jauss - modernity and its literary tradition

Modernity and Literary TraditionAuthor(s): Hans Robert JaussReviewed work(s):Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Winter 2005), pp. 329-364Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/430964 .Accessed: 15/04/2012 09:08

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Critical Inquiry 31 (Winter 2005)

English translation � 2005 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/05/3102-0000$10.00. All rights reserved. From Hans Robert

Jauss, Literaturgeschichte als Provokation � Surhkamp Frankfurt am Main 1970.

329

1. See Paul Robert,Dictionnaire alphabetique et analogique de la langue francaise (Paris, 1951–

64), s.v. “modernite.”

2. Above all in Charles Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, inOeuvres completes de

Baudelaire [Paris, 1950]; hereafter abbreviated P. See also GerhardHess,Die Landschaft in

Baudelaires “Fleurs duMal” (Heidelberg, 1953), pp. 40–42.

Modernity and Literary Tradition

Hans Robert Jauss

Translated by Christian Thorne

1The wordmodernity,which ismeant to distinguish, in epochal terms, the

self-understanding of our era from its past, is paradoxical. If one looksback

over its literary tradition, it seems evident that it has alwaysalreadyforfeited,

through historical repetition, the very claim it sets out to make. It was not

coined specially for our period, nor does it seem in the least capable of des-

ignating, unmistakably, the unique features of an epoch. It is true that the

French noun form lamodernite is, like itsGerman counterpartdieModerne,

a recent coinage. Both words make their first appearance at a time when

our perception of the familiar historical world is separated from a past that

is no longer accessible to us without the mediation of historical knowledge.

Romanticism, as both a literary and a political period, can be considered

remote in this sense, a past that has been sundered from our modernity. If

one takes the revolution of 1848 as romanticism’s historical endpoint, the

emergence of the neologism la modernite does in fact seem to signal a

changed understanding of the world. In France, it was Baudelaire above all

who promoted la modernite—whose earliest known use dates to 1849, in

Chateaubriand’sMemoires d’outre-tombe—1 as a slogan for anewaesthetic.2

In Germany, die Moderne had become fashionable by 1887, after Eugen

Wolff, in a lecture to the Berlin literary society Durch, formulated his new

330 Hans Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition

Hans Robert Jauss was emeritus professor of romance languages at the

University of Constance. His publications include Toward an Aesthetic of

Reception. Christian Thorne is an assistant professor of English at Williams

College.

3. See FritzMartini, “Modern, DieModerne,” in Reallexikon der Deutschen Literaturgeschichte,

ed. Paul Merker andWolfgang Stammler, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1958), 2:391–415.

4. Ernst Robert Curtius, Europaische Literatur und lateinischesMittelalter (Bern, 1948), p. 257;

hereafter abbreviated EL.

5. “Nunc, quoniam nemo eodem tempore adsequi potest magnam famam et magnamquietem,

bono saeculi sui quisque citra obtrectationemalterius utatur.”

Princip der Moderne (“principle of themodern”) in ten theses; although set

alongside Baudelaire’s turn to surnaturalisme, this can only attest to a cer-

tain national backwardness.3 And yet even Baudelaire’smodernite, harbin-

ger of a new artistic epoch, should not make one forget that this coinage is

the late child of a long linguistic history, that even the noun’s most recent

meaning depends on the original adjectivemodernus,which, in turn, is part

of an even older literary tradition, “one of Late Latin’s last bequests to the

modern world.”4 And, at first glance, this tradition seems perfectly poised

to expose as illusory the claim that is intrinsic to the concept of modernity

itself—that the present age, generation, or epoch has a unique claim tonov-

elty and can thus profess to have made progress over the old ways.

For throughout nearly the entire history of Greek and Roman literature

and culture, from the Alexandrian school of Homer criticism to Tacitus’s

“Dialogue on Orators,” the dispute with the admirers of the “old ways”

would flare up around precisely such claims to “novelty.” Namely, insofar

as the “new men” themselves would inevitably metamorphose, over time,

into antiqui, the later generations would take over the role of the neoterici,

and this natural, cyclical sequence would seem to confirm the wise words

with which Tacitus has Materna settle the quarrel between Aper and Mes-

salla: “Since no one can achieve great fame and great tranquility at the same

time, let everyman enjoy the advantages of the age that is grantedhimwith-

out diminishing any other age.”5 From this perspective, the historical self-

consciousness with which themoderni have squared off against the antiqui,

again and again, in every Renaissance since the Carolingian, can then be

taken for a literary constant, as normal and natural in the history of Eu-

ropean culture as the alternation of generations is in biology. The whole

series of La Querelle des anciens et des modernes, which marks European

literature’s path to its national classicism, arose out of the repeated asking

and answering of a certain question: Is antiquity exemplary and what does

it mean to imitate it? But wouldn’t these quarrels themselves then be part

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2005 331

of the ancient inheritance, prefashioned on classicalmodels? Isn’t our pres-

ent consciousness of modernity finally trapped in this same cycle, the cycle

of unrecognized or unacknowledged emulation?

Behind this line of argument, however, there lies one of the ruses of phil-

ologicalmetaphysics, itself originatedby theanciens—theruseof traditions.

This ruse has been variously deployed by Ernst Robert Curtius in his Eu-

ropean Literature and the LatinMiddle Ages, the prototype of all scholarship

on antiquity’s afterlife; most impressive are the passages where Curtius ad-

duces Pseudo-Longinus’s On the Sublime, one of the work’s key texts, in

order to suggest that even the modern notion of creative imagination was

preformed by an ancient tradition long buried. “The inconspicuous fact

that the late-paganVirgil cult was the first to enunciate, however tentatively,

the notion of creative literature thus yields a weighty historical point. It

flares up like a mystical lantern in the twilight hours of the aging world. It

lay extinguished for nearly fifteen hundred years. In the dawning brilliance

of Goethe’s youth, it flickers back to life”—as though it were still substan-

tially the same thought, which, sadly, was “strangled by tradition’sunbreak-

able chain of mediocrity,” strapped for a congenial spirit until Goethe

happened along (EL, chap. 18, §5). In these terms, even the modern notion

of creative art, which was directed against the ancient principle that art

should imitate nature, can be rescued for the mystical continuity of an es-

sential European culture. La querelle des anciens et des modernes takes on

the same meaning in this context: It is a literary trope dating back to an-

tiquity and returning repeatedly in the generational revolt of the young; it

indicates nothingmore than the shifting proportions ofwriters old andnew

(see EL, chap. 14, §2). It becomes possible, then, to see even the secular

process by which modern literature and art have broken away from the an-

cient canon’s normative past as preformedon themodel of the ancientmod-

erni and antiqui; to ignore the break between the ancient and Christian

conceptions of modernity; and finally to absorb modernity’s irreparable

rupture with a historical ideal—a rupture that our modernity completes—

back into the cycle of some natural recurrence. If one looks instead at the

historical process that this putatively self-governing traditionworks to con-

ceal, the history ofmodernus as word or concept will show that themeaning

of the Late Latin term was not given in full at the moment of its coining;

its subsequent course was not to be foreseen. The definition of modernus

cannot be subsumed in the sempiternal meaning of some literary trope. It

only begins to disclose itself in the historical transformation of the con-

sciousness of modernity, becoming recognizable to us as a history-making

force at those points where its necessary antithesis comes to light, in the

self-understanding of a new present and its sloughing-off of some past.


6. Andre Gide, Les Faux-Monnayeurs, quoted in Robert,Dictionnaire alphabetique et analogique

de la langue francaise, s.v. “moderne.”

7. FriedrichWilhelm Joseph von Schelling,DieWeltalter: Fragmente, ed. Manfred Schroter

(Munich, 1946), p. 11: “How few know the genuine past! There can be no past without a powerful

The ordinary use of the word modern should be enough, for a start, to

demonstrate that the word’s meaning is best grasped via its opposites. The

wordmodernmarks the dividing line between today and yesterday,between

what, at a givenmoment, counts as new andwhat counts as old. To bemore

precise, and to put the point in terms of fashion, a most instructive phe-

nomenon in this regard,modernmarks the dividing line between thatwhich

is newly produced and that which the newly produced has sidelined, be-

tween what was still in yesterday and what is already out today. In the realm

of fashion, crossing over into the modern is the process by which whatever

was only just now current not only loses all value but is abruptly remanded

to themasklike vizier of the outmoded,without thegradualdecayoforganic

processes: “Ce qui paraıtra bientot le plus vieux, c’est ce qui d’abord aura

paru le plus moderne.”6 But if what is modern today cannot in any essential

way be distinguished fromwhat will be demode tomorrow, consigned to the

laughable role of anachronism, then the opposite of the modern must be

sought somewhere beyond change. And, indeed, the enduring opposite of

a dress a la dernier cri is not, say, the same dress after it has fallen out of

fashion, but rather a dress that the salesperson coos over as timeless or clas-

sic. Modern in the aesthetic sense of the word is to be distinguished, for us,

not from the old or from the past, but from the classic or the classical, the

eternally beautiful, that which holds for all time. At the end of our exami-

nation we will see that this preunderstanding of the modern, as revealed in

this use of the word and in its implicit antithesis, originated some hundred

years ago in a new turn to the aesthetic. Its first signs are to be found in

France, amongBaudelaire andhis generation,whose consciousnessofmod-

ernite in many respects still determines our aesthetic and historical under-

standing of the world.

2How does a certain consciousness come to the fore in the appearance

and history of the wordmodern—the consciousness, that is, of having taken

a step from the old to the new? And how does the historical self-under-

standing of a period become tangible in the various antitheses tomodernity,

which is experienced, over and over again, as new? The followingword his-

tory is focused on these questions. It is oriented, above all, to the transition

between epochs, aiming to discover, in the meaning of the word as in its

opposite numbers, the reflection of an experience of time, whichone could,

following Schelling, call the sloughing-off of the past andwhich can be seen

as constitutive of any epoch’s consciousness of itself as epoch.7


present, arising in the separation from itself. The man who is incapable of standing in opposition

to his own past has none—or rather, he will never emerge from her. He lives forever in her.”

8. SeeWalter Freund,Modernus und andere Zeitbegriffe des Mittelalters (Cologne, 1957), p. 5;

hereafter abbreviatedM.

9. This function was not (or was no longer) performed by the near synonyms present in this

period. The borrowedword neotericus often gets disfigured and gradually fades from use; praesens

changes into a demonstrative and, like coetanus or novus, designates somethingmore than the

historical (that is, the current) present; seeM, pp. 5–10, 31.

The earliest knownuse of thewordmodernusdates to the490s, theperiod

of transition from ancient Rome to the new Christian world, so one cannot

help but wonder whether this new word testifies to an awareness that an-

tiquity has ended and the Christian age begun. In the earliest sources, the

word has nothing more than a technical meaning; it marks the boundaries

of the current, which iswhat onemight expect from its etymologicalorigins.

Modernus is derived from modo (as hodiernus is from hodie), andmodo, at

this time, meant somethingmore than “merely” or “only” or “just thismo-

ment.” In all probability, it already meant “now,” as well, which is how it

survives in the romance languages. But then modernus does not simply

mean “new.” It also means “of that time,” and Walter Freund—whose ex-

cellent account I am following here—has emphasizedwith good reason that

the latter is the decisive nuance, the one that justifies theneologism.8Among

related temporal terms, only modernus performs the exclusive function of

designating the historical now of the present.9 This it how it appears in 494–

95 in Gelasius’s Epistolae pontificum,which uses the word to set apart recent

events—admonitionesmodernas or the decrees of the latestRomansynod—

from antiques regulis. The antiquitas for which modernus comes to supply

a kind of antithetical supplement is the ecclesiastical past of the patres or

veteres, that period, in other words, that begins with the apostles’ successors

and extends to the bishops assembled at the Council of Chalcedon (seeM,

p. 11). The boundary at which this particular antiques presses up against the

present (nostra aetas) is the year 450, some fifty years back. The pagan or

Roman past is nowhere in sight, though it will soon appear as antiquitas in

Cassiodorus, where it is distinguished from nostris temporibus or the seculis

modernis, which suggests, for its part, “that by the year 500, at the latest,

Helleno-Roman culture was considered, by a whole series of contempo-

raries, a thing of the past” (M, p. 28).

At the beginning of the fifth century, Orosius had already described his

own epoch as the tempora Christiana. His philosophy of history backdated

the onset of the Christian era—the germina temporis Christiani—to the pe-

riod of peace under Augustus, with which he contrasted the relative peace-

lessness of the pagan past. In this version of history, which dissolves the

antithesis between Christianity and the Roman Empire into the transhis-

torical continuity of all time since Christ’s birth, there is no room for any


10. Orosius lacks any notion of antiquitas to designate the past, nor does the metahistorical

present of his tempora Christiana grant a distinct historical identity to the present age; seeM, p. 22.

11. See Johannes Sporl, “Das Alte und das Neue imMittelalter,”Historisches Jahrbuch 50 (1930):

312.

conceptual opposition between a “modern” present and an authoritative

antiquity.10 It is in Cassiodorus, who already looks back on Rome and an-

cient culture as though onto a sealed past, that this opposition becomes

visible for the first time in the new verbal pair antiqui and moderni. Cas-

siodorus imparted a first coloration to this consequential antithesis,which,

under the term antiquitas,disconnects an exemplarypast fromthemodern-

ity of an onward-moving present. For him, the gothic imperial present has

as its ideal and task the renewal of imperial Rome’s lost grandeur. In for-

mulations like the following from his letter to Symmachus—“Antiquorum

diligentissimus imitator, modernorum nobilissimus institutor” (quoted in

M, p. 32)—one hears an ethos of admiration for the old ways, which can

without compunction be combinedwith an affirmation ofmodernity’shis-

torical claims, because the question of progress or decadence or rebirth has

not yet been posed. It is precisely on this point that the relationshipbetween

modernity and antiquitas in Cassiodorus distinguishes itself from later re-

nascences, as well as from the historical self-conception of the medieval

moderni,which was based on a belief in the equality, indeed the superiority,

of the tempora Christiana.

3The antithesis of Christian present and pagan antiquity thatmakes itself

most strongly felt in the scholarly circle around Charlemagne and then

again in the so-called twelfth-century Renaissance is only part of the term’s

subsequent history, which, in the Middle Ages, exhibits the full spectrum

of meanings between temporal boundary and epoch. If you follow the et-

ymology as it has been reconstructed by Freund and Johannes Sporl, what

emerges is basically a process of progressive periodization. Edging ever for-

wards, the temporal boundary ofmodernitas expands to encompass a larger

period of time and then leaves this period behind, transforming it into a

self-contained epoch, so a new past gets inserted between the “modern”

present and pagan antiquitas. The word modernus, which first enters com-

monuse in theCarolingianAge, thus begins theninth centuryby separating

Charlemagne’s new universal empire, understood as the seculum moder-

num, from Roman antiquity (see M, p. 47). But, soon thereafter, the glory

days of Charlemagne will strike the German emperors as an ideal past in its

own right, and the renewal of his empire will come to seem every bit as

pressing as the revival of imperial Rome.11 In the realm of philosophy and


12. SeeMarie-DominiqueChenu, “Antiqui, moderni,”Revue des sciences philosophiques et

theologiques 17 (1928): 82–94.

13. See ibid., p. 88, andM, p. 100.

14. Chenu, “Les ‘Philosophes’ dans la philosophie chretiennemedievale,”Revue des sciences 26

(Jan. 1937): 29. Exceptions are cited inM, p. 86.

15. “If we speak of the ‘ancients,’ we mean the pagan authors. For us, the paganworld and

Christianity are two distinct spheres for which there exists no common denominator. TheMiddle

Ages thought differently. The Christian and pagan authors of the distant past were both called

veteres. No century experienced the opposition between a ‘modern’ present and pagan-Christian

antiquity as keenly as the twelfth” (EL, p. 258).

16. “But themoderni of this period are so dependent on their schooling in ancientmodels that

they emulate even when they protest” (EL, p. 106). Curtius did not recognize the typological

letters, the termmodernidistinguishesChristianwriters fromtheGreekand

Roman writers of pagan antiquity, with Boethius serving as a boundary,

although in the doctrinal tradition the distance back to the antiqui can get

shorter and shorter until the connection with classical antiquity is severed

altogether. In the thirteenth century, the conceptual pair is left indicating

nothing more than a changing of the generational guard among scholastic

philosophers: the antiqui, who taught in Paris from 1190 to 1220 or so, and

themoderni,who, upon succeeding them, introduced the“newphilosophy”

of Aristotelianism.12 This accelerated movement freezes again in the four-

teenth century when the newest dispute between schools—the dispute be-

tween Ockhamite nominalism and Scotist and Thomist realism—so

hardened that the opposition between the via moderna and the via antiqua

would last for nearly two hundred years past its moment of terminological

timeliness (see M, p. 113).

There is another sense in which the counterterm antiqui detached itself

from pagan or Roman antiquity. Antiquitas, as the name for an exemplary

past, could be applied to the Christian veteres or to Old Testament believers

or to the church fathers.13 But the common use of this one word, so laden

with tradition, should not hide the fact that there was, after all, a distinction

drawn between Christian and pagan authors, between patres (sancti) and

philosophi, a dividing line that even humanists like John of Salisbury kept

to, even if he placed Virgil and Terence in “our camp” and once called Or-

igenes a “Christian philosopher.”14 The Middle Ages did not yet see pagan

and Christian antiqui as forming a single “pagan-Christian antiquity.”15

And if the twelfth-century moderni were unusually conscious of living

through some temporal watershed—“of the dawning of the new age, com-

pared to which everything that came before is ‘old’ (Horatian poetry, the

digests or pandectae, philosophy) and indeed old in the same sense that the

Old Testament is old”—then there was in this “rebellion of the young”

against scholasticism and the authority of classical authors somethingmore

than a generation gap behind which Curtius once again discerned an an-

cient pattern (EL, p. 106).16


scheme that underlies themoderni ’s experience of time, although he himself describes antiquity as

“old in the sense of the Old Testament” (EL, p. 259). He clearly understands this as mere

metaphor.

17. See FriedrichOhly, “Synagoga und Ecclesia: Typologisches in mittelalterlicherDichtung,” in

MiscellaniaMedievalia, ed. PaulWilpert (Berlin, 1966), pp. 350–69.

18. Ibid., p. 357.19. SeeM, p. 83; Ohly, “Synagoga und Ecclesia”; and August Buck, “Gab es einen Humanismus

imMitteralter?”Romanische Forschungen 75 (1963): 235. Buck’s notion that the image is motivated

by a “harmonizing balance of self-consciousness and faith in authority” is belied by its appearance

in John of Salisbury’sMetalogicon, which quotes Bernard and then launches into a pointed

critique of Aristotle.

20. Marie de France, “Prolog,” Lais, ed. KarlWarnke (Halle, 1925), ll. 9–16.We are following the

interpretation put forth by Leo Spitzer,Romanische Literaturstudien 1936–1956 (Tubingen, 1959),

The self-consciousness with which, around 1170, a new generation of

Latin and vernacular writers—including Matthaeus of Vendome, Jean de

Anville, Walter of Chatillon, Walter Map, Chretien de Troyes, andMarie de

France—position themselves against “the old authors” is rooted in the same

ground as the twelfth-century Renaissance more generally. It is the his-

torical self-perception of a golden age, which unlike Italy’s humanist Re-

naissance, was experienced neither as the emulation nor as the revival of

antiquitas, but rather as its intensification and culmination. The twelfth-

century moderni ’s experience of time is, as Friedrich Ohly has shown, ty-

pological, not cyclical.17 It has the specific form of Christian historical

experience:

Typology takes moments separated in time and relates them to one an-

other as the intensification of the old in the new. The new preserves the

old, the old lives on in the new. The old is redeemed in the new, the new

is built on the foundation of the old. . . . Typological interpretation is an

act of appropriating the old with the power of the new. It preserves the

past in the elation of the present.18

With the typological experience of history there originates a famous image,

as well, first employed by Bernard de Chartres and later interpreted in an-

tiquity’s favor: the moderni as dwarves sitting on the shoulders of giants.19

The trope bespeaks admiration for the antiqui, to be sure, yet in this ad-

miration one can also hear the consciousness of a typological intensification

of the old in the new: the present can see farther than the past! The progress

that theChristian present sees itself as having achievedover its ancientmen-

tors could also be validated by a sentence from Priscianus’s Latin grammar:

quanto iuniories, tanto perspicaciores. The prologue to the Lais by the ver-

nacular poet Marie de France gives some indication of how that sentence

was cited and understood: “The ancients already knew that their descen-

dants would be more clever because they (the successors) can write com-

mentaries on a text’s wording and thus enrich its sense.”20 Here we see


pp. 3–14. On the medieval use of Priscianus, see Sporl, “Das Alte und das Neue imMittelalter,”

p. 328.

21.

Ce nos ont nostre livre apris,

Que Grece ot de chevalerie

Le premier los et de clergie.

Puis vint chevalerie a Rome

Et de la clergie la some,

Qui ore est an France venue.

Des doint qu’ele i soit retenue

Et que li leus li abelisse

Tant que ja mes de France n’isse

L’enors qui s’i est arestee.

Des l’avoit as autres prestee,

Mes des Grezois ne des Romains

Ne dit anmes ne plus ne mains;

D’aus est la parole remese

Et estainte la vive brese.

[Chretien de Troyes,Cliges, ed.Wendelin Foerster (Halle, 1910), ll. 30–44, pp. 1–2]

On the Translatio studii and Translatio imperii, see Buck, “Gab es einen Humanismus im

Mittelalter?” p. 226.

Priscianus’s observation that grammar, brought into conjunction with the

exegesis of the Old Testament and then typologically construed, has made

progress in the last few centuries. The full and objectivemeaning of the text

is initially hidden and only unfolds in the course of time through the new

commentaries of later readers. This meaning will eventually, once it gets its

last gloss, become fully apparent in a form that has beenmanifest to divine

wisdom from the very beginning. It becomes possible, then, to decipher the

hidden—which is to say, the Christian—meaning of ancient writings for

the first time because these meanings had remained in darkness for the an-

cient “philosophers” or pagan poets. But while Marie de France modestly

inserts herself into the ongoing process of deciphering the true, leaving any

judgment on her work to the superior discretion of posterity, the prologue

toCliges (circa 1176), by her contemporary Chretien de Troyes, bespeaks the

pride of one who sees his own time as the pinnacle of world-historical pro-

gress, which need therefore advance no further. Knighthood and knowl-

edge, which had merely been on loan to the ancients, have traveled, via the

translatio studii, from Athens to Rome and from Rome to France where,

God willing, they have found their permanent home.21

It is in these same years that Walter Map demands precedence for the

present age over antiquity, the precedence that old copper is otherwisegiven

over new gold, and with this demand he stands on its head the classical

notion of the world’s four ages. His protest against the low regard in which

the present is normally heldmakes use of the argument that in everycentury


22. WalterMap,De nugis curialium, ed. Montague R. James (Oxford, 1914), p. 158. See also EL,

p. 25 n. 1, andM, p. 81.

23.

Nostra dico temporamodernitatemhanc, horum scilicet centrum annorum curriculum, cuius

adhuc nunc ultime partes extant, cuius tocius in his, que notabilia sunt, satis est recens et

manifestamemoria, cum adhuc aliqui supersint centennes, et infiniti filii, qui ex patrum et

avorum relationibus certissime teneant que non viderunt. Centum annos qui effluxerunt, dico

nostrammodernitatem, et non qui veniunt, cum eiusdem tamen sint racionis secundum

propinquitatem; quoniam ad narracionempertinent preterita, ad divinacionem futura. [Map,

De nugis curialium, p. 59]

24. But see Sporl, “Das Alte und das Neue imMittelalter,” pp. 336–41.

modernitas has been unpopular (“omnibus seculis sua displacuit moder-

nitas”), so his own work will only command respect after some remote fu-

ture has conferred antiquity upon it.22 His tractDe nugis curialium (written

between 1180 and 1192) is also notable for its multiple uses of the new word

modernitas, which is expressly defined here for the first time: when he calls

“our times” modernitas, he specifies that he means the last hundred years,

the century just expired, because the events (notabilia) from this period are

still fresh, immediately in the memory of all men, easily understood, and

narratable.23 Historically, this classification coincides more or less with the

twelfth-century Renaissance; functionally, it could serve as the horizon of

memory for later generations right down to our own current modernity.

The word modernitas was not Map’s own coinage, however. It appears as

early as the eleventh century in a report composed by Berthold von der

Reichenau on the Lenten synod at Rome of 1075, which had been convened

by Pope Gregory in order to call to mind the instructions handed down by

the church fathers but now forgotten by modernitas nostra (see M, p. 67).

The first known usage ofmodernitas is therefore derogatory. The new term,

as Freund has shown, is part and parcel of reformist thought during the

Conflict of Investitures. A certain consciousness of time takes shape here

not simply in the antithesis of past and present; it arises, rather, with a view

to a twofold temporal break, “one break at the end of the exemplary age of

the antiqui and a second just before the immediate present, whose vocation

it is to reinstate that distant antiquitas” (M, p. 59).Modernitas appears then

as an interlude or middle phase in the progression onwards toward some

third and higher stage, which will be achieved in the future by reformatio.

This threefold division of time, which belongs to a reformist historical con-

sciousness, kicks off a development that will remain conspicuous through-

out the age of early monastic reform, from Peter Damiani to Joachim of

Fiore, but which cannot be followed here.24 As we turn now to the begin-

nings of the humanist Renaissance, we will rediscover, though under rather

different circumstances, the Christian moderni’s three-stage theory of his-


25. See Ohly, “Synagoga und Ecclesia,” who cites passages fromworks by Rupert von Deutz,

Gerhoh von Reichersberg, Bonaventura, and Joachim of Fiore: “The original period of achieved

perfectionmoves to the middle of time and takes on the character of a turning-point into

fulfillment, the time of the church and of eschatology” (p. 359).

26. “O seculum! o litterae! Iuvat vivere, etsi quiescere nondum iuvat, Bilibalde. Vigent studia,

florent ingenia. Heus tu, accipe laqueum, barbaries, exilium prospice” (Ulrich von Hutten, letter

to Bilibald Pirckheymer, 25 Oct. 1518, Schriften, ed. Eduard Bocking, 7 vols. [Leipzig, 1859], 1:217).

27. “Questi fu quel Dante, il quale primo doveva al ritorno delle Muse, sbandite d’Italia, aprir la

via. . . . Per costui la morta poesiameritamente si puo dire suscitata” (Boccaccio,Vita di Dante

[1357–59], quoted in B. L. Ullmann, “Renaissance: TheWord and the Underlying Concept,”

Studies in the Italian Renaissance [Rome, 1955], p. 15; hereafter abbreviated “R”).

28. See “Versus domini Benevenuti de Campexanis de Vicencia de resurectioneCatulli poete

Veronensis,” which begins, “Ad patriam venio longis a finibus exul” (quoted in “R,” p. 13).

tory and especially that “middle phase,” called media aetas in the typolog-

ically conceived world of salvation history and capable of attaining the

dignity of a “high middle age.”25

4“O seculum! O litterae! Iuvat vivere.” The famous cry with whichUlrich

von Hutten, in a 1518 letter to Willibald Pirkheimer, greets the revival of

learning and great minds (“Vigent studia, florent ingenia”) points to some-

thing more than the changed consciousness of a single epoch.26 It has be-

come proverbial or paradigmatic, a kind of archetype for the dawning of a

new age. The notion that an epoch, having undertaken the step from the

old to the new, can—straightaway, from its very onset—become conscious

of itself has clearly hardened into a scheme for historical thought, and this

makes it difficult to recognize the utterly different experience that charac-

terizes the thresholds to other epochs—the beginning of the Enlighten-

ment, for instance. For the step across such thresholds is not always bound

up with the perception that, lo, everything has become new again.Hutten’s

letter goes on to refer to the historical situation, and it does so by showing

that the sense of good fortune that comes from being able to live here and

now in a newly emergent world is, in a special sense, set off by a unique

experience of the past or the old days. Heus tu, accipe laquium, barbaries,

exilium prospice: barbarism will be put in chains; it is just waiting to be

exiled! “Barbarism”means the now-sundered past of theMiddle Ages. This

image ties into the notion, common since Boccaccio, that the muses had

finally returned from a long period of exile; the barbarism of the period just

ended is in for a fateful reversal of the historical situation.27 In a very early

source, the 1323 poem by Benvenuto Campesani on the discovery of a Ca-

tullus manuscript, we find another image, in addition to that of return, for

the dawning of a new intellectual golden age, and that is the image of res-

urrection (de resurrectione Catulli).28 Soon afterwards the image of a literary


29. The image is used by Coluccio Salutati; see “R,” p. 14.

30. “Ea igitur iacente sine cultu, sine decore, vir maximusDantes Allagherii, quasi ex abysso

tenebrarum eruptam revocavit in lucem, dataquemanu, iacentem erexit in pedes” (quoted in “R,”

p. 17).

31. According to Adalbert Klempt,Die Sakularisierung der universalhistorischenAuffassung

(Gottingen, 1960), the notion of themedia aetas ormedium aevumwas current among the

humanists as early as 1518. The first known usage occurs in the formulationmedia tempestas in a

1496 letter by Giovanni Andrea. See Nathan Edelmann, “The Early Uses of MediumAevum,

Moyen Age, Middle Ages,”Romanic Review 14 (Feb. 1938): 3–25.

32. The publication of one of the StrasbourgColloquia is enough to provide a glimpse into this

phenomenon. See L’Humanismemedieval dans les litteratures romanes du XIIe au XIVe siecle, ed.

Anthime Fourrier (Paris, 1964). The papers collected here examine l’humanismemedieval in the

vernacular literatures during and after the Renaissance of the twelfth century, and they come, via

different paths, to the same finding. Instead of the expected imitation des anciens, the texts in

question approach the ancient inheritance with a remarkably free hand, a freedom that later

humanists would not seize for a good long time—in pseudo-ancient romances, which, with

reawakening will be used in reference to Petrarch and the great Florentine

writers.29 And Filippo Villani praises Dante for having summoned poetry

back from an abyss of darkness, for having helped it back on its feet from

its position of utter prostration.30

These images precede the later metaphoric of the Renaissance, which

construes the revival in organic terms. Underlying all of them is a con-

sciousness of modernity that is rather curious in that it refuses to grant its

own past, which it has only just put behind it, the character of a separate

epoch or even of a preliminary stage. The period just ended appears here

as nothing more than a via negationis, as barbarism or obscurity, so, from

the humanistmoderni ’s view, a gap, empty and dark, occupies the position

that, in the Christian reformers’ typological conceptionofhistory, hadbeen

reserved for the media aetas as an elevated period of transition. The mo-

dernity of the incipient Renaissance at first negates the threefold division

of history thatwould later emerge from thismoment in the formof aworld-

historical framework: antiquity, middle ages, and modernity.31 The hu-

manists reinstate the grand antithesis between the antiqui and themoderni,

scouting out a past for themselves, not in the centuries that have just been

sloughed off, which for them are a dark age, but in some rediscovered an-

tiquitas of Greek and Roman authors, who have become bothmore remote

and better understood. This new remoteness is the clearest index by which

to distinguish medieval humanism from the humanism of the Renaissance

proper. For in the so-called twelfth-century Renaissance, themoderni stood

in such easy proximity to their ancient prototypes that they could just as

well have been reading works from their own period. And whenever the

vernacular literature, in its first flowering, appropriates ancient materials,

it employs and modernizes its models with remarkable openhandedness,

which suggests that no one was yet penned in by some humanist principle

of textual fidelity.32 The humanists of the Italian Renaissance do not yet


anachronistic abandon, transplant ancient heroes into knightly garb and the twelfth-century

present; or in the newly created genre of the verse romance, which departed from its

Alexandrinianmaterials; or in the rewriting of the Narcissusmyth, which, in the Roman de la rose,

is transposed into its oppositemeaning (the fons mortis becomes a fons vitae); or in the translation

of ancient authors, which are appropriated in free adaptations, until word-for-word renditions

appear on the scene, in which another type of linguistic reverencemakes itself felt. This shift from

the medieval to the humanistic attitude towards the classical texts has also been demonstrated on

the evidence of Italian vulgarizations of the due- and trecento. See Cesare Segre, Lingua, stile, e

societa: Studi salla storia della prosa italiana (Milan, 1963), p. 56.

33. “Multis de historiis sermo erat, quas ita partiti videbamur, ut in novis tu, in antiquis ego

viderer expertior, et dicantur antique quecunque ante cenebratumRome et veneratum romanis

princibus Cristi nomen, nove autem ex illo usque ad hanc etatem” (Francesco Petrarch, Le

Familiari, ed. Vittorio Rossi, 4 vols. [Florence, 1933–42], 2:58). See also Theodor E. Mommsen,

“Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages,’” Speculum 17 (Apr. 1942): 226–42, esp. p. 232, whose

account I follow here.

34. Petrarch,Epistolae de rebus familiaribus, quoted inMommsen, “Petrarch’s Conception of

the ‘Dark Ages,’” p. 234.

regard themselves as separated from their medieval forebears by a new era

in which ancient culture has been reawakened; for the moment, they pos-

sess, above all, a rather different consciousness of the historical distance

between antiquity and their own present, visible here in themetaphorics of

the dark interlude. In the realm of the arts, this is experienced as a distance

from perfection and is at the root of the new attitude of imitatio and ae-

mulatio.

In the notion of the Dark Ages, we see the first signs of the Renaissance’s

new understanding of history, which hasmade it possible, inhistoriograph-

ical terms, to arrange the antithesis of antiqui and moderni, an exemplary

antiquity and a self-consciousmodernity, into aperiodic cycleof recurrence

or rebirth. In the literary tradition, this turning away from a notion of his-

tory as linear, as directed towards its telos in an irreversible succession of

stages, becomes visible, as an event, in Petrarch. In 1341, on the occasion of

his coronation as poet laureate, Petrarch visited Rome for the second time.

His letter to Giovanni Colonna, with whom he had once made the rounds

of the city, recalls the moment when they were sitting together on the ruins

of Diocletian’s baths, talking about the past and divvying up history into

two great periods, the ancient and themodern, which found their historical

dividing line in the victory of Christianity over Rome.33 In his tractDe viris

illustribus Petrarch had wanted to linger over this second period, but later

he would refer to it as an age of darkness: “Nolui autem pro tam paucis

nominibus claris, tamprocul tantasqueper tenebras stilumferre.”34Ancient

and modern history are henceforth divided for him at a significant turning

point: the moment when Rome fell under the rule of “barbarians,” when,

with the fall of the Roman Empire, ancient culture began its descent into

darkness. In Petrarch’s version of history, the eclipse of ancient Rome thus


35. See Franco Simonel, “La Coscienza della Rinascita negli Umanisti,” La Rinascita 2 (1939):

838–71 and La Rinascita 3 (1940): 163–86, esp. p. 177.

36. See the passage, adduced byMommsen, in which Petrarch charges Cicero with having gone

and died just before the night of error began to fade; see Petrarch,De sui ipsius et multorum

ignorantia, ed. LuigiMario Capelli (Paris, 1906), p. 227.

37. See Petrarch,Africa, 9.451–57, quoted inMommsen, “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark

Ages,’” p. 240.

38. See Petrarch, Le Familiari, 2:58.

39. Hans Blumenberg has shown how this cyclical aspect can be connected with the

metaphorics of light. Giordano Bruno uses the image of a new light igniting to describe

Copernican reform as an event: “This light, which is said to have lit itself between Copernicus and

Bruno, is, however, not yet the flame of enlightenment. It is the sun de l’antiqua uera philosophia,

and this metaphor is connected to the notion of a cyclical history, in which the absence of light is

as ‘natural’ an occurrence as its return” (Hans Blumenberg,Kopernikus im Selbstverstandnis der

Neuzeit [Mainz, 1965], p. 343).

40. Ficino, letter dated 13 Sept. 1492, quoted in Fritz Schalk, “Das goldene Zeitalter als Epoche,”

Archiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprache und Literaturen 199 (1962): 87.

41. Examples can be found in ibid.

occupies the position that, for medieval historians, had been reserved for

the soteriological break that was Christ’s birth. But both this new world-

historical turning point and the metaphor of darkness refer back to some

original, religious conception. It is darkness that the pagans lived in before

Christ brought the light of faith into the world.35 Petrarch, who himself oc-

casionally uses this metaphor in its older sense,36 was presumably the first

to give it this new meaning, designating the light of ancient culture, which,

after darkness has been defeated, will shine forth again, fresh and pure, in

a better future.37 The old and the new, the Christian metaphorics of light

and its humanistic reinterpretation, are pressed up against each other here,

directly side by side.

Petrarch himself surely had no intention of playing the one off the other.

And yet the competition between linear and cyclical history, which would

play such an important role in the further course of the conflict between

the anciens and the modernes, has its origins in Petrarch’s reinterpretation

of the light metaphor to describe Rome’s fall and return. In that same letter

from 1341, he articulated a certain hope: “Quis enim dubitare potest quin

illico surrectura sit, si ceperit se Roma cognoscere?”38 Andwhen, as though

in fulfillment of that hope, Hutten’s contemporaries saw in the present-day

flourishing of learning and the arts the revival of antiquity’s lost grandeur,

there appeared on the heels of the light metaphor the cyclical periodization

of history, which had remained implicit in Petrarch’s “age of darkness.”39

“Hoc enim seculum tanquam aureum liberales disciplinas, ferme iam ex-

tinctas reduxit in lucem”: Ficino takes his own epoch for a new golden age,

which has led the liberal arts, once nearly extinguished, back into the light.40

The new trope of a returning golden age is still bound up here with the light

metaphor, which gets replaced in countless other sources from the period

by the metaphorics of rebirth.41 It is only a short step from the periodic


42. “Come la fenice / Rinasce dal broncon del vecchio alloro, / Cosi nasce dal ferro un secol

d’oro” (quoted in ibid., p. 88).

43. See the Encyclopedie, ou, Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts, et des metiers, ed. Denis

Diderot and Jean d’Alembert, 36 vols. (Geneva, 1778), 12:367: “Ce Perrault, et quelques autres, dont

le versificateur Boileau n’etait pas en etat d’apprecier le merite: LaMothe, Terrason, Boindin,

Fontenelle, sous lesquels la raison a fait de si grand progres.”

alternation of light and dark to the cyclical return of the golden age. But

with this short step the dark ages between Rome’s fall and its return shrivel

to a mere passageway, the memory of which is snuffed out as soon as it has

been traversed. The last wagon in the Florentine Carnival procession of 1513

displays the Triumph of the Golden Age, glossing its own scene with the

image of the phoenix, rising into the air out of its own ashes;42 such is the

symbol of an epoch that understands itself, its ownworld, as emerging from

the incineration of an iron age but that nonetheless becomes conscious of

its modernity by turning back to an ideal past, by gazing in admiration at

the archetype of a perfection once achieved by antiquity and to be achieved

again, it is thought, by emulation—perhaps, someday, even tobe surpassed.

5The protest that, at the end of this period, broke the spell of thehumanist

ideal of perfection and that led to the dismantling of the classical, univer-

salist image of world and man was introduced by Charles Perrault on 27

January 1687, at the height of French classicism, in a session of theAcademie

Francaise. It began a new querelle des anciens et des modernes, which would

engulf all the leading minds of the day, splitting them into two opposing

camps only, after more than twenty years, to reunite them in a new under-

standing that would undo the initial opposition in a way that no one had

anticipated. In this quarrel, which raged because themodern party had pit-

ted the notion of progress, as developed by the methods of modern science

and philosophy since Copernicus and Descartes, against the anciens and

their belief in the transhistorical exemplarity of the ancient world, we see

the transition to a new epoch. In otherwords,we see thepossibilityofdating

the onset of the French Enlightenment as epoch. One could at this point

fall back, asWerner Krauss does, on the weighty testimony ofDiderot,who,

in his entry on “encyclopedia,” does in fact exalt Fontenelle and Perrault as

the trailblazers of enlightenment.43 But, even so, the fact remains that, by

contrast with the Renaissance, the transition from the old to the new is hard

to recognize here because it transpired under entirely different circum-

stances.

The trailblazers of enlightenment quickly adopted as a party label the

term modernes, which had hitherto been a historical designation; and yet

these modernes were by no means conscious of witnessing the dawn of a


44. Charles Perrault, Parallele des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences

(Munich, 1964), p. 113; hereafter abbreviated PA.

45. See Buck,Kopernikus im Selbstverstandnis der Neuzeit, pp. 357–60 andDie kopernikanische

Wende (Frankfurt, 1965).

46. “Sur quelque Art que vous jettiez les yeux vous trouverez que les Anciens estoientextremement inferieurs auxModernes par cette raison generale, qu’il n’y a rien que le temps ne

perfectionne” (PA, p. 443).

47. See, for instance, Blaise Pascal,Traite du vide (1647),Oeuvres completes, ed. Michel de Guern

(Paris, 1998), pp. 452–531. See also Blumenberg,Kopernikus im Selbstverstandnis der Neuzeit, p. 357

and p. 359 n. 2.

48. “N’est-il pas vray que la duree dumonde est ordinairement regardee comme celle de la vie

d’un homme, qu’elle a eu son enfance, sa jeunesse et son age parfait, et qu’elle est presentement

dans sa viellesse” (PA, p. 113).

49. See Hans Robert Jauss, introduction to PA, p. 22.

new age; much to the contrary, they thought that humanity, having spent

its youth in antiquity and itsmiddle age in theRenaissance,hadnowentered

into its senescence. In the opening dialogue of his Parallele des anciens et

des modernes, Perrault offers as his chief argument against the “prejudicial

notion” that antiquity is to modernity as teacher is to pupil “que c’est nous

qui sommes les Anciens.” The Greeks and Romans should not really be

called les anciens because successors are heirs to their predecessors’ knowl-

edge and the present-day moderns command the heights of all previous

human experience, which means that the modernes must be the more ex-

perienced ones, hence the genuine anciens. 44 Behind this argument stands

the formulation, made famous by Bacon, that truth is the daughter of time,

as well as the notion, first expressed by Giordano Bruno, that any insight

into progress across time can be transferred onto the history of the entire

human race. Blumenberg has established that Copernicus was the first to

glean this insight, before Bacon and Giordano Bruno, and he has estab-

lished, aswell, its importance formodernity’s self-understanding.45Perrault

would, in later years, often adduce the sentence veritas temporis filia and

was eager to demonstrate its validity for the realms of art and custom, as

well;46 and yet he did not yet connect it with a progressive historical con-

sciousness, one that understood modernity as a new beginning and never-

ending task.47 Immediately following his argument that the modernes are

the genuine ancients, he clarifies that sentence by bringing in the age of the

homme universel, classifying the present as a kind of senility and not, as one

might expect, as the age parfait. In fact, in another passage, he does not shy

away from pronouncing that the development of the human race, having

reached its pinnacle in the siecle de Louis XIV, might decline again.48 Fon-

tenelle also sees the human race as having arrived at its virilite, but then

breaks off the analogy so as to avoid the unavoidable prognosis of old age

and death.49 This modernity’s new consciousness—which, under the sign


50. On this point and for the following discussion, see Jauss, introduction to PA, pp. 43–60.

of scientific progress, revolts against the anciens’ regard for antiquity as or-

igin and norm and thus also against the self-understanding of an accom-

plished French classicism—is caught between understanding its own

present as humanity’s twilight and, alternately, seeing history in the light of

critical reason as moving inexorably onwards in the age of progress.

The literary conflict at the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth cen-

tury incorporates this ambivalence in the followingway: the “modern” fac-

tion tries to undo the contradiction between the concept of perfection (as

it pertains to the fine arts) and the concept of perfectability (as it pertains

to science and learning) by resolving them into the perspective of human

history’s general and continuous progress. And yet the large-scale compar-

ison of all the arts and sciences, ancient and modern, undertaken to this

end by Perrault came to an unexpected conclusion, which is representative

of the querelle’s cumulative course and eventual upshot. At the end of his

four-volume opus, themodernes’ spokesman feels compelled to confess that

the distance between antiquity could not, in all the arts, be gauged along a

scale of progress. It is not that Perrault now wants to deny modern poetry

or oratory any claim to progress, but rather that, in the meantime, he has

become unsure, as the anciens themselves are, of the comparability of an-

cient andmodern art.50 The process that leads to this intellectual revolution

can be summed up in three steps: First, the modernes countered the claim

that antiquity was without peer, that it set for all time the benchmark of

artistic perfection, by arguing, in rationalist terms, that all men were nat-

urally equal; and, second, they began, as well, to subject the ancients’ cre-

ations to the absolute criteria of bon gout. They began, in other words, to

bring the ancients to the bar of classicism’s prevailing tastes (lesbienseances).

At first, the anciens responded, defensively, by arguing that every periodhad

its own distinct customs and thus its own distinct taste, as well. They de-

manded accordingly that the Homeric epics be judged by the customs of

another age. In the course of the discussion, step for step, this argument

gave rise to the new insight, now shared by both camps, that alongside the

eternally beautiful there was also the historically or conditionallybeautiful,

that alongside beaute universelle there was also beau relatif. The gradual dis-

mantling of classical aesthetic norms thus led, via this route, to a historical

understanding of ancient art.

The discovery that antiquity and modernity are, in the realm of the fine

arts, unlike each other is the consequential upshot of the querelle,which, in

France, diverted the historians’ gaze to the dimension of unrepeatable time

and thus ushered in the Enlightenment. From the differences between an-


51. Saint-Evremond,Sur les poemes des anciens, inOeuvres, ed. Rene de Planhol, 3 vols. (Paris,

1927), 1:279.

52. See Schalk, “Zur Semantik von ‘Aufklarung’ in Frankreich,” in FestschriftW. v. Wartburg, ed.

Kurt Baldinger, 2 vols. (Tubingen, 1968), 1:251–66.

53. SeeWerner Krauss, “Der Jahrhundertbegriff im 18. Jahrhundert,” Studien zur deutschen und

franzosischen Aufklarung (Berlin, 1963), pp. 9–40, esp. p. 14: “The following instances come from

the sphere of Francophone journalism in Holland: ‘Dans le siecle eclaire ou nous sommes, il ne

s’agit pas de faire le docteur.’ And in the same connection: ‘vous savez qu’il n’y a jamais eu de siecle

si fertile en auteurs, que celui dans lequel nous avons l’honneur de vivre.’”

54. See ibid., p. 13.55. See Krauss, “Zur Periodisierung der Aufklarung,” inGrundpositionen der franzosischen

Aufklarung, ed. Krauss andHansMater (Berlin, 1955), p. viii.

cient and modern art, via the varied customs of antiquity and modernity,

the historical particularity of various epochs came increasingly into view.

Saint-Evremond was the first to take stock of this development: “nous en-

visageons la nature autrement que les anciens ne l’ont regarde.” As early as

1685, he laid down a challenge, later to be met by Montesquieu: that the

different characters of ancient and modern epochs—their genie du siecle—

be reviewed in art as in the changing formsof religion, government,custom,

and other such phenomena.51 With this new view of antiquity,modernity’s

self-understanding was bound to change as well. Signs of a new conscious-

ness—an awareness that the beam of enlightened reason has illuminated

theway to a newand eminent age, unlike anyprevious epoch—canbe found

as early as the querelle and multiply in its wake. In his Nouvelles de la re-

publique des lettres, Pierre Bayle speaks of a siecle philosophe—he is thinking

of the natural sciences, which have been expanding rapidly throughout the

1680s, and of the new historical criticism engendered by Protestantism—

and on behalf of this siecle he seizes hold of a notion that had hitherto been

reserved, in the main, for Christian doctrine: “C’est a nous qui vivons dans

un siecle plus eclaire de separer le bon grain d’avec la paille . . . . On se pique

dans ce siecle d’etre extremement eclaire.”52 In the Enlightenment’s early

years, the lumieres de la raison square off against divine illumination, the

lumiere du Ciel. In the course of the eighteenth century, le siecle eclairewill

come to be identified more and more with one’s own century. In 1719, for

example, a journalist will speak of the “siecle eclaire ou nous sommes,”

which has producedmore writers than any other period.53 The enlightened

age is a siecle eclaire,filledwith pride to itsmodern and civilizedpeak,claim-

ing for itself the title siecle humain, siecle philosophique. 54 As of the mid-

century, it is common for contemporary literature to use siecle des lumieres

and siecle philosophique interchangeably with dix-huitieme siecle. 55 The em-

phatic use of siecle is a manifestation of the Enlighteners’ historical self-

consciousness and contributes to the word’s taking on a new meaning—

“century”—in French in precisely this period. On the one hand, the old,


56. See Krauss, “Der Jahrhundertbegriff im 18. Jahrhundert,” pp. 9–11, 17.

57. See Schalk, “Das goldene Zeitalter als Epoche,” p. 96 n. 27.

58. See Krauss, “Siecle im achtzehnter Jahrhundert,”Beitrage zur romanischen Philologie 1

(1961): 95 and “Der Jahrhundertbegriff im 18. Jahrhundert,” p. 18.

