Phenomenology and Aesthetics: Approaches to Comparative Literature and the Other Arts

281 Pages·1990·6 MB·English

by  Wolfgang Wittkowski (auth.)

PHENOMENOLOGY AND AESTHETICS
ANALECTA HUSSERLIANA
THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
VOLUME XXXII
Editor-in-Chief:
ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA
The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning
Belmont, Massachusetts
a sequel to:
Vol. XII : The Mirror of Man in Literature
Vol. XVIII : The Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition
Vol. XIX : Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition: The
Sea
Vol. XXIII : Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition: The
Airy Elements in Poetic Imagination
Vol. XXVIII: The Elemental Passions of the Soul in the Human
Condition
Vol. XXX : Ingardeniana II, and Other Approaches to Aesthetics,
Literature and the Fine Arts
PHENOMENOLOGY
AND AESTHETICS
APPROACHES TO COMP ARA TIVE
LITERATURE AND THE OTHER ARTS
Homages to A -T. Tymieniecka
Edited by
MARLIES KRONEGGER
Michigan State University
Published under the auspices of
The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning
A-T. Tymieniecka, President
KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS
DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LONDON
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Phenomenoldgy and Aesthetics / edited by Marlies Kronegger.
p. cm. -- (Analecta Husserllana ; v. 32)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Phenomeno logy in 1 i terature. 2. Phenomeno logy and 1 i terature.
3. Phenomenology. 4. Aesthetics. 1. Kronegger, Marl ies, 1932-
II. Series.
B3279.H94A129 vol. 32
[PN49J
142' .7 s--dc20
[809' . 93384J 90-4351
ISBN -13: 978-94-0 I 0-7409-4 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-2027-9
DOl: 10.1 007/978-94-009-2027-9
Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers,
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE THEME / Vindicating the Enjoyment of Literature ix
MARLIES KRONEGGER / Phenomenology and Aesthetics -
New Approaches to Comparative Literature and the Other
Arts: Introduction xi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xv
PART ONE
THE LIFE SIGNIFICANCE OF LITERATURE
A. History and Phenomenological Literary Theory
WOLFGANG WITTKOWSKI / The Concept of Autonomous
Art and Literature Within Their Historical Context 3
B. Time and Description in Fiction
W AL TER BIEMEL / On the Manifold Significance of Time in
the Novel 17
MARJORIE H. HELLERSTEIN / One Autobiographer's Real-
ity: Robbe-Grillet 39
PETER MORGAN / Heidegger and English Poetry 49
MICHAEL E. MORIARTY / Expressionist Signs and Meta-
phors in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time 61
PART TWO
PHENOMENOLOGY AND LITERATURE:
THE HUMAN CONDITON
A. The Primeval Sources of Literary Creation
CHRISTOPHER S. SCHREINER / Faulkner/Levinas: The
Vivacity of Disaster 71
v
vi T ABLE OF CONTENTS
ANDRE A. ACIMAN / The Recursive Matrix: Jealousy and the
Epistemophilic Crisis 87
WILLIAM S. HANEY II / Phenomenology and the Structure of
Desirability 103
B. The Experience oft he Other
ROSEMARIE KIEFFER / The Voice of Luxembourg Poets 115
E. IMAFEDIA OKHAMAFE / The Ramatoulaye-Aissatou
Styles in Contemporary African Feminism( s) 131
MARK W. ANDREWS / Nature and Civilization as Metaphor
in Michel Rio's Dreaming Jungles 149
HARLAN R. PATTON / Problems of Literary Expression in
Les Nourritures Terrestres 157
ARON AJI / Lucie Sebetka: The Phenomenon of Abandon-
ment in Milan Kundera's The Joke 165
PART THREE
AESTHETIC RECEPTION
A. Life-Reverberation and Aesthetic Enjoyment
MU YUN LING AND JESSE T. AIRAUDI / "Essential
Witnesses": Imagism's Aesthetic "Protest" and "Rescue" via
Ancient Chinese Poetry 181
BABETTE E. BABICH / Towards a Post-Modern Hermeneutic
Ontology of Art: Nietzschean Style and Heideggerian Truth 195
CYNTHIA RUOFF / Le Veritable Saint Genest: From Text to
Performance 211
B. The Existential Significance ofA esthetic Enjoyment
THOMAS RYBA / Husserl, Fantasy and Possible Worlds 227
ROBERT R. ELLIS / Phenomenological Ontology and Second
Person Narrative: The Case of Butor and Fuentes 239
BERNADETTE PROCHASKA / Modifications: A Reading of
Auden and Iser 249
T ABLE OF CONTENTS vii
C. Aesthetic Reception and the Other Arts
JOSEPH KRAUSE / A Study of Visual Form in Literary
Imagery 259
SITANSU RAY / Indian and Western Music: Phenomeno-
logical Comparison from Tagore's Viewpoint 267
INDEX OF NAMES 273
THE THEME
VINDICATING THE ENJOYMENT
OF LITERATURE
This collection of essays presented at one of our conferences continues
the research program in which we are unraveling the deepest impulses,
tendencies and inspirations that animate the literary work. The present
studies only vaguely refer to our own systematic views about the ways
in which literature and the fine arts spring forth from the interplay
between the creative imagination and the proficiencies of the Human
Condition. Their main thrust is to inquire into the ways in which the
literary work can be approached. This inquiry, however, exemplifies in
its main lines our chief contention, the one which I have been forcefully
advocating for some two decades in lectures and studies published in
our book series. In my most recent monograph ("The Elemental
Passions of the Soul and the Life-Significance of Literature," Analecta
