sensitivity

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In the European Enlightenment, sensitivity describes a tendency that extends from around 1720 to the French Revolution (1789–1799). In France and England, the tendency towards sensitivity appeared as early as around 1700. In literary studies, sensitivity is an epoch between 1740 and 1790.

Origins

Sensitivity is linked to the end of French rationalism after the death of Louis XIV in 1715. She opposes a strictly rational way of life, as it emerged with the disciplining and civilization of European society in the time of absolutism . The German “Age of Enlightenment” only began when the French “Age of Reason ” was supplemented or called into question by socially critical and emancipatory tendencies. It therefore roughly coincides with the "Age of Sensibility" or the Rococo .

The source of sensitivity is largely religious. The emotionally tinged texts for the oratorios by Johann Sebastian Bach are typical examples. Sensitivity is also interpreted as secularized pietism , because it is often related to moralizing content, which, however, is increasingly detaching itself from ecclesiastical and religious guidelines. An important theorist was Jean-Baptiste Dubos .

Characteristic

In the view of sensitivity, the exuberant feeling is not a blemish for those who have it, but rather distinguishes them as a moral person. The emphasis on the public in absolutism was countered by sensitivity with an emphasis on private life . Starting from religiously motivated compassion , it soon expanded to other sentiments . The motif of sensual love, for example, was no longer understood as a destructive passion ( vanitas ), but on the contrary as the basis of social institutions, such as with Antoine Houdar de la Motte . In serious operas ( Tragédie lyrique or Opera seria ), successful love became a symbol of a successful union of states. The addiction to reading also became socially acceptable , and the novel was considerably upgraded as a literary genre compared to drama .

Around the middle of the century, the enlightener Jean-Jacques Rousseau discovered in his epistolary novel Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761) an “untouched” nature as a counter-image to (courtly) civilization. Its predecessor, the sentimental letter novel Pamela or Virtue rewarded (1740) by Samuel Richardson , had a great literary influence with its socially critical tendencies.

German sensitivity

The musician and publisher Johann Christoph Bode translated Laurence Sternes novel A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy under the title Yorick's Sensitive Journey into German in 1768 and was a great success with it. The word was "sensitive" a neologism to which Gotthold Ephraim Lessing had advised and was subsequently transferred to the whole epoch.

German poets who are close to sensibility were Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803), Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (1715–1769) and Sophie von La Roche (1730–1807), the first author of a letter novel in German. Johann Timotheus Hermes wrote a successful work of this literary epoch with his novel Sophiens Reise von Memel to Sachsen . The influence of sensitivity can still be seen in Goethe's youth work The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), a major work by Sturm und Drang . The novel is the literary climax of the "Age of Sensibility" (Renate Krüger) and the beginning of its decline as an art epoch (Goethe in "Poetry and Truth").

aftermath

Religious sensitivity became an inspiration for Romanticism in François-René de Chateaubriand , for example . Sensitivity played a role in popular literature well into the 19th century, including serial novels in magazines such as The Gazebo . In the theater realm, the emotional element emerged from sensitivity.

See also

literature

  • Renate Krüger: The Age of Sensitivity . Koehler & Amelang, Leipzig 1972
  • Nikolaus Wegmann : Discourses of Sensitivity. On the history of a feeling in 18th century literature . Metzler, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-476-00637-9
  • Gerhard Sauder (Ed.): Theory of Sensibility and Storm and Drang . Reclam, Ditzingen 2003, ISBN 3-150-17643-3
  • Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek : tenderness. To the aristocratic sources of bourgeois sensibility. In: German quarterly for literary studies and intellectual history. 2. 2014, pp. 206-233.