Stil und Moral

In recent years, debates on literature and aesthetics in the German and broader “Western” public sphere have often been conducted through a moral lens. While this may partly be attributed to identity politics and activism, it is beyond dispute that the current political and societal crises also have a moral-ethical dimension. At the same time, literary studies is cautious when it comes to moral imperatives. This position is rooted in the longstanding belief that literary skill is compromised when convictions are “packaged” within the medium of literature.

This is why such debates often focus on literary style. Style represents an idea of aesthetic autonomy, which also includes the right to resist moral claims. According to this conception of autonomy, literature not only emancipated itself from rhetoric and religion around 1800, it also systematically rejected moral expectations in the process. Matters, however, have never been that simple. For a long time—already in the work of Kant—complex yet tabooed connections prevail between aesthetic judgments and moral values, connections which are being scrutinized again today. Our conference takes this development as an opportunity to re-evaluate the relationship between style and morality within exemplary historical constellations. Alongside case studies of individual authors, we will also examine literary movements and discourses. When, and in which contexts, have style and morality come into tension? What is their relation in literature around 1800, during the popular Enlightenment, after 1945, and in contemporary culture? Is the modern discourse on evil—from Sade to Baudelaire to Rimbaud or Céline—fundamentally a discourse on style? Which literary genres and forms are particularly well suited to articulate tensions between style and morality?

Fig. above: D.M. Nagu from the series L’avenir du livre (2023/24) (detail)