A Literary History Glossary for the Literature of the Moderne: Revision and Some Suggestions

Abstract

Alongside the realist-naturalist conception of the subject, the artistic texts of the literature of the Moderne aesthetically express another four co-existing conceptions of the subject: if we determine the romantic conception of the subject as being absolute, to be the Foucaultist “shifting foundation” of literature in the Moderne period, then its relation to the post-romantic and neoromantic conceptions of the subject is that of modification (reduction or intensification of the subject’s absoluteness). The romantic subject’s relation to the decadent and symbolist conceptions of the subject is that of mutation; this is also proven by the changed understanding of the structure and function of a symbol in comparison to the romantic theory of the symbol. This change is substantiated also by a Geistesgeschichte interpretation of Baudelaire’s decadent and Mallarmé’s symbolist poetry. The notion of symbolist movement, which is supposed to denote the anti-naturalist literature of the Moderne period, blurs this difference between the two conceptions of the subject and the symbolic structures of expression. Even the progressive notion of the literary trend can no longer explain the inner variety of the literature of the Moderne, because its aesthetic means of expression (symbolization, allegorization, impressionist style) are no longer part of a closed aesthetic system of an individual trend, but rather intertwine simultaneously into open-system combinations of expressions. In order to preserve its awareness of the inner variety of Moderne literature, literary history interpretation should rather view it as a variety of currents of ideas/structures, which compress in not always predictable knots, into aesthetic expressions of various co-existing conceptions of the subject. With its relativism, this pluralism of conceptions of the subject within a literary period (Moderne) communicates a contemporary metaphysical crisis, which is expressed by the symbolist conception of the subject through such a radical use of symbolizing technique that the conception itself becomes a new “shifting foundation” for the disintegration of the subject in modernist literature.