SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 16
My conclusion, to be justi昀椀ed in greater depth elsewhere, is that while critique was doing its
suspicious readings (although many big names in the 昀椀eld agree that we are now entering a postcritical era1) creatives continued to do what creatives do. Craft is theory enacted.
In my readings, I found that my interest in re-centering the author was shared by other
creatives. For many authors, it was fundamental to their practice. I noted other tendencies as well.
As I read, I began to document commonalities I found in short stories, poems, and novels—and
in auto昀椀ction, memoir, creative non昀椀ction.
Those tendencies are set forth below.
When English literature began, Romanticism was its 昀椀rst literary movement—its mid-wife.
That moment of birth was a literary Big Bang: the author was created, the novel emerged, the
genius that is authorship was declared, and the beauty authors can create and inspire was put to
page. We are now at the end of a shorter, but equally seminal, period marked by the absence of
the author. The 昀椀rst turn towards the author was the result of a natural historical evolution and
led to Romanticism. The second turn (a re-turn) towards the author comes after an exile imposed
by critique.
Provisional tenets for a New Romanticism
1. Existential Philosophical Grounding: Literature is a performative existential act, a
raging declaration of Being rooted in the author’s radical freedom and agency (e.g., Sartre, de
Beauvoir).2 The text is a deliberate assertion of the author’s un-othered self against invisibility,
obliteration, the void. This speech act is a militant declaration of existence, transcending
introspection to confront universal annihilation as the author writes with an awareness that the
text represents a true account of their mind.3 Authorial intention is given primacy.
2. Call to Action: New Romanticism recognizes the ability of art and literature to a昀昀ect
change in the world. The agency which the author shares through the text is not only vehicular,
demonstrative of agency, but aims to inspire and motivate agency in others and in the world.
3. Rejection of Resistance: Drawing from its emphasis on agency, New Romanticism,
like existentialism, rejects Sartrean resignation. It also rejects resistance alone, recognizing
that resistance itself is too passive and complacent a response to threatened obliteration. New
Romanticism respects, promotes, idolizes agency and action—positive action through literature
and in the real world—beyond mere resistance.
4. Individual Versus Natural Beauty: The emphasis on beauty shifts from nature’s
sublimity (traditional Romanticism) to the splendor of the individual’s unique perspective,
celebrating humanity and ‘un-otheredness’ in and through the text’s creative act; unlike
Romanticism’s external transcendence (nature), New Romanticism 昀椀nds transcendent beauty in
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably
Think This Essay Is About You”, in Touching Feeling: A昀昀ect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke
UniversityPress, 2003), 123; Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015),
165; Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction”, Representations 108, no. 1 (Fall
2009): 15.
2
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 629. “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the
world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to him to give [life] a meaning, and value is nothing but
the meaning that he wills… This absolute responsibility is not resignation; it is the logical requirement of the
consequences of our freedom.”
3
Donald Barthelme, “Not Knowing,” in Not Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme, ed. Kim
Herzinger (New York: Random House, 1997), 23 (“Art is a true account of the activity of the mind.”)
1
xv
