Making the Aesthetic Turn: Adorno, the Medieval, and the Future of the Past

Nolan, Maura

doi:10.1215/10829636-34-3-549

Cited by 15 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…The influx of experiences that are no longer forced into a priori genres, the requirement of constituting form out of these experiences, that is, from below: This is "realistic" in purely aesthetic terms, regardless of content. (Adorno 1997, 225) As I have argued elsewhere, J. M. Bernstein has shown that the category of "experience," for Adorno, is taken from Hegel's notion of Erfahrung, "the experience of the dislocation of particular from universal" (Nolan 2004;Bernstein 1997, 180). Adorno is not claiming that the demystification of the medieval world set loose the particular to float free, without limits or constraints; his is not a notion of unrestrained heterogeneity or multiplicity.…”

Section: Fragmentation and Sensationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Medieval Sensation and Modern Aesthetics

Nolan¹

2013

The Minnesota Review

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Sensation is a liminal phenomenon, a phenomenon that marks edges and borders. It is the interface between the material world and the physical body as well as between the body and the mind. Medieval writing is full of sensation, from the theoretical accounts of sensation found in scholastic philosophy to the richly sensuous poetics of romance and the raw sensationalism of the fabliau. But the relationship between theories of sensation and the performance of sensation found in poetry or other kinds of imaginative writing -a relationship that, in contemporary terms, would be understood as an aesthetic -is rarely made explicit in medieval texts. Medieval accounts of sensation focused instead on the relationship between the human senses and divinity as various thinkers sought to understand the meaning of embodiment in a world both material and immaterial. In contrast, the locus of modern thinking about literature and sensation can be found in aesthetic theory, which considers the relationship between sensory perception and the material world, particularly in the limit cases of the beautiful and the sublime.This essay brings together two medieval explorations of sensation -one by St. Thomas Aquinas and one by Geoffrey Chaucerand situates them within the twentieth-century account of aesthetics offered by Theodor Adorno. This juxtaposition reveals how past and present structures of thought and expression, far from being straightforwardly aligned in a sequence or developmental arc, are asynchronously intertwined. All three writers engage with the relationship between sensation and historical change; all three, in different ways, think about the problem of embodiment and its relation to generalities like "society," "history," and "divinity." Adorno and Aquinas are concerned with abstractions, with describing how categories like "sensation" or "beauty" function within historical or theological structures of understanding. Chaucer, conversely, is immersed in the particular; not only does he create characters who experience sensations, but he also arouses a variety of sensations by means of poetic craft, from line to line, image to image, and sound to sound. As a result, his poetry functions here as a kind of hinge between the Thomistic account of minnesota review 80 (2013)

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Section: Fragmentation and Sensationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Medieval Sensation and Modern Aesthetics

Nolan¹

2013

The Minnesota Review

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“…Drawing upon Adorno’s aesthetic theory, Nolan too raises formalist concerns regarding the production of Middle English literature, matching Cannon’s revision of the so‐called ineptness of the 13th and early 14th centuries with an examination of the trope of dullness in the 15th century. Her approach, however, brings with it an awareness of the historicity of form, and she calls for an ‘aesthetic turn’ that would entail recognizing art as a ‘privileged space within which history itself – as an asynchronous and uneven thing – comes to be articulated, in advance of, or dragging behind, empirical sequences of events and facts’(‘Making the Aesthetic Turn’ 2). Rather than imagining Middle English texts as singular, writing of literature of the 15th century, she argues that at certain moments we can see…”

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confidence: 99%

“…The recent turn to ‘new formalism’ has sought to reinvigorate inquiries into matters of form by opening formalist criticism to a broader range of critical approaches. Currently, there is no single school of new formalism, no prescribed or coherent system for analysis nor an approach whose critical paradigms have been fully defined; yet it seems to us that the new formalisms articulated by D. Vance Smith, Maura Nolan, and Christopher Cannon among others, have begun to demonstrate how elements of this re‐orientation might offer Middle English studies a way of creating new methods of interpreting manuscript culture. The intersection of formalist and historicist concerns is of particular concern for Middle English scholars who are frequently asked to shed light on conditions of literary production while relying upon modern critical editions criticized for eliding those very processes.…”

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New Formalism and the Forms of Middle English Literary Texts

Marshall

Buchanan

2011

Literature Compass

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Recent work in Middle English literature addresses the emerging relationship between formal analysis and book history. This article, emerging from the 2009 Conference on Editorial Problems in Toronto, seeks to clarify the way in which formalist approaches intersect with trends in English literary manuscript studies. How, we ask, can the lively field of book history take new direction through contact with the ‘new formalisms’ articulated in literary studies? More precisely, how does the form of the medieval book produce literary meaning in a distinctive and historicizable manner? We explore critical approaches to the formal features of medieval manuscripts, addressing medieval and modern theories of the book’s form, the relationship between written and oral forms of texts, the dialect of scribes, authorial composition of manuscripts, scribal corrections, the layout and illustration, and the binding of the codex. We suggest that close readings of manuscript form can shed light on aspects of texts obscured by the printing technology and formatting changes of modern editions. Furthermore, we point to new avenues for contextualizing the book within late medieval literary culture.

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Gillespie

2013

A Handbook of Middle English Studies

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Making the Aesthetic Turn: Adorno, the Medieval, and the Future of the Past

Cited by 15 publications

References 13 publications

Medieval Sensation and Modern Aesthetics

Medieval Sensation and Modern Aesthetics

New Formalism and the Forms of Middle English Literary Texts

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