Art and Nature Around 1800

How is a poem like a leaf, or an aria like the cosmos? Is nature a work of art, or is art a mere copy of nature? And what decides? These questions, ancient in origin, became strangely urgent in Germany around 1800. In this seminar we will track peculiar proposals about nature and art, and their interrelation, from their ancient Greek origins, through German romanticism, and into their surreptitious return in 1920s Paris. We will also ask: why did these proposals surface when they did, just after the French and Soviet revolutions? Zones of interest will include the analogies of words to flowers, and of poems to children; gardening as literary trope; puppets; artistic judgment; and natural languages, including the “writing of stones.” Readings of Plato, Aristotle, Hebel, Kant, Rousseau, Goethe, Hölderlin, Kleist, Büchner, Proust, Caillois, Benjamin, and Francis Ponge.