The formalism of close reading is found wanting on two scores: (1) it aims at an ascesis of

the reader who must, in her or his encounter with the text, bracket all personal interests and
predilections so that the text may deploy its intentional structure unhindered; (2)by
stressing the autonomy of each text, this methodological approach is incapable of
reintegrating the text into a history.

 The problem of the aesthetic praxis: “Since historicism, scholarly research in the
arts has indefatigably instructed us about the tradition of works and their
interpretations, about their objective and subjective genesis, so that today it is easier
to reconstruct the place of a work of art in its time, to determine its originality as
compared to its sources and predecessors, and even to uncover its ideological
function than it is to learn of the experience of those who in productive, receptive,
and communicative activity developed historical and social praxis in actu, a praxis
whose already reified result the histories of literature and art pass on to us”.
 The division of this work into two volumes is further justified by a fundamentum in
re: the phenomenological distinction between understanding and cognition, primary
experience and the act of reflection in which consciousness returns to the meaning
and constitution of its experience is also present in the distinction between
assimilation and interpretation in the reception of texts and aesthetic objects.
Aesthetic experience occurs before there is cognition and interpretation of the
significance of a work, and certainly before all reconstruction of an author's
intent. The primary experience of a work of art takes place in the orientation
to its aesthetic effect, in an understanding that is pleasure, and a pleasure that
is cognitive. Interpretation that bypasses this primary aesthetic experience is the
arrogance of a philologist who subscribes to the error that the text was not created
for readers but for him, to be interpreted by such as he. This sets literary
hermeneutics the twofold task of methodologically distinguishing between the two
kinds of reception, which means that it must on the one hand shed light on the
actual process through which the effect and significance of the text concretizes
itself for the present reader, and on the other reconstruct the historical process
in which readers have received and interpreted the text at different times and
in varying ways. Application must then be the demand to measure the present
effect of a work of art against the earlier history of its experience and to form the
aesthetic judgment on the basis of effect and reception. If this means the recurrence
of questions that I developed in my first lecture at Constance in 1967 because 1
wished to take a position on the crisis in the philosophical disciplines, I am
perfectly aware that this beginning of my theory of reception cannot simply be
extended and elaborated today. (this is the fundamental basis in the Epistemology
of Romance)
 The aesthetic experience – the role of literature in the education
o The role distance: the distance of the routine role performance.
 o The aesthetic experience of role distance can be intensified and become
aestheticism when it is taken up in a real-life situation where the conventions
of morality or tact demand a wholly serious involvement.
o The example of the Flaubert’s flaneur – it’s like the aesthetic experience in
the Campobello’s book.: Drawn from pure curiosity into the street battles at
the height of the 1848 revolution, Frederic Moreau nonetheless retains the
attitude of the "flaneur": "The drums beat the charge. Shrill cries could be
heard, and shouts of triumph. The crowd rocked in a continuous surge.
Frederic, wedged between two dense masses, stayed where he was.
Fascinated, he was enjoying himself hugely. The wounded falling, and the
dead lying stretched out, did not look as if they were really wounded or
dead. He felt as though he were watching a play."10 This episode is literary
only in its pointedness, not by virtue of the conduct it portrays. For it is a
common experience (one need only think of the comic aspects of a funeral)
that the seriousness of any role turns into play the moment one either
voluntarily or involuntarily adopts the aesthetic attitude of the
spectator. The episode in Flaubert's novel that turns the bloody seriousness
of history into mere spectacle for the "flaneur" is part of a historically
significant context. In Frederic's aesthetic stance and in the political acts of
his friends, Flaubert's cryptic irony points up a second-hand experience of
history: just as the aesthete copies a passe romanticism, the revolutionaries
imitate the larger-than-life-size 1789 model.
o The humanistic education: according to the motto of humanistic education,
the imaginative power of poetry was to be preferred to the logical
conceptualization of philosophy when patterns of correct speech and action
were to be conveyed.
 The pathological reverse of the aesthetic experience: when the expectations
derived from reading encounter an alien reality and the pure sentiments and higher
passions of poetry fail to materialize in life and can only be maintained in
opposition to everyday experience in the fantasy worlds of the daydream.
 The masked ball and the archetypes of identification: the knight, the shepherd,
the jester.
o The heroic, the bucolic, and the picaresque
 Proust’s recherche is therefore also the place where the direction of expectation of
the aesthestic experience reverses itself: the anticipation of the imagination which
is foiled by the irreparable inadequacy of the actual present can fulfill itself in what
is past when the purifying power of recollection makes it possible to recover in
aesthetic perfection what was experienced deficiently. In a manner of speaking,
aesthetic experience is effective both in Utopian foreshadowing and in
retrospective recognition.
 After the advent of the aesthetics of subjectivity (when aesthetic activity is neither any longer experienced as a creation
according to nature nor —in Poe's and Baudelaire's antiromantic turn—as a production like nature's), aesthetic reflection
which accompanies modern lyric poetry up to Valery understands the artist's creation as a creation against the resistance and
opacity of nature.
o Through the human process of abstraction, the countless properties of its material are brought into a
new, constructive order whose totality is less complex than its parts. And as he confronts the unending
development of nature which excludes neither blindness nor chance, the artist experiences his work as a
blissful seizing of the possibilities of his own, finite world.
  The naïve look of the child: The concept of the naïve as encountered in the philosophy of history —the childhood of both
individual and historical life (i.e., Greek civilization)—which is meant to counter the alienation of modern society 27 is linked
in Baudelaire's definition of genius with the fresh perception of the child: "everything the child sees is new; he is in a constant
state of rapture."28 But it is not only owing to its freshness and plenitude of meaning that the child's perception becomes the
ideal yardstick of aesthetic experience. What the child sees freshly because for the first time also permits the adult to
rediscover what already lies within him as past experience and can be recalled; the poet whose conscious aesthetic activity can
undo the alienation of reality and re-create the world in its original newness returns to our consciousness a forgotten or
suppressed reality. Baudelaire's theory of aesthetic experience anticipates what is common to Freud's and Proust's aesthetics:
the sharpened perception of the new or the surprising representation of another world are not enough. What is required as an
additional and concurrent element is the opening of the door to the rediscovery of buried experience, 29 the lost time that has
become recoverable. Only this constitutes the entire depth of aesthetic experience.
 The power of memory
 THE UNDERSTANDING OF AESTHETIC MEANING IS A VOLUNTARY ACT

2. CRITIQUE OF ADORNO’S AESTHETICS OF NEGATIVITY

 The negativity
 Kant: negativity marks both the subjective and the objective aspects of aesthetic experience. It is contained in Kant's
"disinterestedness of aesthetic satisfaction," a formula of negation that gets at the "distance between self and object, that hiatus
in the life of pleasure which is referred to as aesthetic distance or the moment of contemplation”.

Na introdução à “Pequeña apologia de la experiencia estética”, Daniel Innerarity apresenta o debate no qual o pensamento de Jauss
emerge. Desse modo “El concepto de experiencia estética es introducido por Jauss y otros em el debate contemporáneo para establecer
una especificidad de lo estético en un panorama polarizado por dos posiciones extremas. Por un lado estarían lo que podríamos
denominar hiperestéticas, que niegan una racionalidad específica del comportamiento estético en nombre de un concepto integral de
verdad y conocimiento formulado a partir del paradigma del arte. No puede existir una lógica especial del juicio estético, porque la
experiencia estética es un modo privilegiado – si no el modo – del conocimiento. […] En el otro extremo estarían las miniestéticas,
caracterizadas por negar una recionalidad específica del comportamiento estético en nombre de un concepto estricto de racionalidad,
inalcanzable para la percepción estética, a la que se ha desprovisto de toda relación cognoscitiva y significativa con el mundo”.
Jauss comparte plenamente este enfoque y añade: ‘En el comportamiento estético, el sujeto experimenta la adquisición del sentido del
mundo” (p,15) – Los procedimientos estéticos de la imaginación y sus construcciones nos hacen presentes contenidos de experiencia de
situaciones familiares o extrañas en el modo de su descubrimiento o significatividad.