Romanticism is often understood as an age of extremes, yet it also marks the birth of the modern medium in all senses of the word. Engaging with key texts of the romantic period, the book outlines a wide-reaching project to re-imagine the middle as a constitutive principle. Sng argues that Romanticism dislodges such terms as medium, moderation, and mediation from serving as mere self-evident tools that conduct from one pole to another. Instead, they offer a dwelling in and with the middle: an attention to intervals, interstices, and gaps that make these terms central to modern understandings of relation.
224 pp., ISBN 978-0-8232-8841-0
Table of Contents
Introduction | 1
1. Parenthyrsos: On the Medium of the Sublime | 17
2. The Medium Eats the Message: Mediatization and Force in Kleist’s “Michael Kohlhaas” | 38
3. Radically Neutral: Hegel, Haiti, Kleist | 71
4. Love Language: Plato, Shelley, Schlegel | 104
5. This Is (Not) a Joint: Two Readings of Friedrich Hölderlin | 127
6. Lyric Meditude: On Hölderlin and Ashbery | 154
After Words | 173
Acknowledgments | 187
Notes | 189
Works Cited | 217
Index | 233
