UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

Looking through lidless eyes: Friedrich, kleist and the logic of sensation

Beaumont, M; (2018) Looking through lidless eyes: Friedrich, kleist and the logic of sensation. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities , 23 (6) pp. 3-19. 10.1080/0969725X.2018.1546989. Green open access

[thumbnail of Beaumont_Lidless Eyes (Angelaki) final.pdf]
Preview
Text
Beaumont_Lidless Eyes (Angelaki) final.pdf - Accepted Version

Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

The German painter Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea (1808–10), a picture that has played an important role in accounts of the prehistory of twentieth-century abstract art, is significant among other reasons because it bravely refused painting’s narrative vocation and in so doing radicalized the optics characteristic of the contemporary aesthetics of the sublime. Friedrich’s contemporary, the novelist and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist, intuited precisely this in his scintillating comments on the painting at the time it appeared. Invoking the shocking idea that looking at The Monk by the Sea is like seeing through eyes whose lids have been cut off, he recognized that Friedrich had transformed the canvas into the locus not so much of narration and signification as of sensation. This article leans on the terms devised by Gilles Deleuze to explain the paintings of Francis Bacon in order to explore the seminal shift in the relationship between spectator and composition that Friedrich’s canvas dramatizes with such compelling power.

Type: Article
Title: Looking through lidless eyes: Friedrich, kleist and the logic of sensation
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2018.1546989
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2018.1546989
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords: Caspar David Friedrich, Heinrich von Kleist, Gilles Deleuze, sensation, the sublime, Enlightenment vision
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of English Lang and Literature
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10066674
Downloads since deposit
226Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item