Abstract:

The following study shows how a handful of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century German-speaking critics relied on the interpretive term style in their research. It argues that through an interdisciplinary dialogue a number of art historians and Romance language scholars developed a new stylistic strategy of reading. Their writing---not feuilletonist cultural criticism but specialized university scholarship at its most powerful---combined philology, linguistics, and artifact-bound museum work. Nonetheless, the politics of the 1920s and 30s changed German universities and when highly trained critics like Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach immigrated to the United States, stylistic analysis became the backbone of modern comparative literature.

Style meant different things in art history and literature at the end of the nineteenth century. The German art historian Aby Warburg was one of the first to reject his field's formalist approach and examine the figurative, literary implications of Botticelli's wind-swept, styled nymphs. Thinking about style, even more radically, as a subcategory of linguistics, both Aby Warburg and the German Romanist Karl Vossler independently examined the tension between individual stylistic expression and artistic norms and conventions. Art history and Romanistik also focused on national styles and cultural differences---the theme of a conservative talk given by Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal at Munich University in 1927. Munich Rector Karl Vossler's speeches of the same year took issue with his invitee's nationalistic use of style. Vossler and two younger Romanists, Spitzer and Auerbach, concentrated instead on the reserve and decorum of French Classicism's Jean Racine. Leo Spitzer, in a monumental essay, analyzed the playwright's individual linguistic tics, refocusing style on the particular artist rather than the culture. In art history the Vienna-based Julius von Schlosser argued for a similar redefinition of style, but neither of these skilled close readers nor Erich Auerbach in his soon-to-be influential Mimesis could refrain from using the stylistic detail to illuminate a larger cultural history. The disciplinarily fluid investigative concept of style would dictate a practice of reading still familiar today.