For decades critique and the academy have downplayed the importance of the author’s intention to deciphering meaning in texts. This approach to literature ignores the fact that the author is the sine qua non—that without which literature would not exist. It ignores the fact that the text is fundamentally communication between the author and the reader.
New Romanticism recognizes that literature has shifted, expanded, and evolved significantly from the Romanticism of the 18th century, but that certain fundamental elements are worth revisiting, including the importance of authorship. Texts which lean into New Romantic principles work within the following parameters:
1. Existential Philosophical Grounding: Literature is a performative existential act, a raging declaration of Being rooted in the author’s radical freedom and agency (e.g., Sartre, de Beauvoir).[1] The text is a deliberate assertion of the author’s un-othered self against invisibility, obliteration, the void. This speech act is a militant declaration of existence, transcending introspection to confront universal annihilation as the author writes with an awareness that the text represents a true account of their mind.[2] Authorial intention is given primacy.
2. Call to Action: New Romanticism recognizes the ability of art and literature to affect change in the world. The agency which the author shares through the text is not only vehicular, demonstrative of agency, but aims to inspire and motivate agency in others and in the world.
3. Rejection of Resistance: Drawing from its emphasis on agency, New Romanticism, like existentialism, rejects Sartrean resignation. It also rejects resistance alone, recognizing that resistance itself is too passive and complacent a response to threatened obliteration. New Romanticism respects, promotes, idolizes agency and action—positive action through literature and in the real world—beyond mere resistance.
4. Individual Versus Natural Beauty: The emphasis on beauty shifts from nature’s sublimity (traditional Romanticism) to the splendor of the individual’s unique perspective, celebrating humanity and ‘un-otheredness’ in and through the text’s creative act; unlike Romanticism’s external transcendence (nature), New Romanticism finds transcendent beauty in the ‘book of self,’ the internal landscape shaping and expressing the subject’s experience of the world.
5. Literature as Unibrow: There is no highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow. The idea of a ‘literary’ genre is rejected. Genre is seen as: (1) a marketing tool; and (2) a set of shared expectations between the author and implied reader. Personal style (vivid prose, experimentation, or stark minimalism) regains emphasis as a marker of intent; ‘literariness’ is merely one of many tools available to the author. Aesthetics is an element to be balanced with form and function to create the cohesive whole.
6. Author as Subject of Fiction: The author’s voice permeates the text, whether overtly (autofiction, creative nonfiction) or subtly (realist or modernist absence), embodying their existential intent. New Romanticism insists on the author’s unapologetic presence as the text’s soul, rejecting any dilution of their agency.
7. Implications for Critique: The author’s intent is the heartbeat of the text, driving interpretation as a closed communicative act, rejecting symptomatic reading for hidden meanings in favor of what the author meant to say. The author supplants the ‘heroic critic,’ reclaiming the spotlight as creator. Credibility in critique hinges on the critic’s own creative chops, reviving a modernized Romantic idolization of the artist.
Notes
[1] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 629. “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to him to give [life] a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that he wills… This absolute responsibility is not resignation; it is the logical requirement of the consequences of our freedom.”
[2] Donald Barthelme, “Not Knowing,” in Not Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme, ed. Kim Herzinger (New York: Random House, 1997), 23 (“Art is a true account of the activity of the mind.”)
Sine Qua Non