59. See section 2 of this essay.

Christian sense of siecle as “worldly time,” to be distinguished from the

kingdom of God, persists despite gradual fading. But, on the other hand,

themore narrow sense of siecle,derived from the notionof a human lifetime

and meaning “reign” or “term of rule,” expands more and more until it

means, in epochal terms, “century.” The borders of siecle’s temporal com-

pass outgrew the siecle de Louis XIV, eventually coinciding with the begin-

ning and end of the new century, which, over and against the beau siecle just

passed, claimed a historical mission of its own.56 The external classification

system of centuries, which the church had already been using, thus took on

board the new notion, formulated in the saeculum of Enlightenment, that

each century could, like the present one, be seen as having a distinct content

and thus as forming an epoch unto itself.57 But whatmost characterizes the

altered historical self-consciousness of the enlightenedmodernes is that they

began, as of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre’s famous analysis of the present in

1735, to see their own day and age as standing before the forum of future

history. On the basis ofmuch impressive evidence culled fromutopiannov-

els and political utopias, Krauss has shown that, as of the 1760s, thequestion

arises again and again whether or not actions taken in the present would

hold up under the keener eyes of a more advanced mankind.58 It is in this

previously unencountered and epochal leitmotif that the modernity of the

Enlightenment turns its back most decisively on the counterposition of the

humanist anciens; from this moment on, the standard by which the history

of the present is to be judged, by which its claim to modernity is to be

gauged, lies in the open horizon of the future’s budding perfection and no

longer in the paradigms of some perfect past.

6In the eighteenth century, the separating-out of antiquity andmodernity

into two historical epochs, each in its ownway perfect, can be traced via the

gradual disintegration of the literary form in which French classicism had,

during its final years, conducted the querelle—a form that Schiller and

Friedrich Schlegel would take up again around 1800, namely, the compar-

ative “parallel.”59 Since the Renaissance, this literary genre had been culti-

vated after various ancient models, especially Plutarch’s; it flourished in

France as an important instrument in the polemic between the anciens and

the modernes and remained popular in the eighteenth century as a way of


60. See Buck, “Das heroische und das sentimentale Antike-Bild in der franzosischen Literatur

des 18. Jahrhunderts,”Germanisch-romanischeMonatsschrift 13 (Apr. 1963): 166.

61. OnRenaissance humanism’s cyclical theory of history, see Hans Baron, “TheQuerelle of the

Ancients and theModerns as a Problem for Renaissance Scholarship,” Journal of the History of

Ideas 20, no. 1 (1959): 3–22. On this theory’s afterlife in the French querelle, see Jauss, introduction

to PA, p. 27.

62. An account of the term perfection couldmake visible the process by which a new sense of

history is formed: In the eighteenth century, perfection drifts further and further away from norms

of universal and timeless validity and fastens instead onto the relatively beautiful; as early as 1774,

Herder is applying the term expressly to what is unique in time and place: “Every human

perfection is national, secular, and, if observed with utmost precision, individual” (Johann

GottfriedHerder,Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menscheit, ed. Karl-Gustav

representing the social and cultural history of the ancient and modern

world.60 It was still in these terms that La Harpe, for example, discussed

world literature in his Lycee ou cours de literature ancienne etmoderne (1786–

1803). On a smaller scale, the comparative framework could take up literary

themes, the treatment of Electra, for instance, by Sophocles, Euripides,Cre-

billon, and Voltaire, but it could be carried over into other realms as well.

There were “parallels” of Aristotelian and Cartesian physics, of ancient and

Christian ethics, of ancient and modern heroes, of economic systems, and

even of ancient and modern revolutions. Chateaubriand’s Genie du Chris-

tianisme (1802), which is still organized much like Perrault’s comparison of

the arts and sciences as practiced by the anciens on one hand and themod-

ernes on the other, can surely be regarded as the last significant work in this

genre. But it also spells the end of the vision of history developed by Re-

naissance humanism. For the historical parallel, which began as a literary

form, was more than a neutral framework of comparison. It presupposed

a standard of comparison—the point de la perfection—and thus also an

analogy with organic growth or biological lifespan. This is the analogyused

by the humanists (and at first by the moderns as well) to trace the course

of history in general—the crowning epochs of antiquity and the eta mod-

erna—as well as the more modest phases of national development, all of

which were described as the periodic recurrence of growth, maturity, and

decay.61 This model of history made it possible, above all, to bring the

achievements of historically distinct epochs into comparison with one an-

other and thus to judge them by a transhistorical standard of perfection:

past and present are not unique, qualitatively dissimilar epochs. They are

comparable blocks of time in which the past can repeat itself as present, in

which it can, via emulation, be achieved anew or even—by the lights of this

same point de la perfection—be outdone. To the extent, however, that a new

experience of history included both antiquity and modernity in the irre-

versible progression of historical time, making all epochs seem equally per-

fect (or, in a later formulation of Ranke’s, “equally close to God”),62 the


Gerold, 2 vols. [Munich, 1953], 2:31). This break away from humanism’s cyclical theory of history is

also clear in another of Herder’s moves. He gets himself out of the contradiction between, on the

one hand, the new sense of antiquity andmodernity’s historical difference and, on the other hand,

the old historiography of humanity’s life cycle by simply splitting the homme universel in two:

Anyone who considers the condition of the Roman lands (and they were formerly the cultured

universe!) in the last centuries will admire andmarvel at Providence’s curious way of

replenishing human powers . . . . The beauties of Roman law and knowledge were unable to

replenish powers that had disappeared, to reconstruct nerves that felt no breath of life, to

rouse the motivating forces that lay flat—that is, death! a worn out corpse lying in blood—and

at that point, in the north, a newman was born. [Ibid., 2:39]

63. Francois-ReneChateaubriand,Essai historique, politique, et moral sur les revolutions

anciennes et modernes, ed. L. Louvet (Paris, n.d.), p. 613; hereafter abbreviated EH. See also

Reinhard Koselleck, “Der neuzeitliche Revolutionsbegriff als geschichtlicheKategorie,” Studium

Generale 22 (1969): 825–38.

64. “M’obstinant dans l’Essai a juger le present par le passe, je deduis bien des consequences,

mais je pars d’unmauvais principe; je nie aujourd’hui la majeure de mes raisonnements, et tous

ces raisonnments tombent a terre.Dazu gehore vor allem der Irrtum de vouloir conclure de la

societe ancienne a la societe moderne; de juger, les uns par les autres, des temps et des hommes qui

n’avoient aucun rapport” (EH, pp. 614–15).

65. “Le genie de l’homme ne circule point dans un cercle dont il ne peut sortir. Au contraire (et

pour continuer l’image), il trace des cercles concentriques qui vont en s’elargissant, et dont la

circonference s’accroıtra sans cesse dans un espace infini” (EH, p. 614). The figure of the spiral

comparability of history itself vanished. Andwith that the historicalparallel

lost its meaning, as Chateaubriand himself attested most impressively for

the French case in his Essai historique, politique, et moral sur les revolutions

anciennes et modernes considerees dans leurs rapports avec la revolution fran-

caise.

In the version of the Essai published in 1797, Chateaubriand still aimed

at examining whether the new revolutionary government rested on “true

principles” and thus promised to endure or whether, alternately, even this

change in world circumstance would lead to the realization “que l’homme

faible dans ses moyens et dans son genie, ne fait que se repeter sans cesse.”63

The comparison is carried out on five ancient and seven modern revolu-

tions and results in a discrediting, decided in advance, of this most recent

revolution, which he loathed. But when Chateaubriand published a new

edition of the Essai in 1826, he considered it necessary to comment exten-

sively on his old text and not only out of political opportunismbut because

he had, in themeantime, come to the conclusion that the historicalparallels

he had drawn in 1797 were mistaken in their very premises. He had been

wrong to believe that he could draw inferences about modern society on

the basis of ancient society or that he could compare periods and people

that in actual fact had “no relation” to one another.64 It was wrong to claim,

additionally, that human destiny traveled in a perpetual circle; if onewanted

to retain this image, better to think of circles expanding concentrically into

infinity—spirals, in other words.65 Ancient and modern societies are fun-


makes possible a compromise between a historical progression that is periodic and one that runs

irreversibly into infinity, but it also leads out the analogy with organic life.

66.

Naude appellemodernes parmi les auteurs latins, tous ceux qui ont ecrits apres Boece. On a

beaucoup dispute de la preeminence des anciens sur les modernes; et quoique ceux-ci aient eu

de nombreux partisans, les premiers n’ont pas manque d’illustres defenseurs.Moderne se dit

encore enmatiere de gout: ainsi l’on dit l’architecturemoderne, par opposition a l’architecture

gothique, quoique l’architecturemoderne ne soit belle, qu’autant qu’elle approche du gout de

l’antique. [Encyclopedie, 22:24]

damentally dissimilar and thus not legitimately comparable. Nothing in

history repeats itself. Nothing about the present can be demonstrated or

learned from the past. With this lapidary comment, Chateaubriand attests

to the utter triumph of historicism—the triumph, that is, of the intellectual

revolution that broke onto the scene when the querelle came to an end, that

developed in the historical thinking of the Enlightenment, and that cul-

minated, at last, in the historical consciousness of a new generation, which

configured its opposition to antiquity in a new way, expressly conceivingof

its modernity as the experience of a rediscovered Christian and national

past.

7This process leading up over the eighteenth century to this epochal

change is reflected in etymology as well. One could show in detail howmod-

erne gradually withdrew from the antithesis to ancien and entered instead

into other oppositions. Replacing the polemically laden term ancien, an-

tique will now often take over the function of designating the modern

world’s historical distance from the ancient. When, in its 1779 edition, the

Encyclopedie uses the terms anciens and modernes in order to distinguish

antiquity and modernity, with Boethius serving as epochal border point, it

takes pains to specify that in matters of taste moderne no longer stands in

categorical opposition to ancien but rather to anything demauvais gout, for

instance, gothic architecture. Modern taste—which, in the very next sen-

tence, makes the overtly classicist move of pledging its allegiance to the gout

de l’antique—here sees its antipodes in “Gothic taste.”66 Twenty years later,

it is precisely the gout de gothique, the return to the Middle Ages as under-

taken by Chauteaubriand’s poetry or the first historical novels, that inau-

gurates a new self-understanding of modernity, which, in turn, places its

historically variable opposition to antiquity in a different light. The new

modernity, which, after the turn of the century, thinks of itself as romantic,

designates its opposition to antiquity with a word that, in this meaning, it

has to borrow from the brothers Schlegel: classical. In France, theword clas-


67. In his Lettres philosophiques (1734), Voltaire still refers to the bons ouvrages du siecle de Louis

XIV, but from 1751 on he employs the formulation nos auteurs classiques; see PierreMoreau’s Le

Classicisme des romantiques (Paris, 1932), p. 5. Between these two dates, there had appeared the

programmatic poem Le Temple du gout, in which Voltaire constructs a first canon of classical

French poetry from the preceding age of Louis XIV. The subsequent history of the word classique

in the eighteenth century shows, in the meantime, that classicwas still understood in the

normative sense of a canon that could encompass both ancient andmodern authors. Compare the

Encyclopedie’s entry on classique: “Classique se dit aussi des auteursmemesmodernes qui peuvent

etre proposes pourmodele par la beaute du style. Tout ecrivain qui pense solidement et qui sait

s’exprimer d’unemaniere a plaire aux personnes de gout appartient a cette classe: on ne doit

chercher des auteurs classiques que chez les nations ou la raison est parvenue a un haut degre de

culture.”

68. SeeMadame de Stael,De l’Allemagne (1810; Paris, 1857), p. 145, where she warns that anyone

who does not accept this distinctionwill never succeed in “juger sous un point de vue

philosophique le gout moderne.”

69. On the basis of newmaterial, Krauss has, in the end, corrected any prejudice about “the

Enlightenment’s hostility to history” (Krauss, “FranzosischeAufklarung und deutsche Romantik,”

sique had not yet appeared in opposition to moderne because the French

term had, throughout its history, preserved the sense of the exemplary,

which had already developed in antiquity. What’s more, when, in the eigh-

teenth century, the age of Louis XIV slipped over the horizon of lived ex-

perience, broke away to form a completed past, and was elevated to the

status of France’s classical age, the meaning of the phrase nos auteurs clas-

sique did not narrow sufficiently to serve as a periodizing term.67 As late as

1810, Madame de Stael had to go out of her way to explain that classique in

A. W. Schlegel’s sense of thewordwas not a synonym forparfaitbut referred

rather to the two great periods in world literature: “Je m’en sers ici dans

une autre acception, en considerant la poesie classique comme celle des

anciens, et la poesie romantique comme celle qui tient de quelquemaniere

aux traditions chevalereques. Cette division se rapporte egalementauxdeux

eres dumonde: celle qui a precede l’establissement du christianisme, et celle

qui l’a suivi.”68

The history of the word has at this point led us to the epochal moment

in which a new generation announces its historical self-understanding by

christening its modernity with a name of its own, le romantisme, which

binds the present to its autochthonous origins, the ChristianMiddle Ages,

and disassociates it from classical antiquity, understoodnow as an irretriev-

able, historically regarded past. The French may have borrowed the terms

classique/romantique from the Germans, but they did not have to borrow

the things themselves. Over the course of the eighteenth century,wellbefore

the import of Herder’s and Schlegel’s ideas, the relationship indicated by

this antithesis had already developed in France—the relationship, that is,

of modernity to theMiddle Ages as its proper past and to antiquity as a now

remote past. The rediscovery of the Middle Ages did not take shape against

the Enlightenment;69 it was, in fact, ushered in by the notion, widespread


Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Karl-Marx-Universitat Leipzig 12 [1963]). The following comments

complement his thesis by examining the perspectives that opened out for the Enlightenment’s

historical thought from la querelle des anciens et des modernes.

70. “Le point le plus necessaire et le plus rare pour un historien est qu’il sache exactement la

forme du gouvernement et le detail des moeurs de la nation dont il ecrit l’histoire, pour chaque

siecle. Un peintre qui ignore ce qu’on nomme il costume ne peint rien avec verite” (Francois de

Salignac Fenelon, “Lettre a M. Dacier, sur les occupations de l’Academie,”Oeuvres de Fenelon, 8

vols. [Paris, 1854], 5:478). The description of theMiddle Ages as a “modern antiquity” comes from

Jean Chapelain,De la lecture des vieux romans, ed. Alfred C. Hunter (1646; Paris, 1936), p. 219—by

my reckoning the earliest introduction of antiquite to designate a national andmedieval past,

implying a comparison to antiquity while still clinging to the notion of a “dark interval.”

71. See RaymondNaves, Le Gout de Voltaire (Paris, 1938), pp. 108–18; Henri Comte de

Boulainvillier’sEssai sur la noblesse de France is from 1732, Abbe Du Bos’sHistoire critique de

l’establissement de la Monarchie Francoise dans les Gaules from 1734.

72. Buck has discussed this development under the rubric of “antiquity’s afterlife”; see Buck,

“Das heroische und das sentimentale Antike-Bild in der franzosischen Literatur des 18.

Jahrhunderts.” If one considers the historicizationof antiquity initiated by the querelle, the same

process would now have to be portrayed in another light. Antiquity’s changed status—frommodel

to antitype—wouldmake clear the historical process whosemeaning has beenmostly profoundly

and decisively delineated by Schiller, in the antithesis between the naıve and the sentimental.

by the end of the querelle, that the ancient and modern worlds were simply

different. From this notion there sprang a further idea,whichMontesquieu,

in the Esprit des lois, was to give its richest orchestration: that every nation,

and not just every historical period, had its own unique, incommensurable

“genius.” The interest awakened by the querelle in the variety of customs

and literature from other periods—which Fenelon, in his 1714 Lettre a

l’Academie, elevates to a demand that a history be written on the basis of

the detail des moeurs de la nation—also opened one’s eyes to the tenebres de

notre antiquite moderne. 70 Both the first attempts at a new, historical criti-

cism (which, after Raymond Naves, are connected with the efforts of the

Academie des Inscriptions et des Belles Lettres) and the beginnings of thefirst,

politically interested representations of the Middle Ages by Boulainvilliers

and Du Bos fall during or just after the querelle. 71 It is possible to follow in

this a reciprocal process by which modernity and antiquity drift both to-

wards one another and further apart. On the one hand, one begins to regard

antiquity—which has gone from being an emulatable model to a historical

antitype—in ever-changing stylizations of its historical otherness: in the

idealized, bucolic images of its original simplicite andnaıvete;or, alternately,

in the primal poetry of its archaism and barbarity; or in the lionized con-

ception of the political life of the Greek polis and the Roman Republic; or

finally—after the excavations of Herculanum and Pompei—in the senti-

mental beauty of its ruins.72 On the other hand, the Middle Ages get recov-

ered, step by step, as an exemplary and national past; they get described in

their institutions and customs as a time of heroic and Christian virtue and

are brought to the present in the exemplary continuity of this or that na-


73. Jean-Baptise de la Curne de Sainte-Palaye,Memoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie, consideree

comme un etablissement politique et militaire, 3 vols. (Paris, 1759–81), 1:8.

74. See Chateaubriand,Genie du Christianisme (Paris, 1948), bk. 2, chap. 11, “Le Guerrier—

Definition du beau ideal”; hereafter abbreviatedGC; see esp. the following passage:

Si au contraire vous chantez l’agemoderne, vous serez oblige de bannir la verite de votre

ouvrage, et de vous jeter a la fois dans le beau ideal moral et dans le beau ideal physique. Trop

loin de la nature et de la religion sous tous les rapports, on ne peut representer fidelement

l’interieur de nosmenages, et moins encore le fond de nos coeurs. La chevalerie seule offre le

beaumelange de la verite et la fiction. [P. 197]

tional tradition. The discovery of the medieval origins of the modern state

was promptly followed by the discovery of chivalric poetry, the songs of the

knights and troubadours, in the service of which scholarly research and

popular editions worked hand in hand. Specialmentionmust bemadehere

of de laCurne de Sainte-Palaye,who, in 1746, beganpresentinghisMemories

sur l’ancienne chevalerie to the Academie des Inscriptions. He concluded, af-

ter a lifetime of study, that the customs of the Christian Middle Ages were

not equal to the customs of the Homeric age; they were in some respects

even superior (the passage could just as well come from Genie du Chris-

tianisme of 1802):

Un contraste singulier de religion & de galanterie, de magnificence & de

simplicite, de bravoure & de soumission; unmelange d’adresse & de

force, de patience & de courage, de belles actions produites par unmotif

chimerique & de functions Presque serviles ennobles par unmotif

eleve. Moeurs a la fois grossieres et respectables, aussi dignes d’etre etu-

diees sur-tout par un Francois, que celles des Grecs ou des Orientaux,

comparables en bien des points, & memes supeierues en quelques uns,

a celles des temps heroiques chantes par Homere.73

The image of the Middle Ages that is commonly attributed to Chateau-

briand and Madame de Stael can, in many respects, already be detected in

Sainte-Palaye and the works of the other Enlightenment scholars who fol-

lowed his lead by researching and editing medieval literature. All that was

left for the Genie du Christianisme was to carry out the analogies already

sketched out between the two antiquities—the old, heathen, heroic age and

the modern, Christian one. The innovation here—Chateaubriand’s dis-

tinctive contribution—lies, then, in his modern poetics, which ushers in

romanticism, the age of modernity (l’age moderne) that comprises both the

Christian Middle Ages and the historical present, and yet it appears as an

age whose high point has already passed.74 The rediscovered poetry of the

Middle Ages is now attractive not only because the Christian knight, sus-

pended in the opposition between barbaric social conditions and a perfect


75. The reasoning here seeks to explain why true literature is a poetry of the past and cannot be

found in the present:

Nous voyons chaque jour se passer sous nos yeux des choses extraordinaires sans y prendre

aucun interet; mais nous aimons a entendre raconter des faits obscurs qui sont deja loin de

nous. C’est qu’au fond les plus grands evenements de la terre sont petits en eux-memes: notre

ame, qui sent ce vice des affaires humaines, et qui tend sans cesse a l’immensite, tache de ne les

voir que dans le vague pour les agrandir. [GC, p. 195]

76. See Friedrich Schlegel, Uber das Studium der griechischen Poesie, ed. Paul Hankammer

(Godesberg, 1947), p. 62:

Art must follow nature; artificial culturemust follow natural culture . . . . Nature will remain

the guiding principle of culture until it has lost this right . . . . Even in the earliest periods of

European culture, one finds unmistakable traces of the artificial origin of modern poetry. The

power, the materialmay have been provided by nature; but the guiding principle of aesthetic

culture was not the drive, but rather certain governing concepts.

religion, lives up to the highest notions of heroism and ideal beauty but also

because true poetry requires “cette vieillesse et cette incertitudede tradition

que demandent les muses”; it arises, therefore, from historical distance and

a whiff of the faraway (GC, p. 195).75 Modernity’s sense of self, which Cha-

teaubriand defines as an “indeterminacy of the passions” unknown to an-

tiquity and that he personified in the figure of Rene, transcends the

contemporary because it experiences beauty only in the no-longer; it ex-

periences the authentic only in the sentimental return to naıvete. TheGenie

du Christianisme is still missing a word for this, a word that would bring

together a sentimental relationship to naturewith the lure of thehistorically

remote as discovered in medieval poetry—the word romantic, whose his-

tory we turn to now.

8How could a word that in its origins designated the bygone world of the

old chivalric romances come over the eighteenth century to mean a new

feeling for nature, eventually linking history and landscape—the lure of the

faraway and the perception of unconstrained nature—so tightly together

that the turn of the century’s generation found its consciousness of mo-

dernity aptly expressed in the correspondence between the two? Themajor

stages in the word’s history sketched out here can be reduced to a common

denominator, which Friedrich Schlegel has surely given its sharpest for-

mulation: the separation of modern from ancient art is directed by “gov-

erning concepts”; it is “artificial culture.” The prehistory of “the romantic”

offers the best imaginable example of the “artificial origin of modern po-

etry.”76

The word was first derived from the Middle Latin romanice (“poetry in


77. “Romance story,” “romancial tales,” “romancial,” “romancy”; see Logan Pearsall Smith,

FourWords: Romantic, Originality, Creative, Genius (Oxford, 1924), pp. 3–17; hereafter abbreviated

FW.

78. See Fernand Baldensperger, “‘Romantique,’ ses analogues et ses equivalents,”Harvard

Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 19 (1937): 13–105. Baldenberger, to whomwe have

referred for all earlier literature, gives as first citation the following title from the year 1650:Th.

Bayly, Herba Parietis: Or, theWallflower . . . Being a HistoryWhich Is Partly True, Partly Romantic,

Morally Divine.

79. Thus in Goethe’sWerther (1774): “It is settled, Lotte, I mean to die, and I write that to you

without romantic exaggeration.”Compare Baldensperger, “‘Romantique,’ ses analogues et ses

equivalents,” p. 75.

80. The following citation—from the entry on romantisch in the GrimmBrothers’ dictionary—

sums up this development: “Hartenstein, in the first ed. of 1764, later romantische handlungen

[romantic plots]; insofar as beauty or the sublime exceeds their familiar averages, one tends to call

them romanisch (or romanhaft in a later edition)” (JacobGrimm andWilhelmGrimm,Deutsches

Worterbuch [Leipzig, 1893], p. 1155, s.v. “romantisch”).

the vernacular”) to designate themost successful postancient genre, the ro-

mance (Fr. romanz, Eng. romount), but its ascendancy began at a timewhen

the distance between the medieval romance world and contemporary life

was strongly felt. This feeling both sparked a critique of the romance and

laid bare a new aesthetic allure in anything romancelike. The adjective ro-

mantic appears for the first time in England between 1650 and 1660 in vari-

ous forms and spellings.77 It means “resembling the old romances” and is

thus the opposite of the true, the nonfictional, or theprosaically real.78From

this root meaning—“something that only happens in romances, not in real

life”—there emerge side-by-side both a derogatory meaning and a lauda-

tory one. On the one hand, the word romantic develops into a byword for

the improbable, the merely fictional, the chimerical, or, with an eye to the

feelings of the romance characters themselves, thehysterical (seeFW, p. 7).79

But what was dismissed by disparagers of novels and critics of the imagi-

nation did not cease to be alluring for romance readers for whom the im-

probability of the plots was themost strange and gripping thing about them

and for whom the extravagance of emotions could come across as unusual,

even admirable.80 And so the word romantic develops, conversely, from the

unrealistically romancelike to the out-of-the-ordinary and further on to the

poetic, with the allure of the romancelike soon insinuating itself into com-

parable real-life events, events in antiquated places and similar settings and

eventually in the solitude of nature itself. This is whatmarks the path to the

world-understanding of the romantic generation, which came to the fore

around 1800—the steps of a progressive transferal of the word romantic

onto moments of real life and aspects of nature.

At the beginnings of this development there are places that call romances

to mind and that are therefore described as romantic. As early as 1654, John

Evelyn was recording in his diary that “Salisbury Plain remindedme of the


81. Samuel Pepys, entry for 13 June 1666,The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Henry B.Wheatley, 9

vols. (London, 1893–99), 5:307.

82. Thus, for instance, John Evelyn’s diary entry for June 23, 1679: “The grotts in the chalky rock

are pretty: ’tis a romantic object, and the place altogether answers the most poetical description

that can be made of solitude, precipice, prospect” (quoted in Baldensperger, “‘Romantique,’ ses

analogues et ses equivalents,” p. 25).

83. See James Thomson’s Seasons, quoted in FW, p. 11: “‘oaks romantic,’” “‘romantic’

mountain,” “where the dun umbradge o’er the falling strem, romantic, hangs.”

pleasant lives of the shepherds we read of in romances.” Elsewhere, he trots

out the new word for just such a memory: “There is also on the side of this

horrid Alp a very romantic seat near Bath” (quoted in FW, pp. 10–11). A

few years later, in Samuel Pepys’s diary, we find the first evidence of the

extension of romantic to describe an out-of-the-ordinary event. At a fu-

neral, a group of simple sailors movingly declare their loyalty to their dead

commander, which Pepys introduceswith the followingwords: “Therehap-

pened this extraordinary case—one of the most romantique that ever I

heard of in my life, and could not have believed, but that I did see it.”81

Improbable, yet true: “romantique” comes close here to stepping into the

formulation that, in Aristotelian poetics, establishes the higher truth of po-

etry over history, though in Pepys’s comments it serves only to give the “po-

etry of life” an edge over prosaic reality. The romantic moment is distinct

because it fulfills an expectation that ordinarily only a romance—and not

real life—could redeem. In these terms, romanticism is an attitude that sees

itself as viewing life through the medium of literary experience and sen-

sation. This is no less true of its further development, in which romantic is

transferred from old castles and romancelike settings to unconstrainedna-

ture. The artificial origin of the romantic sense of nature is, at this point,

palpable, as Logan Pearsall Smith long since recognized: “It is Nature seen

through the medium of literature, through a mist of associations and sen-

timents derived from poetry and fiction” (FW, p. 13). The texts show step

by step how the romantic qualities of landscapes were first viewed by way

of analogy with descriptions in romances,82 from which they later became

more and more detached so that ever since Addison’s Remarks on Italy

(1705) and Thomson’s Seasons (1726–30) natural scenes get called romantic

even when they no longer call to mind potentially romancelike events.83

With this semiotic turn, the English word romantic moved further away

from its French counterpart romanesque, which, in the eighteenth century,

retained the narrower sense of the romancelike. And so it happened that in

1776, the French translator of Shakespeare, Letourneur, found that roman-

esque did not properly capture the sense of romantic, leading him toborrow

the word romantique back from English to describe the romantic qualities

of nature. Letourneur, like Girardin soon after him (De la composition des


84. “Si ce vallon n’est que pittoresque, c’est un point de l’etendue qui prete au peintre et qui

merite d’etre distingue et saisi par l’art. Mais s’il est Romantique, on desire s’y reposer, l’oeil de

plait a le regarder et bientot l’imagination attendrie le peuple de scenes interessantes” (quoted in

Baldensperger, “‘Romantique,’ ses analogues et ses equivalents,” p. 76).

85. Quoted in Robert,Dictionnaire alphabetique et analogique de la langue francaise, s.v.

“romantique.” To the quoted passage, Girardin adds the following explanation: “J’ai prefere le

mot anglais, Romantique, parce que celui-ci designe plutot la fable du roman, et l’autre . . . la

situation, et l’impression touchante que nous en recevons.”

86. Chateaubriand: “Jusqu’a ce moment la solitude avait ete regardee comme affreuse; mais les

chretiens lui trouverentmille charmes. Les anachoretes ecriverent de la douceur du rocher et des

delices de la contemplation: c’est le premier pas de la poesie descriptive” (GC, bk. 1, p. 233).

paysages [1777]), also explains why the word pittoresque is not an adequate

substitute for romantic in this context.84 Like the romanesque, the pictur-

esque or painterly refers to the objective qualities of an image or natural

scene. The romantic, however, has less to do with the objective beauty of

nature than it does with the subjective, melancholy, or “interesting” effect

nature engenders: “Si la situation pittoresque enchante les yeux, si la situ-

ation poetique interesse l’esprit et la memoire, retracant les scenes acra-

diennes en nous, si l’une et l’autre peuvent etre formees par le peintre, et la

poete, il est une autre situation que la nature seule peut offrir: c’est la sit-

uation Romantique.”85 The romantic qualities of nature are here under-

stood as an effect produced by nature alone and touching the imagination,

while the picturesque speaks only to the eyes. Girardin clearly no longerhas

inmind that, in fact, the romantic, no less than thepicturesque,presupposes

a scene from life or nature regarded through themediumof art, of romance,

or painting. He now attributes to nature itself everything that the word ro-

mantique had imported into it from theworld of romance, and yet allmem-

ory of the artificial formation of the romantic sense of nature is not thereby

extinguished. As late as 1798, the Dictionnaire de l’Academie retains, in its

explanation of romantique, the literary analogy that underwrites its original

function: “Il se dit ordinairement des lieux, des paysages, qui rappellent a

l’imagination les descriptions de poemes et des romans.”

The foregoing development of the word romantique does not yet capture

the full concept of the romantic, however, as cultivated by the romantic

school in Germany and then brought to France by Madame de Stael. Ro-

manticism understood as the aesthetic experience of nature, which Cha-

teaubriand described in his chapter on the modern poesie descriptive that

Christianity had made possible—he called it the poetry of solitude—86 this

romanticism had to fuse first with romanticism understood as the allure,

first discovered inmedieval poetry, of a world sunk into the distant past and

only knowable by its relics. There is no need to trace out this other lineage

behind the word romantic (or the German romantisch), which leads from


87. See RichardUllmann andHelene Gotthard,Geschichte des Begriffes “Romantisch” in

Deutschland (Berlin, 1927), p. 93.

88. Herder,Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung derMenscheit, 2:45.

89. The sentence that follows the passage quoted here would, for what it is worth, serve as a

description of de la Curne Sainte-Palaye: “One has compared the spirit of ‘Nordic chivalry’ with

the heroic ages of the Greeks—and indeed found points of comparison.”The possible affiliation

between the two demands closer examination.

90. See Goethe, maxim 868 (written between 1818 and 1827),Maximen und Reflexionen, in

GoethesWerke: Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Erich Trunz (Munich, 1981), 12:488. Compare the

following sentence fromGC, p. 192: “Enfin, les images favorites des poetes enclins a la reverie sont

presque toutes enpruntees d’objets negatifs, tels que le silence des nuits, l’ombre des bois, la

solitude des montagnes, la paix des tombeaux, qui ne sont que l’absence du bruit, de la lumiere,

des hommes et des inquietudes de la vie.”

91. The relevant discussion is JoachimRitter, Landschaft—Zur Funktion des Asthetischen in der

modernen Gesellschaft (Munich, 1963)

the old romances to the Italian romantic epic and then further on to Wie-

land, explaining how it is that romantic could come, over the second half of

the eighteenth century, to describe the entire period of chivalric and trou-

badour poetry (see FW, p. 15).87 It may be enough to adduce a passage from

Herder’s tract Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Men-

schheit, which shows that the word romantisch, as a periodizing term, still

preserved something of the aesthetic bearing that seemed most fitting for

the word in its recent adjectival forms: “The spirit of the century weaved

and tied together themost incongruous qualities: braveryandmonasticism,

adventure and gallantry, tyranny and magnanimity; tied it to the totality

that appears to us now—between the Romans and us—as a ghost, a ro-

mantic adventure; once it was nature, it was—truth.”88 The traits that

Herder singles out from the period, which he still regards as an “interlude,”

are familiar to us from de la Curne Sainte-Palaye.89 But Herder adds some-

thing to this image of the “gothic” past, and this new element accounts for

its romantic character: “once it was nature, it was—truth.” It is not yet the

rediscovered national and Christian past but rather its irrecoverably van-

ished present—the now improbable, but once true adventure of bygone

time—thatmakes up the allure of the romantic. To write history is to create

an image of the lost nature of another, now alien, yet still familiar time! If

one takes stock of what it is that makes history romantic in this definition,

then its connection to the romantic qualities of landscapewill becomeclear.

For in nature as in history, the romantic impulse is not to look for what is

present; it is to search out everything distant, absent, as the antiromantic

Goethe testifies most beautifully: “The so-called romantic quality of a re-

gion is a quiet sense of the sublime in the guise of the past or, what is the

same, solitude, absence, seclusion.”90 Landscape is nature in the guise of the

past; it is the sensation of some lost harmony with the world’s totality!91 In


this bearing, which looks into the distant reaches of history to find the truth

of a nature that was and looks into the nearness of the natural surroundings

to find the absent totality, humanity’s lost childhood, history and landscape

come together in a reciprocal relationship. In this relationship is rooted the

self-image of a generation that, paradoxically, experiences its modernity as

a conflict with the present age and no longer as an antithesis to the olden

days. Regardless of whether they located their historical archetype in the

transfiguring distance of the ChristianMiddle Ages or expected the peak of

modern culture to arrive in the future in the form of Friedrich Schlegel’s

“aesthetic revolution,” discontent with one’s own incomplete present is the

common denominator shared by conservative and progressive romantics

alike. It hurries us on to the point when a new generation will root its mo-

dernity in a rather different relationship to history.

9In romanticism’s historical self-conception, the consciousness of mo-

dernity reaches back to the Middle Ages as a self-designated point of origin

and thus encompasses the longest chronological period in the history of the

term. In the nineteenth century, this consciousness develops alongpeculiar

lines. This development, in fact, is characterized by something more than

modernity’s loosening itself from its equation with the romantic, an equa-

tion canonized by A. W. Schlegel. If the symbiosis of the romantic and the

modern falls prey to the term’s oft-observed dynamic—if, that is, a new

consciousness of the modern comes to the fore, determined to be more

modern than the romantic—then something emerges at this point that we

have yet to encounter in the history of the term. While the wordmoderne’s

semiotic compass is busy narrowing itself from the Christian age in its en-

tirety to the life span of a single generation, finally shriveling away to the

fashionable alternation of the latest literary trends, the newly coined term

modernite no longer even understands itself as epochally opposed to some

determinate past. The consciousness of modernity that succeeds romanti-

cism’s understanding of the world emerges with the experience of how

quickly the romanticism of today can, upon becoming the romanticism of

yesterday, appear classical in its own right. With that, the great historical

antithesis between the old and the new, between ancient andmodern taste,

gradually loses its currency. The world-historical opposition of the roman-

tic to the classical is reduced to the relative opposition between whatever,

for a given set of contemporaries, is current and those same things’ ap-

pearance to the following generation as overtaken and outmoded. And in

the reflection on this process of art and taste’s accelerating historicalchange


92. Martini, “Modern, DieModerne,” p. 402.

93. Stendhal,Racine et Shakespeare, ed. PierreMartino (Paris, 1925), p. 45; hereafter abbreviated

RS.

94. “Je respecte infiniment ces sortes de classiques, et je les plains d’etre nes dans un siecle ou les

fils ressemblent si peu a leurs peres. Quel changement de 1785 a 1824! Depuis deuxmille ans que

nous savons l’histoire dumonde, une revolution aussi brusque dans les habitudes, les idees, les

croyances, n’est peut-etre jamais arrivee” (RS, p. 91).

there now coalesces a consciousness of modernity that ultimately only ever

distinguishes itself from itself.

Fritz Martini has shown how the historical period encompassed by the

romantic notion of themodernprogressively shrinks inGermanyonce there

comes to pass a certain reversal, anticipated by Solger’s Erwin (1815). In

Heinrich Heine and the Young Germans, modernity and romanticism go

from being synonyms to being antitheses.92 In the 1830s, the YoungGerman

movement gave a new explicitness to the termmodern—nowwhittleddown

to the present, the current, the realistic—and, by identifying itwith theZeit-

geist, they turned it programmatically against the ramshackle romantic

world. This is preceded, however, by a retooling, in France and Italy, of the

terminological pair romantic and classical in whichwe can see this reversal’s

first moment, which sets the ball rolling, leading again to that modernite

which only ever distinguishes itself from itself. It was Stendhal who, in his

great essay “Racine et Shakespeare” (1823–1825), gave this process itsdecisive

turn, furthering the polemic over romanticismo begun in Italy in the circle

around Ludovico di Breme and appealing to his generation’s special, indeed

unprecedented, historical experience.

