The Return of Nature as Art (国外比较文学的浪漫主义研究)

mu

英文版，也许对专业的朋友有帮助吧。看了前几页觉得很不错，写席勒的篇幅尤其长。


The Return of Nature as Art: An Ecocritical Perspective on Romantic Aesthetics

What are poets for? This was the question to which Heidegger returned in of one of the first essays that he wrote as he began to emerge from ‘inner exile’ following the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945.1 This question in turn provides the frame for Jonathan Bate’s ecocritical reconsideration of Heidegger’s poetics of being and dwelling in the concluding chapter of The Song of the Earth. Heidegger himself had taken his cue from the German writer Hölderlin, who, in “Bread and Wine” (“Brod und Wein,” 1800/01), exclaims, “who wants poets at all in lean years.”2 Stated thus, with reference, that is, to a contemporary reality constructed as in some sense deficient, this is a paradigmatically Romantic question. Both the question itself and the various ways in which it was addressed by different Romantic writers and philosophers are vitally concerned, moreover, with the relationship of art, and particularly poetry, to nature and the divine.

Ghosting the Romantic engagement with this key question is an understanding of mimesis, which, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe reminds us in his essay, “Hölderlin and the Greeks,” derives its authority from Aristotle.3 “Generally speaking,” opines Aristotle in The Physics, “on the one hand techne accomplishes what phusis is incapable of effecting; on the other hand, techne imitates phusis.”4 Whereas Plato had maintained that all the artist could ever create was a mere imitation of an imitation, Aristotle’s concept of techne suggests the possibility of an imitation that actually surpasses the original in nature. When applied to art, this double construction of mimetic techne acquires a new edge for the Romantics in view of their reconceptualization of both nature and the divine. In this chapter, I will trace a number of divergent paths in Romantic thinking on the relationship of art and nature, before returning to the question of the role of literature specifically in the ecopoetics of dwelling, ecstatically, in the Fourfold.

i. Art in search of nature: The sentimental turn

“Poets everywhere,” declares Schiller in his essay “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”(“Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung,” 1796/7), are, “by their very definition, the guardians of nature. Where they can no longer quite be so and have already felt within themselves the destructive influence of arbitrary and artificial forms or have had to struggle with them, then they will appear as the witnesses and avengers of nature. They will either be nature, or they will seek lost nature.” (W, 20, 427)5 At first glance it is difficult to believe that this affirmation of nature

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Earlier, I argued that the Weltfrömmigkeit of the poetics of redemption incorporated a reaching out to a world (let us now also say, an earth) beyond the bounds of art. In this strand of Romantic aesthetics, art, as Coleridge puts it, is “subordinated” to nature (CW, 7.2, 17). Wordsworth, certainly, was clear on this, insisting in “Prospectus,” that natural beauty, the “living Presence of the earth,” surpassed “the most fair ideal Forms/Which craft of delicate Spirits hath composed/From earth’s materials” (42-5).55 Within German Romanticism, the strongest statement of the priority of nature over art is to be found in Hölderlin’s ode “Nature and Art or Saturn und Jupiter” (“Natur und Kunst oder Saturn und Jupiter”), which suggests that the power of poesy (embodied in the figure of the Olympian god) is usurped from phusis (his deposed father), and remains forever indebted to it.56 Similarly, in Modern Painters, Ruskin insists that art should never seek to compete with or outdo, but simply to interpret nature: it might function as an icon, pointing beyond itself to the intimation of the divine in nature, but it must never become an idol. “The picture which is looked to as an interpretation of nature is invaluable, but the picture which is taken as a substitute for nature, had better be burned.” (W, 3, 12) Thus, he insists on “the necessity, as well as the dignity, of an earnest, faithful, loving study of nature as she is, rejecting with abhorrence all that man has done to alter and modify her.” (W, 3, 44)57
And yet, how could the work of art that interprets nature not in some way itself “alter and modify her,” at least within its own imaging of it? Moreover, to the extent that the work of art is not bound to the place that it represents, but destined rather to be received in any number of other places, most of them pretty well insulated against “nature as she is” (such as art galleries, domestic interiors, school classrooms), the work of landscape art is always at risk of functioning precisely as a substitute for embodied experience of the land itself. A substitution of this kind is indeed recommended by Alexander von Humboldt, who concludes his essay on “The Physiognomy of Plants” with a celebration, not of the natural world as such, but rather of the power of the writer and artist to convey the experience of exotic places in their work. For those who are unable to travel to such places themselves, art, he says, can provide a substitute.58 This might have seemed relatively innocuous in the early nineteenth century, and indeed, could have been intended to in some measure protect the wild places that Humboldt had visited from being overrun by tourists and settlers. However, at a time when the beauty, wonder and strangeness of first nature is at risk of being utterly eclipsed by a tamed and simulacralized second nature, in which images of wild places somewhere else are proffered to reconcile us to the disappearance of the wild from the places where we ourselves reside (I will not say dwell), we need a hermeneutics that resists Humboldt’s logic of substitution. Such a hermeneutics would need to be able to demonstrate how the work of art always, inevitably, fails to convey the experience of which it is a trace. This, as I suggest below, might be termed a Romantic ‘ecopoetics of negativity’.
iv. Art falling short of nature: Negative ecopoetics

ljxfu

太好了，比较文学的都好难找啊，