Literature in the context of the aesthetic revolution imagined by Jacques Rancière

Abstract

From the perspective of the three regimes of identification of the arts put forth by Jacques Rancière, literature has a central role in overcoming the poetic, or representative, regime, with the aesthetic regime. According to Rancière, the realism of writers like Hugo, Balzac, Stendhal and Flaubert subverts hierarchies and existing normative assumptions in the poetic regime of the arts. Starting with these authors, any subject or any person - that is, belonging to any social condition - could become a serious literary object, which can be viewed as democracy in literature. Also taking the analyses by Erich Auerbach into consideration, this article aims to describe how this process took place, trying to show through some examples the way in which literature started to be developed in a space where the hierarchies of themes and social occupations were broken and where the sensitive equality of everyone started to be related. From a politic-philosophical point of view, Rancière promotes approaches to the universality of Kantian aesthetic judgment and the subsequent proposal of Schiller with respect to an aesthetic education of humanity that draws the principle of a new freedom from this sensitive equality.