Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 8 Number 1, April 2007
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Marshall, David. The Frame of Art: Fictions of Experience, 1750-1815. John Hopkins University Press, 2005, 259 pages, ISBN 0-8018-8233-8.
Reviewed by
David Marshall’s goal is to complicate the neat, Kantian category of aesthetics as it emerged and has become understood in retrospect. His primary strategy is to address Enlightenment aesthetics by beginning his study immediately before the term gained the discursive power it achieved by the end of the 19th century. In so doing, he intends to reveal what Marshall views as a central contradiction in the field of aesthetics: even as Enlightenment thought began to carve out aesthetic experience as a discrete experience deserving special attention in philosophy and professional criticism, it was revealing itself multiply as having the power to blur distinctions between art and reality rather than separate them.
Marshall demonstrates this fomenting “problem” for Enlightenment aesthetics through examining philosophical, critical, and fictional accounts. Adeptly, he crosses several comparative fields. For example, in chapter one, he examines the problem of the picturesque and the problem of art and artifice through 18th century gardening, landscaping, and landscape painting. He examines the earliest Enlightenment aesthetic philosophy in “The Impossible Work of Art,” (Chapter 2) and “Arguing by Analogy: Hume’s Standard of Taste” (Chapter 7) he addresses the philosophical discourses of Kames, Pope, Lessing, and Hume (and, briefly, Burke and Wittgenstein) to find that the earliest Enlightenment aesthetic discourse is trapped by the frame of art it sought to delineate.
But Marshall seems most in his element in the remaining chapters, where he performs close readings of literature, examining not only the chosen pieces themselves but the tendency of works such as Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné to “compulsively” represent representation (if you will) within the borders of their own fictive--and metafictive--worlds. Here, the nuanced and sophisticated examination of frames within frames bears the most fruit and allows Marshall to easily underscore his conclusion that art and everyday experience did not fall neatly into the separate categories Enlightenment aesthetics attempted to delineate.
His ability to work across comparative fields, however, is not matched by an ability to work across theoretical disciplines. The study may have been helped by a more interdisciplinary approach, which could include the explanatory power of reception theory and cognitive studies in trying to get at the “how” of affective, aesthetic experience, or at least draw upon phenomenology (which involves several of the figures he evokes, including Kant and Hume) as a framing discourse. Similarly, the study lacks a historic perspective on aesthetic theory, which, understood holistically, predates the emergence of a titular discipline. Though his examination of the emergence of the word “aesthetics” into English discourse via German philosophy in the 18th century is well taken, aesthetic theory did not emerge fully formed from the Enlightenment and was shaped by a history of thought that reaches back to Greco-Roman philosophy.
As a reader I experienced a strong desire for Marshall to extend his identification of the past “problem” of Enlightenment aesthetics to a contributive solution that could find a place within current aesthetic theory. Ideally, finding a more theoretically balanced paradigm to the uneasy relationships between art, artifice, and “reality,” would seem to be the hero’s quest that such a study should at least hint at if not solve. However, to his credit, Marshall explicitly states in his introduction that his intent is to explore, illustrate, and narrate the “intense experiences of art” represented in the Enlightenment, which form a strong “counter-tradition” to the cold, disinterested, experiences and mechanized measures of taste that emerged from the rapidly professionalizing criticism of the era. He is undoubtedly successful in this task and that recommends this work to anyone interested in cognitive and affective engagement with works of art.