Notes on the Critical Reception of G.E. Lessing's Laokoon in 19th and Early 20th-century America

When Clement Greenberg wrote his essay, Towards a Newer Laocoon, a homage to G.E. Lessing's Laokoon (1766), he was not fully aware of the complex cultural constructs he was dealing with. His general perception of the treatise resulted from a long and complicated phenomenon of cultural appropriation and negotiation. Around the second half of the 19h century, an intense migration of symbols and paradigms from Germany to America took place, and Lessing's Laokoon was an important part of it. This mobility of ideas was favored by the migration of scholars, who played the role of physical vehicles of new paradigms and cultural values. Most important were the intersections and negotiation processes: during this age, Lessing's theories conformed to American cultural needs and expectations. This phenomenon paved the way to the canonization of a precise mythology, as the treatise gradually became the symbol for the strict logic for the separation of the arts. At the beginning of the 20th century, this tradition was canonized by Irving Babbitt's The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (1910): here, the author revised and reshaped Lessing's ideas in order to adapt them to the case of modern art.