Genius, Taste, Talent: Differentiating the Faculties of the Mind at the Berlin Academy in the Eighteenth Century

This case study presents a debate among the members of the Berlin Académie royale des sciences et belles-lettres concerning the question to be proposed for the 1784 prize essay competition. Drawing on correspondence and treatises on aesthetics and ‘psychology’ from members of the academy, the article aims to highlight the difficulties of establishing literary expertise in the eighteenth century, and how this process was challenged by the relationship between the categories of ‘nature’ and ‘exception’. The competition question was ultimately rejected by the belles-lettres class members — not because it lacked interest, but because it did not align with their conception of the discipline at the time of its specialization.

This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .