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An Attempt to Unify All the Fine Arts and Sciences under the Concept of That Which Is Complete in Itself

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Karl Philipp Moritz  and
Elliott Schreiber
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Extract

Charting the origin of romantic aesthetics in theories of the symbol, Tzvetan Todorov points to an eighteenth-century author who remains little known outside the field of German studies: Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–93). Todorov locates the birth of the modern aesthetic of “intransitive signification” (162)—the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy, or the idea that works of art signify nothing outside themselves—in Moritz's essay “An Attempt to Unify All the Fine Arts and Sciences under the Concept of That Which Is Complete in Itself” (1785). Surprisingly, even more than a quarter century after the publication of Todorov's book in the United States, Moritz's seminal treatise is not available in a complete English translation.

Type
Criticism in Translation
Information
PMLA , Volume 127 , Issue 1 , January 2012 , pp. 94 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by The Modern Language Association of America

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