Théophile Gautier and the Modernist Aesthetic: A Forgotten Player at the Intersection of Times, Signs and Media

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Kirsten von Hagen
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 396328986

As one of the most versatile figures in the 19th-century French literary canon, Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) has garnered relatively little critical attention in the academic arena. Long dismissed as the archetypal proponent of an elitist, self-referential "art-for-art's-sake" sensibility, Gautier's extensive oeuvre - which encompasses poetry, prose, drama and libretti for ballet, as well as art criticism, travelogues, manifestos and theoretical writings - is only gradually benefitting from a more nuanced reappraisal. Recent Gautier scholarship has nonetheless been particularly keen to foreground Gautier's pivotal role both as a mediator between competing conceptions of art in the 19th century and as a key player in the evolution of modernity. Gautier and Modernity will initially involve a systematic examination of Gautier's wide-ranging authorial roles against the backdrop of this critical reassessment. The primary aim of this project is to facilitate a renewed understanding of Gautier's unique take on aesthetic autonomy, an aesthetic which, in its genesis, is traditionally regarded as unproductive and unworldly. As such, two salient features emerge from a study of Gautier's innovative approach. Firstly, this approach accords a ground-breaking new function to art in an era of growing differentiation and institutionalization that characterizes modernity. Secondly, artistic endeavour is transformed into a method of critical self-examination by virtue of an explicitly interdisciplinary and intermedial approach, which provides the underpinnings for a distinctly modernist aesthetic, both in theory and practice.Gautier and Modernity pursues an investigation of intermedial reference points in Gautier's oeuvre that goes far beyond established research on "transposition d'art" in Gautier's lyrical oeuvre by focussing especially on his novels and novellas (prose), but also on his dramatic works and journalism - areas that have until now received little scholarly attention.Gautier's approach to intermediality, a core element of this project, provides a germane (self-)critical platform amid the welter of theories and interest groups in the context of 19th-century art, an approach which, above all, proves remarkably prescient of developments in the arts beyond the fin de siècle.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants