"There is a popular misconception of the Romantics as rebelling against all formal constraints in favor of untrammeled freedom (as in their fondness for "wild" gardens" around those "broken" columns), and indeed we have heard Schlegel's Julius explicitly rejecting "all that … we call 'order'" in his Lucinde project. But it is clear that in fact he and his creator have a veritable passion for form — in Wallace Stevens's famous phrasing, a "rage for order" — and that what they're rejecting is only certain "conventions" of order and form. I prefer to think of Schlegel as a "romantic formalist" — a term that I apply to myself as well — and I will venture to say that the principal difference between Romantic romantic formalism and Postmodernist romantic formalism is that the latter, more than the former, inclines to the ironic (though impassioned) reorchestration of older conventions — including the classical and the neoclassical — rather than to their rejection in favor of "new" forms."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesPostmodern authorsJohns Hopkins University alumniNovelists from MarylandJohns Hopkins University faculty
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
A little earlier, Barth mentions "the 'broken' columns of Romantic landscape architecture." Julius is the protagonist of Schlegel's novel Lucinde (1799). The Wallace Stevens quote is from the poem "The Idea of Order at Key West" (1934). (Ellipsis in Schlegel quote is in Barth's text.)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Barth
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
John Barth
John Simmons Barth (May 27, 1930 – April 2, 2024) was an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work.
39 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by John Barth →
Related Quotes
"Marilyn Marsh, who had about had it with Spain, declared to him [the old Spanish man]: … But it redounds to your nati…"
"One of the things I miss about teaching is that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back…"
"Women thought me charmingly shy, and sometimes stopped at nothing to “penetrate the disdainful shell of my fear,” as …"
"[N]othing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it, from outside, by pe…"
"[T]here is no will-o'-the-wisp so elusive as the cause of any human act."
"[I]t is sometimes pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him."
"More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations."
"'Tis e'er the wont of simple folk to prize the deed and o'erlook the motive, and of learned folk to discount the deed…"
"'Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion."
"The night-sea journey may be absurd, but here we swim, will-we nill-we, against the flood, onward and upward, toward …"