The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism"The Romantic Performative" develops a new context and methodology for reading Romantic literature by exploring philosophies of language from the period 1785-1835. It reveals that the concept of the performative, debated by twentieth-century theorists from J. L. Austin to Judith Butler, has a much greater relevance for Romantic literature than has been realized, since Romantic philosophy of language was dominated by the idea that something "happens" when words are spoken. By presenting Romantic philosophy as a theory of the performative, and Romantic literature in terms of that theory, this book uncovers the historical roots of twentieth-century ideas about speech acts and performativity. Romantic linguistic philosophy already focused on the relationship between speaker and hearer, describing speech as an act that establishes both subjectivity and intersubjective relations and theorizing reality as a verbal construct. But Romantic theorists considered utterance, the context of utterance, and the positions and identities of speaker and hearer to be much more fluid and less stable than modern analytic philosophers tend to make them. Romantic theories of language therefore yield a definition of the "Romantic performative" as an utterance that creates an object in the world, instantiates the relationship between speaker and hearer, and even founds the subjectivity of the speaker in the moment when the utterance occurs. The author traces the Romantic performative through its diverse development in the moral, political, and legal philosophy of Reid, Bentham, Kant and the German Idealists, Humboldt, and Coleridge, then explores its significance in literary texts by Coleridge, Godwin, Holderlin, and Kleist. These readings demonstrate that Romantic writers mounted a deeper investigation than previously realized into the way the act of speaking generates subjective identity, intersubjective relations, and even objective reality. The project of the book is to read the language of Romanticism as performative and to recognize among its achievements the historical founding of the discourse of performativity itself. |
Contents
Romanticism and Linguistic Pragmatics 2 Introducing | 13 |
Fabulous Retroactivity Derrida 16 Performativity History | 19 |
Whats in a Constitution? 51 Binding Terms | 56 |
Kant German Idealism and Philosophies of Language | 68 |
Cognition | 89 |
Real Being and Represented Being 93 Schelling and the I | 96 |
The Performative Humboldt | 106 |
The Performative Coleridge | 144 |
Uptake? | 221 |
The Social Hölderlin 225 Patmos | 233 |
Kleist and the Fragile Performative Order of the World | 240 |
The Resistance | 289 |
Truth | 313 |
Identity as Institutional Fact Deloraine Cloudesley | 320 |
Fiction as Testimony and Testament | 326 |
335 | |
Other editions - View all
The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism Angela Esterhammer No preview available - 2000 |
Common terms and phrases
action affirms Alabanda Alkmene Amphitryon Austin authority behavior Bentham Bernhardi Burke Caleb Williams Cloudesley cognition Coleridge Coleridge's communication concept constative constitution context contract conventions critique declaration Deloraine dialogic Diotima discourse divine drama effect Empedokles essay existence experience expression Falkland Fichte Fichte's fiction French Revolution Friedrich Godwin grammar guage Herder Hermokrates Hölderlin's human Humboldt Hyperion idea identifies identity illocutionary acts illocutionary force individual intersubjective Kant Kant's Kantian Kleist's Kohlhaas Kohlhaas's linguistic logical Michael Kohlhaas mind narrative nature novel oath object Penthesilea performative utterance philosophy of language poem poet poet's poetic poetry political positing pragmatic predicate principle promise pronouns proposition reading reality Reid relation relationship role Romantic performative Searle sentence social acts sociopolitical speaker speaking speech acts speech-act theory Sprachlehre story synthesis theory of language things thought tion tive truth tween understanding uptake verb verbal words writing