Description
Book SynopsisIn this groundbreaking book David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution. The total work of art is usually understood as the intention to reunite the arts into the one integrated whole, but it is also tied from the beginning to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. The synthesis of the arts in the service of social and cultural regeneration was a particularly German dream, which made Wagner and Nietzsche the other center of aesthetic modernism alongside Baudelaire and Mallarmé.
The history and theory of the total work of art pose a whole series of questions not only to aesthetic modernism and its utopias but also to the whole epoch from the French Revolution to the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. The total work of art indicates the need to revisit key assumptions of modernism, such as the foregrounding of the autonomy and separation of the arts at the ex
Trade Review
Roberts portrays the total work of art not simply as a particular and peripheral genre of modern culture but rather as a fundamental idea that responded to the experience of desacralization in modernity... This book is impressive in sweep, thought-provoking in its challenges to accepted cultural schemas, and fascinating in the details it uncovers along the way. In short: a grand synthetic account that truly holds together. It represents an important contribution to the re-thinking of modernism.
* Monatshefte *
There is much to admire in Roberts' study of the total work of art and he convincingly makes the case for its importance.... Roberts’ book provides a hugely insightful study of the total work of art. Most helpfully he uses this recurring motif as a way of breaking down conventional narratives about modernist politics, spirituality and aesthetic technique.
* Consciousness, Spirituality and the Arts *
With this volume, Roberts completes a trilogy devoted to European modernism. Art and Enlightenment (1991) offered a critical assessment of Adorno's theory of modern music, while Dialectic of Romanticism proposed a 'civil' alternative to Romantic nostalgia and Enlightenment progressivism. This new book, on the tangled legacy of Richard Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk ('total work of art'), is equally original, in approach and detailed readings.... The author traces its origins to the French Revolution and German Romanticism, and then monitors the cultural resonance of Wagner's Parsifal, via Nietzsche and Mallarmé, which extends to the 20th-century avant-garde—particularly its odd mix of differentiation/synthesis of the arts, and its theatrical fusion of art and life. Finally he surveys the 'sublime' politics of Fascist spectacle, which Walter Benjamin famously reduced to the 'aestheticization of politics.' If the Nazis seem finally to have discredited the entire tradition, it nevertheless finds a spectral afterlife in contemporary theme parks and cyberspace. Ambitious, densely written, yet rewarding, this volume caps a remarkable achievement. Summing Up: Highly recommended.
* Choice *
Robert's comprehensive account is impressive, and the breadth of his references is matched by the pertinence and precision of his case studies from across European literature, art, architecture, music, and film...
* Modern Language Review *
Table of ContentsIntroductionPart I: The Artwork of the Future1. Refounding Society
Ancients and Moderns: Rousseau's Civil Religion
The Festivals of the French Revolution
Revolution and Representation
The Abyss of Political Foundation2. The Destination of Art
The Secularization of Art: Quatremère de Quincy
Aesthetic Education: Schiller
Aesthetic Revolution: Hölderlin
The Destiny of Art: Hegel3. Prophets and Precursors: Paris 1830–1848
Organic and Critical Epochs: Saint-Simon
Musical Palingenesis: Mazzini and Balzac
The Musical City: Berlioz
Ancients and Moderns: Wagner4. Staging the Absolute
Modernism or the Long Nineteenth Century
The Birth of Tragedy: Nietzsche
The Great Work: Mallarmé
Dialectic of Enlightenment: From the Nineteenth to the Twentieth CenturyPart II: The Spiritual in Art5. Religion and Art: Parsifal as Paradigm
The Idea of Return
Religion and Art
The Profoundest Symbol: The Grail
The Theater to Come6. The Symbolist Mystery
Homage to the Gesamtkunstwerk
The Ultimate Fiction: Mallarmé's Book
The Last Ecstasy: Scriabin's Mysterium
Gnosis and Ecstasy7. Gesamtkunstwerk and Avant-Garde
The Avant-Garde: Analysis and Synthesis
From Dionysus to Apollo: Stravinsky and the Ballets Russes
The Spiritual in Art: Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter
The Crystal Cathedral: Bruno Taut and the Bauhaus8. The Promised Land: Toward a Retotalized Theatre
The Theatre Reform Movement
World Theatre: Hofmannsthal and Claudel
Theatre of Cruelty: Brecht and Artaud
Synthesis of the Arts: A TypologyPart III: The Sublime in Politics9. National Regeneration
The Community to Come
Romain Rolland: Le théâtre du peuple
Gabriele d’Annunzio: Il fuoco
The Nietzschean Sublime10. Art and Revolution: The Soviet Union
The Birth of the New Man
Festivals of the Revolution
From Art to Life: The Russian Avant-Garde
Stalin’s Total Work of Art11. The Will to Power as Art: The Third Reich
The Avant-Garde and the Breakthrough to Totality
Benjamin and the Aestheticization of Politics
The State as Work of Art: Jünger’s Der Arbeiter
Hitler’s Triumph of the WillConclusion
Bibliography
Index
