A Feminist Sublime and Grotesque: Dorothea Schlegel, Mary Shelley, George Sand, and their Twentieth-Century Daughters

My dissertation focuses on a genealogy of feminist aesthetics that foregrounds work from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A linking of Dorothea Veit Mendelssohn Schlegel (1763--1839) (German), Mary Shelley (1797--1851) (English), and George Sand (1804--1876) (French) configures a revised aesthetics of the sublime and the grotesque, concepts paired for their non-normative excess or "un-form." This genealogy is a pre-history that unfolds toward the twentieth-century feminist phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir, whose focus on "lived experience," whose claim that "the body is a situation" is analogous to a depiction of embodiment in the novels of Schlegel, Shelley, and Sand. Set in relief against the male-centered legacy of Longinus, Burke, Kant, and Schopenhauer---in order to elucidate a different aesthetic tradition---my project proposes an embodied sublime and grotesque, both of which contest gendered dualisms---of the aesthetic, the social, and the political. My interest is in showing how women transform what is traditionally depicted as a vertical transcendence into a horizontal transcendence of more egalitarian community relations. Starting with women's exclusion from transformative experiences of the sublime and the grotesque, I move toward an aesthetic incorporation of body, often through music, that shifts the vertical metaphysical conceptual axis to a horizontal, embodied, more ethically grounded, paradigm.;The coda with which this project concludes gestures toward women novelists' continued engagement of the sublime and the grotesque in the twentieth century, in ways that show awareness of a long aesthetic tradition whose conceptual parameters excluded women. Focusing on a number of sublime-grotesque deployments with special attention to the double, I engage authors Virginia Woolf (British), Monique Wittig (French), and Christa Wolf (German).;Since the grotesque and the sublime hover at the intersection of several disciplines, my methodology is concomitantly interdisciplinary and feminist: philosophy, rhetoric, musicology, psychoanalysis, narratology, history, and cognitive science all serve to shift a canonized aesthetics of the sublime and the grotesque toward an ethics of the interhuman.