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Abstract
This dissertation begins with an assumption that by the late eighteenth century, in Europe, serious art and literature could no longer be created by following the paradigms of significance established by a predominantly religious, pre-Enlightenment tradition. These paradigms had come to seem artificial or strained, no longer capable of conveying the kind of truth recognized by an enlightened, "scientific" culture. Art which remained within these outmoded paradigms had come to be seen as inherently "theatrical" or manipulative of its audience, offering a brief and superficial escape from the difficulties of living in a world of revolutionary upheaval.
Writers such as Diderot and Lessing held out the possibility of a "naive" art which would regain the genuineness of experience traditionally demanded of high art. The naive artwork was to have a self-subsisting integrity or openness equivalent, in its own terms, to that which modern science had found in natural objects. My hypothesis, following the art critic Michael Fried's investigations into the origins of modern painting, is that the call for a naive art meant that if it were to continue as something more than entertainment, art would have to defeat or suspend its condition as something made to be viewed, read, listened to, etc., insofar as this condition had been structured by outmoded paradigms of comprehensibility.
This dissertation purports to discover what this meant for the practices of critical, dramatic, narrative and philosophical writing. Following an introductory section outlining the dialectic of the naive and the "theatrical," five different works are examined, by writers for whom the problem of "theatricality" was particularly pressing: Lessing's Laokoon (criticism), Diderot's Paradoxe sur le comedien (theater), Kleist's Amphitryon (theater) and Die Marquise von O dots (narrative) and Kant's Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (philosophy). In each case the author attempts to demonstrate how the conditions of the work's readability, rather than being taken for granted, are set forth within the work itself. It is argued that only by insisting upon its own conditions of readability, rather than by meeting formal criteria inherited from tradition or prescribed by criticism, does the work succeed or fail as an instance of critical, theatrical, narrative or philosophical writing.
