Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and PoetryOriginally published in 1766, the Laocoön has been called the first extended attempt in modern times to define the distinctive spheres of art and poetry; its author, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, has been called the first modern esthetician. As Michael Fried writes in his foreword, it is Lessing who invented the modern concept of the artistic medium, and it is in the Laocoön, ultimately, that we find the source for modernist assumptions of the uniqueness and autonomy of the individual arts. And, as Fried argues, it is a work that present an impressively coherent esthetic semiotics, a book that at once sums up and moves beyond classical thought about the nature of the sign. Long a central text for literary critics, art historians, and philosophers, the Laocoön is here returned to print in Edward Allen McCormick's authoritative translation. McCormick's introduction, notes, and biographical appendix have been retained; the new foreword by Michael Fried emphasizes Lessing's current importance for recent trends in art history and literary theory. |
From inside the book
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... disgust . Indeed , this repugnance , if I have examined my own feel- ings with sufficient care , is completely of the same nature as disgust . The feeling with which we react to physical ugliness is disgust , only in a lower degree . To ...
... disgusting features as an ingredient in producing the mixed sensations of the ridiculous and the terrible which he so successfully heightens by the addition of the ugly . The disgusting can heighten the ridiculous ; or representa- tions ...
... disgusting ; his face is disfigured by blood and dust , and his hair is matted , Squalentem barbam et concretos sanguine crines , 11 as Virgil puts it ; 12 a disgusting object , but he is for that very reason all the more terrible and ...