Husserliana, Vol. XXVIII, 1989) I substantiated this contention in
extenso. First, it is through marveling/wonderment that art, and in
particular literature, takes off and, second, that it is through aesthetic
enjoyment - as one of the primogenital factors of the Human Condi
tion - that literature, and the fine arts are generated.* The conclusion
is obvious: it is in enjoyment also that lies the key to their being
received and appreciated by the reader/spectator. This is not the place
to dwell on the innumerable ways in which aesthetic enjoyment is
ciphered in the life-significance of the literary work; we refer the reader
to our above-mentioned study. What, however, is manifest in the
different approaches to literary works and the varied points of fascina
tion to be found in them as displayed in the present collection is that
though techniques of interpretation and hermeneutics possess some
validity in that they help dissect complexities and can enhance under
standing by throwing side lights on the make-up of the particular
literary work, it is not intellectual interest and the need to satisfy
curiosity about structural puzzles or abstruse linguistic games that
* Cf. A-T. Tymieniecka, Logos and Life, Creative Experience and the Critique of
Reason, Book I, Kluwer, 1989, and, The Passions of The Soul and The Ontopoiesis of
Culture: The Life Significance of Literature (Logos and Life, Book III), 1990.
ix
x THE THEME
ultimately carry the work and it is not the quest for these that should
inform any interpreter who would truly convey the meaning of the
literary work to the reader or audience. The literary work is not meant
to be a game played with words, concepts, historical puns. It calls for
enjoyment at the level of its essential concern: the vision of life that it
crystallizes. The royal approach to it is through the channel of the direct
spontaneous enjoyment it gives or is apt to sustain. This aesthetic
enjoyment is analogous to the reader/spectator's life-enjoyment as
he/she salvages meaning within his/her own framework of life experi
ences. Thus, the uniquely personal, spontaneous/resonance of the work
with the experience of the recipient is the surest guide to the retrieval of
the life-significance ofl iterature.
The large spectrum of personal fascinations manifested in the
present collection shows how the literary work stands out and becomes
alive within the perspectives of each of us. It is aesthetic enjoyment that
gives us access to these perspectives. Through their opening the life
significance of a work and the vision of life it intimates are glimpsed.
Filtered through literature this vision enters, expands, and enriches our
lives and our very beingness, for though only glimpsed there it is seen
the more profoundly for being woven into the tapestry that first caught
our eye. The master weaver of tales can thus inform a whole culture,
can inspire age upon age. It is just this vision that a focus upon
structures and techniques of any sort on linguistics will miss.
ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA
MARLIES KRONEGGER
PHENOMENOLOGY AND AESTHETICS -
NEW APPROACHES TO COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE AND THE OTHER ARTS
Introduction
Our investigations show us ways of orchestrating human existence and
aesthetic enjoyment. Aesthetic enjoyment and phenomenology imply
one another. They take us away from sclerosed, jaded artifices of
literary analyses based on artificial forms, structures, and devices, and
bring us back into the real world of all there is alive. In opposition to
the view that sees the literary text basically as a system of meanings,
A-T. Tymieniecka and our investigators propose that it is a specific
pattern of life-significance, universal and uniquely personal at the same
time, that matters. In the drama of being, each life is an open and
unfinished book in which the unfolding and perfecting universe has
recorded its cosmic biography. Each life is at a given time a summation,
a living history of ebbs and flows of the ocean of being. So situated,
each individual is caught between the cosmic self and social mould and
toils to break out and away in order to further cultivate his or her
cosmic heritage.
Creative subjectivity cannot awaken itself except in communion with
Nature. It is not enough to consider the mutual entanglement of Nature
and man in relation to aesthetic feeling or the perception of beauty.
What matters to us, is the mutual entanglement of Nature and man, the
coming together of World and Self, in relation to artistic creation. Then,
we truly enter our subject matter, asking ourselves with Tymieniecka,
what is the creative act? The papers presented here show why the
aesthetic significance of life, which enters into the existential self-inter
pretation of the human being, is at its roots poetic. With Tymieniecka
we realize that the creative process is not limited to literature, the arts
and thought, but is as wide as life.! Creativity in literature, the arts, and
thought is part of the creativity of life, a transforming factor of life,
making us participate in a whole, a unity, of everything there is alive.
We are born together with everything that exists - with all that is alive.
Creativity is the irreducible element of the human condition, the
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