Stael’s Philosophy of the Passions

Sensibility, Society and the Sister Arts

Tili Boon Cuillé, Karyna Szmurlo

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781611484731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: Literature

Sensibility, or the capacity to feel, played a vital role in philosophical reflection about the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the arts in eighteenth-century France. Yet scholars have privileged the Marquis de Sade's vindication of physiological sensibility as the logical conclusion of Enlightenment over Germaine de Staël's exploration of moral sensibility's potential for reform and renewal that paved the way for Romanticism. This volume of essays showcases Staël's contribution to the "affective revolution" in Europe, investigating the personal and political circumstances that informed her theory of the passions and the social and aesthetic innovations to which it gave rise. Contributors move seamlessly between her political, philosophical, and fictional works, attentive to the relationship between emotion and cognition and aware of the coherence of her thought on an individual, national, and international scale. They first examine the significance Staël attributed to pity, happiness, melancholy, and enthusiasm in The Influence of the Passions as she witnessed revolutionary strife and envisioned the new republic. They then explore her development of a cosmopolitan aesthetic, in such works as On Literature, Corinne, or Italy, On Germany, and The Spirit of Translation, that transcended traditional generic, national, and linguistic boundaries. Finally, they turn to her contributions to the visual and musical arts as she deftly negotiated the transition from a Neoclassical to a Romantic aesthetic. Staël's Philosophy of the Passions concludes that, rather than founding a republic based on the rights of man, Staël's reflection fostered international communities of women (artists, models, and collectors; authors, performers, and spectators), enabling them to participate in the re-articulation of sociocultural values in the wake of the French Revolution.

Contributors: Tili Boon Cuillé, Catherine Dubeau, Nanette Le Coat, Christine Dunn Henderson, Karen de Bruin, M. Ione Crummy, Jennifer Law-Sullivan, Lauren Fortner Ravalico, C. C. Wharram, Kari Lokke, Susan Tenenbaum, Mary D. Sheriff, Heather Belnap Jensen, Fabienne Moore, Julia Effertz

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Setting the Stage
• Part I: The Politics of the Passions
• Chapter 1: The Mother, the Daughter, and the Passions
• Chapter 2: The Virtuous Passion: The Politics of Pity in Staël’s The Influence of the Passions
• Chapter 3: Passions, Politics, and Literature: The Quest for Happiness
• Chapter 4: Melancholy in the Pursuit of Happiness: Corinne and the Femme Supérieure
• Part II: International Aesthetics
• Chapter 5: The Peripheral Heroine Takes Center Stage: From Owenson’s National Tale to Staël’s European Genre
• Chapter 6: Ethnography and Autoethnography: Cosmopolitanism in Corinne ou l’Italie
• Chapter 7: Liquid Union: Listening through Tears and the Creation of Community in Corinne
• Chapter 8: Aeolian Translation: The Aesthetics of Mediation and the Jouissance of Genre
• Chapter 9: British Legacies of Corinne and the Commercialization of Enthusiasm
• Part III: Philosophy and the Arts
• Chapter 10: The Power to Corrupt: A Staëlian Perspective on the Fine Arts
• Chapter 11: The Many Faces of Germaine de Staël
• Chapter 12: Staël, Corinne, and the Women Collectors of Napoleonic Europe
• Chapter 13: Germaine de Staël Defines Romanticism, or the Analogy of the Glass Harmonica
• Chapter 14: Between Ideal and Performance: Corinne in Female-Authored Singer Narratives of the 1830s
• Bibliography
• About the Contributors