| Summary: | </p>This doctoral thesis makes its case for an aesthetics of attachment. The argument is made against Walter Benjamin’s <i>Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels</i> (1925), which endeavours to obstruct the immersive experience of its readers. According to Benjamin, the Catholic and “Romantic” dramas by Calderón de la Barca epitomise the dangers of aesthetic attachment. Indeed, he reads the playwright through the lenses of Romantic writers such as A.W. Schlegel, who identify in Calderón’s works the sacred world of magic and religion that the Enlightenment had allegedly repressed. For Jena Romantics, Calderón became the emblem for the fight against what they took to be a “disenchanted” version of everyday life. </p>
<p>Benjamin tells us that such a Romantic endeavour to recreate the divine in the arts is uncritical and irresponsible. He compares Calderón’s dramas with Counter-Reformation buildings, in which the ornamentation — according to Benjamin — mesmerises visitors and obfuscates their ability to appreciate the edifice’s keystone. Hence the danger of aesthetic attachment, in this argument, is that it hinders our critical abilities. As an alternative, Benjamin champions the “ruined” — that is, fragmentary — aesthetics of German Baroque drama. <i>Ursprung</i> therefore recreates a neo-Baroque rhetoric which schools its readers into the position of detached interpreters — the objective being, of course, to hinder feelings of immersion. </p>
<p>This thesis goes back to the Spanish <i>comedia</i> and to the debates about the dangers of fiction in early-modern Spain in order to dismantle Benjamin’s assumptions about Calderón as well as to make a case for popular art. The engagement with Calderón underscores the fact that aesthetic attachment cannot be dispelled and, therefore, that it also plays a central role in Benjamin’s book. Finally, through close readings of <i>La vida es sueño and La dama duende</i>, I show that Calderón calls forth feelings of identification and immersion whilst remaining both critical and thought-provoking. </p>
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