批评的使命与文学共和国的危机

The Vocation of Criticism and the Crisis of the Republic of Letters

早期现代文学共和国是一片"飘忽无形、常常故意神秘兮兮的领域",可是它形成了欧洲批评的自我理解。浪漫时代的文学共和国是一场令人眩惑的冲突。参与这场冲突的"派别"与"体系",曾经被早期现代共和国成功地压制。但是,古老的资产阶级文学共和国在世纪之交的寿终正寝,并不意味着那些思想或批评同一体的强大格局及其所主导的实践活动已经终结。它们作为学者的网络或学术秩序,作为置于市民社会的观念市场,作为驱动改良和革命的政治知识分子而形成。本文首先勾勒出早期现代人所理解的文学共和国的简史,牢记其作为"幻象"而又集中体现真实实践和真实关系的奇特性;然后,详细探讨19世纪转折时期英国和德国作家对批评家与公众关系的浪漫反思。

The early modern idea of a republic of letters defined an‘elusive,often deliberately mysterious domain’,yet shaped the self-understanding of European criticism until the last decade of the eighteenth century.The republic of letters became in the Romantic age a confusing clash of those‘sects and systems’that the early modern republic had triumphantly suppressed.However,the apparent end of the older bourgeois republic of letters at the turn of the nineteenth century was not the end of those powerful configurations of intellectual or critical identity and practice it generated-as a network or class of scholars;a marketplace of ideas situated in civil society;or a formation of political intellectuals pressing reform or revolution.In the Romantic period these divergent institutionalizations of criticism became unavoidably confrontational as the relation of criticism to its public had to be redefined under new historical and cultural conditions.This paper first sketches a brief history of the literary republic as early moderns understood it,keeping in mind its peculiar quality as an illusion that focused real practices and relationships.Then it looks more closely at the Romantic rethinking of critic and public in British and German writings of the turn of the nineteenth century.