[DOWNLOAD] "Angela Esterhammer. The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism (Book Review)" by Studies in Romanticism # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free

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Title: Angela Esterhammer. The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism (Book Review)
Author : Studies in Romanticism
Release Date : January 22, 2003
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
Pages : * pages
Size : 193 KB

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Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi+357. $55.00. With Angela Esterhammer's The Romantic Performative, speech-act theory comes of age in romanticism studies. Although there have been numerous books and articles challenging and revising J. L. Austin's and John Searle's theory of language, and a fair number adapting that theory to the task of interpreting texts (including Esterhammer's Creating States, a study of Milton and Blake), there has not been to my knowledge any extended treatment of its relation to romanticism, at least none so thorough, so penetrating, and (at the same time) so critical as the book under review here. Speech act theorists share with romantic writers, says Esterhammer, a vital interest in the relation between language and world. Thus (as Searle points out) in speech-act theory the performative is defined as a kind of utterance which attempts to get the world to fit our words; through declarations, prophecies and promises it aims to constitute or change the state of things. It differs therefore from the constative, which attempts to get our words to fit the world; through assertions, affirmations, and descriptions the constative aims to capture the truth of things. The performative, however, may be considered more broadly than Searle's definition indicates. As verbal action, the performative brings into existence the conditions which ground the validity of the utterance itself. "Verbal utterances have an effect on the addressee, the speaker, and the speech situation that needs to be described not just in terms of rhetoric or persuasion, but as the actual founding of the subject-positions of speaker and hearer, the establishment of their relationship to one another and to the external world" (xii). It is this broader sense that characterizes the romantic performative, which in some ways is more comprehensive, more risk--taking than the modern performative. Austin and Searle, says Esterhammer, see the performative as circumscribed by a world of conventions and rules that govern its effectiveness, whereas the romantics were likely to emphasize the performative's creation of new rules. Austin and Searle, moreover, assume the pre-existence of a speaker with specifiable intentions, whereas the romantics by contrast raised the problem of subjectivity (in light of eighteenth-century empiricism) and made the subject more "fluid," more created as well as creative (13). At the same time the romantics were more apprehensive of breakdown and failure in the creative act.