Symbolism

the prevalence of aesthetics over ethics

Abstract

This work aims to understand Symbolism as a literary movement in which aesthetics overlaps ethics. It thus seeks to analyze how in symbolist poetry there is a prevalence of aesthetic aspects over ethical ones, considering the principles and characteristics of this literary movement from the end of the 19th century and the dimensions of the ethical and aesthetic in philosophy and the arts. This is a bibliographical study, with a brief theoretical discussion about the notions of ethics and aesthetics in the light of philosophical studies, especially those of Amelia Valcárcel (2005) and Benedito Nunes (1991); discussions about Symbolism based on studies such as those by Edmund Wilson (1967) and Tzvetan Todorov (2014) and analysis of poems by symbolist writers Stéphane Mallarmé and Cruz e Souza. Studies on ethics and aesthetics give us an idea of ​​how complex they, being human constructions, are and highlight the historical-philosophical tensions that marked/mark discussions around the meaning of Art and life. In the field of Literature, there is always an overlap of one over the other. However, the predominance of one never completely disappears the other, so the predominance of aesthetics over ethics in Symbolism does not mean the total absence of the ethical dimension in all literature of that period.