Hegel on the Modern Arts [Paperback]

Rutter revisits and resolves the 'end of art' debates while breaking new ground on Hegel's response to painting and literature.Hegel's farseeing suggestion that art reaches its 'end' in modernity resonates powerfully today. Drawing on unpublished lectures, Rutter recasts received views of Hegel's position, demonstrating the subtlety and relevance of his responses to Dutch painting and Romantic poetry and arguing, finally, for Hegel's importance as a philosopher of modern life.Hegel's farseeing suggestion that art reaches its 'end' in modernity resonates powerfully today. Drawing on unpublished lectures, Rutter recasts received views of Hegel's position, demonstrating the subtlety and relevance of his responses to Dutch painting and Romantic poetry and arguing, finally, for Hegel's importance as a philosopher of modern life.Debates over the end of art' have tended to obscure Hegel's work on the arts themselves. Benjamin Rutter opens this study with a defence of art's indispensability to Hegel's conception of modernity; he then seeks to reorient discussion toward the distinctive values of painting, poetry, and the novel. Working carefully through Hegel's four lecture series on aesthetics, he identifies the expressive possibilities particular to each medium. Thus, Dutch genre scenes animate the everyday with an appearance of vitality; metaphor frees language from prose; and Goethe's lyrics revive the banal routines of love with imagination and wit. Rutter's important study reconstructs Hegel's view not only of modern art but of modern life and will appeal to philosophers, literary theorists, and art historians alike.Introduction; 1. The problem of a modern art; 2. Painting life; 3. The values of virtuosity; 4. The lyric; 5. Modern literature; Bibliography. The contribution to [the] larger conversation about art and modernity made by Rutter's book & is a significant one. His is without question one of the most scholarly informed and literarily sensitive books on Hegel'l"