This post-doctoral research project investigates the metaphorical structures underlying the understanding of Einfühlung—conceived as the basic psychological mechanism by means of which subjective emotional energies can be “projected” into aesthetic objects—in the contexts of both 19th century psychological aesthetics and 20th century avant-garde literature.
It analyzes in particular the shaping function of a set of interrelated tropes, like “vibration,” “rhythm,” and “resonance,” that serve rhetorically to establish a relationship of dynamic continuity between affective states and material signs.
According to this figurative logic, both the production and reception of art take place as a transfer of Schwingungen, in a proc-ess that links the internal, psychological vibrations of emotional states to the external, physical vibrations of various aesthetic media. My project focuses on the significance of this communicative model for the conception and praxis of poetry. Drawing on theoretical writings by psychologists like Vischer, Lipps, Groos, Siebeck, and Wundt as well as aesthetic experiments by avant-garde artists like Kandinsky, Blümner, Ball, Schwitters, and Hausmann, it seeks to reconstruct the outlines of a historical poetics of affect that priori-tizes the phonetic qualities of linguistic sounds over their semantic dimension.
As a cultural strategy aimed at identifying “pure” forms of emotional expression, this development provides the backdrop for an avant-garde renegotiation of traditional aesthetic concepts such as mimesis, abstraction, and symbolic representation. It also, however, puts into practice a model of linguistic interaction in many ways very similar to the ones that have recently be-gun to gain prominence in contemporary neuroscientific research, on the basis of investiga-tions into the relationship between language and empathy.
By exploring the organization of a historical semantic field, my project will therefore also shed light on the prehistory of cur-rent theoretical developments, which re-conceive the event of einfühlen as a fundamental moment in the production and perception of linguistic signs.
