ESTETIKA RUŽNOG U „RIMSKIM PRIČAMA“ ALBERTA MORAVIJE

Abstract

The paper juxtaposes the key postulates of Kant’s and Hartmann’s aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime with Karl Rosenkranz’s aesthetics of ugliness in order to examine the dynamics of the relationship between the beautiful, the sublime, and the ugly in art. The paper’s working hypothesis is that the aesthetics of ugliness is necessary since the ugly and the beautiful form a binary opposition, given that the concept of the beautiful cannot be known and understood without the concept of the ugly. To investigate this hypothesis, the paper analyzes selected Roman Tales by Alberto Moravia (1907-1990), one of the most significant modern Italian writers, whose characters come from the margins of the society and belong to various categories of the ugly based on Rosenkranz’s nomenclature from The Aesthetics of Ugliness. With their physical and spiritual ugliness, Moravia’s characters negate the banalities of life and prove that the mundane is not beautiful per se, but is more often than not ugly and ordinary, and even as such it deserves to be the object of art.