Franco Moretti (2)

Page 21

Few things have been so exhilarating for aesthetic studies—and so fatal to their empirical solidity—as Hegel’s marriage of philosophy of history with idealist aesthetics. In the Aesthetics, every historical epoch has in essence one ideal content to ‘express’, and it gives ‘sensible manifestation’ to it through one artistic form. It was practically inevitable that—following the argument in reverse—once one had defined a rhetorical form one felt authorized to link it directly to the idea—single, solitary, resplendent—in which a whole epoch is supposedly summed up. Inevitable, and wrong—or at least, nearly always. Although from time to time moments of extraordinary intellectual and formal compactness occur, as a rule the opposite happens in history, and no system of values has ever been able to represent a Zeitgeist without being challenged by rival systems.

Moretti, Franco. “The Soul and the Harpy” in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms. trans. Susan Fischer, et al. London: Verso, 1983, pp. 1-41.