Romanticism’s Longue Durée
The Woodstock Festival and History’s Journey Back to the Garden
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21671416 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Eric Rosenberg (0000-0002-8217-5458, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 39 |
| Publication date | 2025-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Sillages critiques (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1272-3819 • E-ISSN: 1969-6302 |
| Publisher | OpenEdition (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.4000/15row |
| OpenAlex | W7131644735 |
| Language | FR |
| References cited | 13 |
The Woodstock Festival of August 1969 was an inherently Romantic event, the apotheosis of spectacular countercultural aesthetics in the form of music, audience, dress, undress, discourses of freedom and rebellion, communal coexistence, social cooperation, and return to the land. The Festival’s singularity, however, was as much the result of a competing version of Romanticism that rehearsed a historical model with origins in the nineteenth century and operative long into the twentieth century. Late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Romanticism’s afterlife harnessed tensions between individuality and collectivity, imagination and materiality that would mingle with a historical Realism as incendiary as the Romantic was sublime. The result in the case of Woodstock, as aptly articulated by one participant, was a cultural Big Bang that streaked comet-like across the end of the Sixties’ social and artistic firmament only to fizzle and burn out in events like Altamont. Modern history’s mania for periodization did nothing in the end to ensure the sequestration of time made seemingly so necessary by the emergence, at the end of the eighteenth century, of the Enlightenment human. What seemed a temporal model of Romanticism replaced by Realism in the middle of the nineteenth century was really a much longer enactment of friction between the individual and the mass, rendering phenomena like Woodstock one more example of Modernism’s failure to nurture the new beyond its birth
Aestheticism · Apotheosis · Counterculture · Modernity · Nothing · Reactionary · Realism · Romance · Romanticism · Uncanny · Music History and Culture · Spatial and Cultural Studies · Theater, Performance, and Music History
| Highly cited | No |
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