Guest Blogger: Aesthetic Dilemmas by Marlo Alexandra Burks

Hugo von Hofmannsthal is frequently portrayed as an aloof writer, out of step with modern sensibilities. Aesthetic Dilemmas: Encounters with Art in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Literary Modernism by Marlo Alexandra Burks re-evaluates his place in twentieth-century European Modernism by arguing that his work is not escapist but instead engages the consciousness of readers through dynamic encounters with works of art. In her guest blog below, Burks introduces us to the topic of this new book.

Last year I learned that the word “aesthetic” had been adopted by teenage girls on the internet to describe something they thought “looked good.” As in: That shirt is so aesthetic! The term may already be passé – not being a teenage girl myself, I wouldn’t trust my information to be up to date – and in a way it’s not too far from eighteenth-century usage. Then again, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten was only twenty-one years old in 1735, when he used the term “aesthetics” to refer to the science of what is sensed or imagined. The young Enlightenment philosopher is credited with having established aesthetics as a philosophical discipline and sister science to logic, but the heart of this particular science was judgment – through the senses – of what is beautiful.

As with any good concept, the field of aesthetics shifted and grew. Books on the topic could soon be found shoulder to shoulder on the shelf with titles and treatises on traditional Western philosophical subjects such as logic, ethics, and theology. In other words, our sense of what is beautiful (or the opposite) likes to flirt with other modes of inquiry and ways of knowing – just as we want to give meaning to our judgments and share that meaning with others. Maybe what “looks good” is an expression of a deep metaphysical yearning for perfection, unity, and harmony. Maybe it’s a natural resistance to the rapacious appropriation of virtually any human endeavour in the service of “utility.” Maybe it’s a tool for manipulation and propaganda.

Cosmetics and carvings and Bach’s French Suites are all equally valid objects of aesthetic consideration. There is something radically egalitarian about the discipline, and that’s where Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) comes in. His isn’t exactly a household name in the English-speaking world, but his thoughts on our aesthetic responses to objects in our environment – and to the environment itself – are some of the most interesting and engaging I’ve come across in German literature. And German literature talks about aesthetics a lot. (There’s even a literary trope called the “Kunstgespräch”: the conversation on art.) In writing Aesthetic Dilemmas, I wanted to introduce English speakers to a writer whose works are worth reading not only for their literary (aesthetic) merit but also for the way they engage with that nearly universal impulse to announce when something “looks good.” Hofmannsthal was constantly asking: What happens in that moment when we perceive works of art – or anything, really – in that “aesthetic” way? Do we change? Does our relationship to the world evolve? How does that happen?

Illustrated cover of the 1905 Wiener Verlag edition of Das Märchen der 672. Nacht und andere Erzählungen. Photo by Marlo Alexandra Burks.

I’ve taken an old-fashioned approach to Hofmannsthal’s fiction, essays, poetry, and opera libretti. Really close readings aren’t very popular in either academia or broader cultural criticism right now, but our era’s reactive habits of quick (and vociferous) judgment have a way of missing things – and that has also been the case in some Hofmannsthal scholarship. As much as this is a book about a particular author’s works in their cultural and historical context, it’s also a deliberate attempt to exercise patience in scholarship, to slow down and investigate automatic reactions to a text, and to reflect on the implications of a deeper, responsible engagement with art.

Marlo Alexandra Burks is writer and editor for the Literary Review of Canada.