Romantic Theory

The invitation to participate in the seminar on Theory was simultaneously pleasing and puzzling: I was pleased to be paired with Tilottama Rajan, towards whose work I am intellectually sympathetic, but puzzled by the rubric under which I was asked to articulate the relation of my Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol to her Dark Interpreter. My only contributions to what is conventionally understood in literary studies as Theory have been an article on Northrop Frye and one on Walter Benjamin’s epistemological preface to the Origin of German Tragic Drama (“Walter”). And the latter, having been commissioned by and published in a South Korean journal, remains almost entirely unknown anywhere else. For its part the Genealogy makes little reference to contemporary literary theory, and thereby largely excludes itself from the principal discursive context in which the Romantic conception of the symbol has been a focus of attention. But this self-exclusion was partly a consequence of what Rajan calls the book’s “reconstruction” of the Romantic symbol in its public intellectual context. For in that context the symbol appears not as an actual semiotic, still less a specifically literary, phenomenon, but as a philosophical construct that sought discursively to institute, in Gadamer’s sense of the term, a mode of non-discursive representation inhering in the structure of the world itself. In other words, the symbol was a concept as defined by Reinhart Koselleck: that is, a model of a structure of relationships, in this case of a paradoxical fusion of presence and reference.