariosto and Tasso—and not merely alphabetically. The question to be addressed here is this: in what relation does Don Juan, as a poetic project, stand to Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, “A new creation with [its] magic line,” and to Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, “unsurpasss’d in modern song” (Childe Harolds Pilgrimage 4.40, 39)? The question is worth asking less for the specific reasons that Byron repeatedly links the two poets and in Don Juan adopts their stanzaic form, ottava rima, than for the general reason that none of the three poems conforms fully or uncontestedly to the traditional conventions of the genre with which each asks primarily to be identified, heroic poetry, or epic. But for reasons to be considered, the answer cannot be formulated adequately in the expected terms of personal affinity or literary influence.