Abstract

This dissertation situates the writings of Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schnitzler in critical discussions on sentimentality. It identifies the critique of the sentimental as a rhetorical means of rejecting works of art beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, and it examines the ways in which each of these writers constructs sentimentality and manipulates the critique of it in order to prove himself a culturally viable creative subject. ;Chapter one identifies Wagner as a foremost representative who establishes sentimentality as a problematic aesthetic and attempts to exclude it from the German cultural tradition. Wagner uses sentimentality, freighted with connotations of emotional falsity and transgressive power, to construct a "Jewish aesthetic" in order to expel Jewish composers from the German musical tradition. Furthermore, Wagner exploits it as a screen for a projected body of aesthetic problems, with which he tries to negotiate the various contradictions in his then fledgling thoughts on music. ;Chapter two considers the way Nietzsche complicates the idea of defining sentimentality. He invokes two figures, "ressentiment" and "Wagner," which reveal performatively the significance of "sentimentality." Nietzsche rejects a formulation of self-identity through the construction and rejection of a sentimental other. Instead, he demonstrates that sentimentality is itself a figure for the manipulation of discursive space. ;Chapter three examines the representation and critique of sentimentality in a novel by Schnitzler. Sentimentality is problematized through Schnitzler's depictions of its debilitating effects such as subjective rootlessness and inaction. Schnitzler tries to insert his voice in the very critical discourse initiated and designed to exclude a Jewish voice such as his by redefining sentimentality as an illness commonly shared by modern subjects as a whole. ;The critical texts selected for analysis in this dissertation are culled from several disciplines in order to recall the pervasiveness of the critique of sentimentality. A close reading of works by Wagner, Nietzsche, and Schnitzler unravels the urgency with which these writers forge aesthetic self-definition against the unstable backdrop of modernity. It also contributes to our understanding of what we, late twentieth-century readers of culture, still reject under the name of sentimentality