The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature (Literature and Philosophy)
Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei
Language: English
Pages: 280
ISBN: 0271032286
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Fascination with quotidian experience in modern art, literature, and philosophy promotes ecstatic forms of reflection on the very structure of the everyday world. Gosetti-Ferencei examines the ways in which modern art and literature enable a study of how we experience quotidian life. She shows that modernism, while exhibiting many strands of development, can be understood by investigating how its attentions to perception and expectation, to the common quality of things, or to childhood play gives way to experiences of ecstasis—the stepping outside of the ordinary familiarity of the world.
While phenomenology grounds this study (through Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Bachelard), what makes this book more than a treatise on phenomenological aesthetics is the way in which modernity itself is examined in its relation to the quotidian. Through the works of artists and writers such as Benjamin, Cézanne, Frost, Klee, Newman, Pollock, Ponge, Proust, Rilke, Robbe-Grillet, Rothko, Sartre, and Twombly, the world of quotidian life can be seen to harbor a latent ecstasis. The breakdown of the quotidian through and after modernism then becomes an urgent question for understanding art and literature in its capacity to further human experience, and it points to the limits of phenomenological explications of the everyday.
or painterly image. It can now be seen why Ce´zanne’s paintings, in particular, were provocative of ecstasis for Rilke as well as for painters who followed him, though similar astonishment is expressed of van Gogh’s modernism in Hofmannsthal’s Briefe, mentioned in previous chapters. It was in his break from Impressionism that Ce´zanne ac- The Painterly and Poetic Image 181 complished a unique discovery regarding painterly constitution. Originally he had much in common with the Impressionists,
accord with a linguistic model that issues from a radical critique of traditional theories of linguistic expression. In approaching the silent ecstasis of vision in modern painting, the possibilities and limits of treating the art of painting as a language, even in a radically renewed and ontologically broadened sense, need to be considered. This can be accomplished by extending the range of potential application for these theories, by considering some paintings that seem to resist the poetic or
poems, as affirmed in Heidegger’s essay, that describe a time of need in the disenchanted modern age. The anguished speaker addresses those who are familiar with the world’s more splendorous aspects (angels, heroes, animals, children). Animals are called upon for having noticed that humans are not really at home ‘‘in the interpreted world’’ (in der gedeuteten Welt), ordered by their representations. But it is those who have died young, whose graves Rilke had seen in Naples and Rome, who are still
projection onto the image, which in turn transforms the material objects on which it is cast. This further decentralizes the narrator’s focus: If the lantern were moved I could still distinguish Golo’s horse advancing across the window-curtains, swelling out with their curves and diving into their folds. The body of Golo himself, being of the same supernatural substance as his steed’s, overcame every material obstacle—everything that seemed to bar his way—but taking it as an ossature and
(green, yellow, violet, gray) and by being not absolutely distinct from other blue things (sky, apron, paper). Given this metaphoric indirectness, it appears that Hamburger’s theory, while valuable, is misleading. Epistemology is an account of knowledge, of Literary Phenomenology 113 the conditions of cognition, Erkenntnis. But what Rilke’s poetry achieves is a noncognitive grasp that works the registers of intuition and feeling so that the specificity of that which speaks to the poetic gaze