Aesthetic Autonomy vs. Social Commitment: Revisiting the “Art for Art’s Sake” Debate Through New HistoricismWith Special Reference to Plekhanov’s Art and Social Life

Abstract

The issue of aesthetic autonomy versus social commitment in literature is not new, but in this paper, the focus of the theoretical background has been on Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov and his masterpiece essay Art and Social Life (1912). This central thesis of Plekhanov, namely that the doctrine of art for art’s sake develops in those regions where artists are hopelessly in conflict with their social surrounding, is analyzed, developed and subject to test against both a variety of literary texts and cultural movements using the supplementary method of New Historicism. The paper will argue that in the most important aspects, the sociological aesthetics of Plekhanov prefigure the New Historicist insistence on the historical embeddedness of all cultural production, as well as also provide a more explicitly class based account of the ideological circumstances under which the illusion of aesthetic autonomy is generated. The paper shows that the alleged aesthetic autonomy is never a universal philosophical truth, but a historically located ideological construct by presenting close readings of Pushkin’s metamorphosis under Nicholas 1 and French Romanticism and Parnassianism, Victorian aestheticism, Modernist impersonality and dedicated literary traditions of Brecht to Achebe. Based on Greenblatt, Williams, Eagleton, Jameson, Adorno and Plekhanov as well as on Plekhanov the paper suggests a dialectical interpretation of aesthetic production where form and social content are constitutive of each other. The research finds that the sociological paradigm developed by Plekhanov with the enhancement of New Historicist methodology is still one of the most fruitful frameworks that can be used to comprehend the mutual connection between art and society.