“De memoire d’historien, jamais peuple n’a eprouve, dans ses moeurs

et dans ses plaisirs, de changement plus rapide et plus total que celui de 1780

a 1823; et l’on veut nous donner toujours lameme literature.”93ForStendhal,

history since 1789 stands in complete contrast to its entire courseheretofore.

He finds in the revolution an event separating the Francais de 1785 from his

generation as though by an abyss. It would be unreasonable to expect an

appreciation of classical literature from the “children of the revolution,”

who instead of readingQuintusCurtius andTacitus,wentmarchingagainst

Moscow, witnesses to the astonishing upheavals of 1814; theywouldfind the

classics, their comedy and their pathos alike, unbearable (seeRS, pp. 79, 45).

The knowledge that the course of history has become utterly different since

1789 stands at the beginning of an epochal consciousness that perceives the

step from old to new as a total rupture in time; the revolution has cut the

cords between past and present. Modern society is separated from the an-

cien regime not only by its new constitution, its habits and its ideas, but also

by its taste, by a different relationship to the beautiful.94 For it is precisely


95. For a parallel in the realm of history writing, which, since the revolution, has been faced

with the problem of “catching up with an accelerating history,” see Reinhard Koselleck in

Nachahmung und Illusion, ed. Jauss (Munich, 1964), pp. 194, 234.

those qualities that one’s grandfathers found most delightful in literature

that now make the grandchildren yawn. If one regards its effects, beauty is

directly beautiful only for its initial public, the one for which it was pro-

duced, and it is beautiful only to the extent that it aims for and achieves this

currency. It is from this notion that Stendhal derived his famous definition

of the romantic, which broke with the previous history of the word, con-

verting its traditional meaning into its opposite. The romantic is now no

longer the allure of that which transcends the present, the remote and the

bygone, which stand, as though in a field of tension, over against the real

and the everyday. The romantic is rather the latest trend, whatever is beau-

tiful now—which, once outmoded, will have to forfeit its immediate allure,

capable then of arousing a merely historical interest: “Le romaticisme est

l’art de presenter aux peoples les oeuvres litteraires qui, dans l’etat actuel

de leurs habitudes et de leurs croyances, sont susceptibles de leur donner

le plus de plaisir possible. Le classicisme, au contraire, leur presente la lit-

terature qui donnait le plus grand plaisir possible a leurs arriere-grands-

peres” (RS, p. 39).

With this definition, romantique ends its run as a periodizing concept;

the great historical antithesis between romanticism and classicism is over.

For everything classical was once, in its ownmoment, itself romantic: “So-

phocle et Euripide furent eminemment romantiques” (RS, p. 39). Stendhal’s

notion of the romantic takes over the original function of the Latin mod-

ernus: to designate the historical now of the present; it gives themodern the

meaning of the highest worth and explains everything classical—in purely

functional terms, via a simple shift of historical modalities—as the roman-

ticism that once was. And with that we have come full circle, and the sub-

sequent experience of modernity is set. In contrast to the tradition of the

term moderne up to this point, the word romantique—in its new meaning

of “current,” that which culminates in the now of the present—is no longer

opposed to some antiquitas, some authoritative past. In the experience of

recent history, the events of 1789 have made the subsequent period seem

like a movement freshly begun and accelerating under its own weight and

the previous period like amired-downandmotionless long-ago.95Stendhal,

accordingly, no longer opposes to this (in his sense of romantic)modernity

some antiquity, some past that predated it and could serve it as model or

first stage. In his 1823 tract, the consciousness of modernity only ever repels

itself, so whatever is current today gets left behind, ever and again, in this

362 Hans-Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition

96. This formulation occurs in Baudelaire: “En unmot, pour que toutemodernite soit digne de

devenir antiquite, il faut que la beaute mysterieuse que la vie humaine y met involontairement en

ait ete extraite” (P, p. 885).

97. The opposite position, that of conventional aesthetics, is made clear at the outset by the taste

of sundry visitors to the Louvre, who believe that, in the presence of “masterworks,” they now

have art in its entirety.

98. “L’idee que l’homme se fait du beau s’imprime dans tout son ajustement, chiffonne ou

raidit son habit, arrondit ou aligne son geste, et meme penetre subtilement, a la longue, les traits

de son visage. L’homme finit par ressembler a ce qu’il voudrait etre” (P, p. 874).

perpetual stop-and-start, becoming the romanticism of yesterday and thus

classical in its own right. There emerges now a new notion of classicism,

which is defined only in negative terms, by the pastness of successfulworks,

and no longer by some bygone perfection.

If, in the incessant conversion of the current to the classical, evenmod-

ernite itself becomes antiquite, 96 then one wonders about the nature of the

beauty that this never-ending process is always producing.How can beauty

satisfy this constantly shifting ideal of nouveaute, how can it mirror in art

the unique qualities of the present age while at the same time standing in

opposition to itself, insofar as, once deemed classic, it seems immortal, im-

pervious to historical change, indeed eternal? This is the question asked by

Baudelaire in his remarks on Constantin Guys, the Peintre de la viemoderne

(1859). His answer, which, as a “theorie rationnelle et historique du beau,”

is meant to stand in opposition to conventional aesthetics, returns to Sten-

dhal’s modern definition of beauty: “que le Beau n’est que la promesse du

bonheur” (P, p. 875).97 According to Baudelaire, Stendhal was wrong to

claim that beauty is utterly subject to the ever-changing ideal of happiness

(see P, p. 876). The nature of beauty can be grasped neither by one-sidedly

surveying current trends—that is, the characteristic features of an epoch,

its fashion, its morality, and its passions—nor by simply reviewing the an-

tique store classicism of bygone masterworks, on which the aesthetic Phi-

listinism of the bourgeois is based (see P, p. 873). Beauty in the terms

demanded by Baudelaire’s consciousness ofmodernity is clearest in fashion

as seen by Constantin Guys, who makes an effort “de degager de la mode

ce qu’elle peut contenir de poetique dans l’historique, de tirer l’eternel du

transitoire” (P, p. 884). Fashion is the startingpoint forBaudelaire’smodern

aesthetic because there is a twofold allure peculiar to it. It embodies the

poetic qualities of historical things, the eternal in the ephemeral. Beauty

steps forth in fashion, not as a timeless ideal known in advance, but rather

as an idea of beauty made by man for himself, in which the morality and

aesthetics of his period disclose themselves andwhich allowshimtobecome

something like what he wants to be.98 Fashion demonstrates what Baude-

laire calls the “twofold nature of beauty,” which is his abstract definition of


99. “Il [ConstantinGuys] cherche ce quelque chose qu’on nous permettra d’appeler la

modernite; car il ne se presente pas de meilleurmot pour exprimer l’idee en question. Il s’agit,

pour lui, de degager de la mode ce qu’elle peut contenir de poetique dans l’historique, de tirer

l’eternel du transitoire” (P, p. 884).

100. In Chateaubriand’sMemoires d’outre-tombe, 6 vols. (Brussels, 1849), which provides

Robert with his earliest citation, the wordmodernite still stands in direct opposition to the

romantic; pressed shoulder to shoulder with vulgarite, its meaning is derogatory: “La vulgarite, la

modernite de la duane et du passeport, contrastaient avec l’orage, la porte gothique, le son du cor

et le bruit du torrent.”

modernite: “La modernite, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la

moitie de l’art, don’t l’autre moitie est l’eternel et l’immuable” (P, p. 884).

With this last milestone in the history of the word, our remarks have

arrived at the threshold of our own present modernity and thus at the fore-

seen endpoint. For now we can see with what justification it was said at the

outset that our preunderstanding of modernity reaches back historically to

the aesthetic and historical self-understanding of Baudelaire and his con-

temporaries, so the appearance of the new word la modernite after 1848 can

serve, for our epochal consciousness, as a boundary line between the de-

parted historical world and the familiar one. Baudelaire introduces lamod-

ernite into his ruminations on the connections between le beau, la mode, et

le bonheur expressly as a neologism.99 It ismeant to name the twofoldnature

of beauty, in which the vie moderne of both the historical everyday and of

current political events discloses itself to our understanding; the aesthetic

and the historical experiences of modernite coincide for Baudelaire. The

changedhistorical self-understanding thatmanifests itself in thismodernity

can once again be grasped by considering the opposite number that Baude-

laire’s formulation entails. This opposite of modernite is not, as one might

expect in this case, romanticism.100 Although romanticism is in fact thepast

that lies directly behind Baudelaire’s modernity, it is for that very reason

not regarded as the latter’s antithesis. Because in the process of historical

experience modernity for Baudelaire, like romanticism for Stendhal, is al-

ways separating itself from itself (“Il y a eu une modernite pour chaque

peintre ancien”) (P, p. 884), every modernite inescapably becoming an an-

tiquite in its own right, no particular past—not even, pace Benjamin, clas-

sical antiquity—can serve as constitutive antithesis to the beauty ofmodern

art. It is wholly in keepingwith this newaesthetic experience thatBaudelaire

opposes to the unstoppable, onward-rollingwheel ofmodernite a stationary

pole that comes into being as the past is repeatedly sloughed off. For the

producing artist, the ephemeral, the momentary, the historical is only half

of art, fromwhich its other half, the lasting, the immutable, the poeticmust

first be distilled. Similarly, the experience of modernite includes, for his-

torical consciousness, an aspect of the eternal as its opposite number. But


101. The association between the eternal and the passe can also be found at the end of the essay

on “RichardWagner et Tannhauser”: “Je me crois autorise, par l’etude du passe, c’est-a-dire de

l’eternel, a prejuger l’absolu contraire, etc.” (Baudelaire, “RichardWagner et ‘Tannhauser’ a

Paris,”Oeuvres completes de Baudelaire, p. 1066).

102. “Cet element transitoire, fugitif, dont les metamorphoses sont si frequentes, vous n’avez

pas le droit de le mepriser ou de vous en passer. En le supprimant, vous tombez forcement dans le

vide d’une beaute abstraite et indefinissable, comme celle de l’unique femme avant le premier

peche” (P, p. 884).

103. In Baudelaire, this break with the Platonism of classical aesthetics is visible only in its first

outlines; but in Valery, it and all its consequenceswill emerge into the light of day; see

Blumenberg, “Sokrates und das ‘objet ambigu,’” Epimeleia: Die Sorge der Philosophie um den

Menschen (Munich, 1964), p. 285. Since the present essay, as a contribution to the history of

concepts, leads no further than the threshold of our present-daymodernity and thus cannot

untangle the aspects of the modern in contemporary literature, I would like to refer the reader to a

colloquiumdedicated to the transition from classical to modern art: Immanente Asthetik—

Asthetische Reflexion: Lyrik als Paradigma der Moderne, ed. Wolfgang Iser (Munich, 1965).

this is by no means a belated variant of the Platonic-Christian antithesis of

time and eternity, which romanticism had revived and worn out. This is,

rather, that antithesis’s opposite! For eternel here takes the place earlier oc-

cupied by antiquity or the classical; like ideal beauty (le beau unique et ab-

solu), the eternal (l’eternel et l’immuable) has, as the antithesis ofmodernite,

the character of a sloughed-off past (P, p. 875).101 Even that which appears

timelessly beautiful to us at some point had to be produced. Timeless

beauty—this necessarily follows from Baudelaire’s theorie rationnelle et his-

torique du beau and his exposition thereof with reference to fashion—is

nothing other than the idea of beauty in its status as the past, an idea of

beauty proposed and then repeatedly cast aside by men.

The exemplary art of the peintre de la viemodernediscovers in thefleeting

and the contingent an element of undying beauty; it sets poetic qualities

free in fashion and history, which classical taste had ignored or prettified.

For Baudelaire, true art, then as now, cannot do without an “element tran-

sitoire, fugitif, dont les metamorphoses sont si frequentes.” If it is absent,

the work of art stumbles inevitably into the empty space of a beauty as ab-

stract and indeterminate as the beauty of the only woman before the Fall.102

Eve after the Fall is the epitome of beauty in modernite’s understanding of

theworld, the emblemof a revolt against themetaphysics of timelessbeauty,

truth, and goodness! This bold analogy puts the seal on the antithesis of

modernite and eternel, which opens up the most recent—and for our pur-

poses last—chapter in the terminological history of themodern, but which

also testifies to the anti-Platonic impulses in Baudelaire’s aesthetic, which

cleared the way for the aesthetic experience and the new artistic canon that

characterize the modernity of our own present day.103

jauss - modernity and its literary tradition

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