Word: schwab
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...Schwab's original claims links the Hindu influence to the metaphysical sublimity" of the great German philosophical systems of the 18th and 19th Centuries, suggesting philological revolution as their praxis...
India is privileged as the Orient to pose "the great question of the Different." For Schwab, India, and not Eqypt, was the first and essential Oriental influence to inspire the mental displacement. Schwab calls "totally erroneous" the popular assumption that the deciphering of hieroglyphics represented the critical breakthrough, attributing the traditional "prejudice" surrounding Champollion's famous discovery to glamorizing myth. Instead, he explores at length the Occidental fascination with "the Hindu soul... something like a separate sex." Schwab's retrospective vision is itself a richly dense landscape with illuminating details such as Shelley's "pantheism" and Leibnitz's "Oriental lobe...
Between 1936 and 1940, Schwab edited the journal of international poetry. Yggdrasil His appreciation of the German Romantics rests in particular on what he views as their spiritual assimilation of the Oriental. His treatment of Herder discerns in the pre-Romantic philosopher an awakened appreciation for primitive wisdom, the original versus the classic in poetry. Herder and Schelling are seen as the primary influences on Novalis's later search for a universal religion. He also discover overlays of Oriental motifs and values in "The Iranian Nieztsche" and "The Buddhism of Wagner...
...ROMANTICISM ITSELF anything other than an Oriental eruption of the intellect?" he boldly asks. And yet, Schwab admits that the relationship between the two influences was "less a local and temporary one than an essential one." Above all, he attempts to dispel the notion that the Oriental impact on western thinking was merely "a fanciful dream." He points out, wryly, that "China had a long history in Europe, but it had been too much represented by folding screens, porcelains, and banalities...
...quest for authenticity, Schwab is uncompromising in his attack on shallow Oriental exoticism. He reveals his anti-aesthetic bias against the French Romantics, toward whom his brilliant criticism is considerably less kind. He denounces their tendency toward "formal creation." The chapter, "An Extended Orient: Exoticism" criticizes at length the borrowing of imagery by the French as sheer indulgence. Gautier's Avatar is dismissed as the work of an exploitive dilettante with a "strikingly apparent gift for painting generalized pictures." Similarly, Hugo's Orientales is dismissed as "meager picturesque Orient imposed upon Montparnasse landscape...