KATHLEEN Kete. Making Way for Genius

Kathleen Kete tells us that ambition was a serious problem in an era coming to grips with Enlightenment modernity. In what can be described as a cultural history of ambition in postrevolutionary France that engages with literary history, New Biography, and the new history of emotions, Kete examines how three early nineteenth-century authors—Germaine de Staël, Stendhal, and Georges Cuvier—grappled with the ethical dilemmas of personal success. The greater part of the book is concerned with how these three authors, caught between the collapse of Old Regime corporatism and the emergence of new social and juridical arrangements, took on the problem of ambition and offered solutions to its discomforts in their lives and works. Each of these solutions—which Kete labels genius, vocation, and destiny—was a kind of subterfuge designed to overcome the burdens of ambition, whether they be charges of selfishness, materialism, or the disapprobation of one's peers. After tracing the shift in attitudes toward ambition from the eighteenth century to the postrevolutionary era and showing that the new civil order shaped by competitive individualism provoked fears of atomization, Kete uses Staël's Corinne (1807) to map out the notion of romantic genius as an irresistible drive. By allowing success without the charge of selfishness, romantic genius recasts ambition as a love of glory compatible with freedom of self-expression. Corinne's triumph and death were emblematic of the instability of the modern self, a fate that Staël sought to avoid by dedicating herself to opposing Napoleon at the expense of her own happiness. In contrast to Napoleon's cynicism and naked ambition, Staël proposed the concept of “enthusiasm,” where the individual is saved from the consequences of the passions by seeking transcendence and mutual toleration.

Art · Art history · Destiny (ISS module) · Enlightenment · Genius · Glory · Individualism · Literature · Modernity · Political science · Romance · Romanticism · Theology · European Political History Analysis · Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy