ABSTRACT
Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), xi+ 177 pp., £12.99 (paperback)
These books, both dealing with topics in Romantic critical theory, differ markedly in style. The differences are evident throughout-in the vocabulary, the chapter headings, down to the way that the sentences turn. They begin and end differently, have a different sense of a project, and a different notion of a proper scholarly apparatus-what you should and shouldn’t do, for instance, with a footnote (and in Ferguson’s case, to whom you might dedicate your footnotes). The differences in style are in some way comparable with a variance that Ernst Behler draws out between Schleiermacher and Friedrich Schlegel in their views on the proper modes of knowledge acquisition. While Schleiermacher is content to work from a position of puzzlement, to reach up by slow and steady progress towards a higher understanding attained through the accumulation of facts and insights, the latter believed that higher understanding came first. Behler cites Schlegel: ‘It is not sufficient to understand the real meaning of a confused work better than the author understood it himself. You must also comprehend the confusion, including its principles, and be able to characterize and even reconstruct it’ (279). In this comparison Ferguson is like Schlegel, and Behler like the steady Schleiermacher. If Behler hints at the difficulties that Schlegel and Schleiermacher may have had conversing with each other, we may legitimately ask how a conversation between Behler and Ferguson might sound-two critics who may seem to have more in common than not: both academics in North American universities, both scholars of European Romanticism; but who, when we listen in, are speaking in styles that are as distinct as different languages.
