The End of Literature, Hegel, and the Contemporary Novel by Francesco Campana

Author:Francesco Campana
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030313951
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

1 Rereading the End of Art

As we have seen, the so-called end-of-art thesis, over the course of numerous revivals and re-elaborations (even in fields that are not limited to the specialist research on Hegel), has aroused an endless debate concerning both its general version as it pertains to the overall notion of art and how it can be understood in relation to literature.

If it is true that the multiplicity of voices has brought this topic well beyond its Hegelian origin, it is also true that a real variety of readings can be found only by looking at the interpretations of the thesis in the work of Hegel himself. This is not only a question of particular academic schools or of the approaches taken by critics. Rather, it results from the fact that the Hegelian texts themselves—and not only the Lectures on Aesthetics—leave space for a slew of potential meanings.

In order to describe the general attitudes and expectations the interpreters place in the thesis, an important view has been proposed by Benjamin Rutter and, more recently, in a similar way by Julia Peters. Assuming, as has been done here many times before, that no one reads the thesis any longer as the actual end or, worse, death of artistic production, they question the ways in which the thesis has been interpreted in terms of a loss of the relevance of art within the cultural context and in society in general. They use a psychological description to exemplify outcomes in philosophical interpretations, distinguishing between ‘pessimistic’ and ‘optimistic’ readings of this loss. For the first group of commentators—and among them, we can find thinkers like Dieter Henrich or Arthur C. Danto—Hegel would have decreed the fact that art will have irreparably lost its effectiveness in society, even its raison d’être, and will instead give way to philosophy (or to the philosophy of art); for the second group, instead—which includes scholars such as Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Stephen Houlgate or Robert B. Pippin—the peremptory nature of the loss of art’s status in modernity is mitigated by the ongoing indispensability and continued vitality of modern art, even though it bears a different function.1

There are yet more details to consider. One of the most complex and articulated attempts to discuss the plural meaning of this thesis belongs to Stephen Bungay, who has divided the several interpretative proposals about the thesis and the future of art in modernity by Hegel into different groups: those who are critical of Hegel and have found in the thesis a ‘eulogy’ for art, ousted and definitively replaced by philosophy (in this group, Bungay brings back Croce, who decreed this ‘eulogy’ and he is probably the origin of the denomination of the end as ‘death’, Glockner, Litt, Wolandt, Bubner); the interpreters who find the Hegelian philosophical-artistic system—and with it also the thesis on the end of art—in its whole useless and try to recover some local insights or critical assessments of specific artists or artworks (Stoikov, Helferich, Harries, Rüsen, Oelmüller); those—and this is the

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