Art and Life in Aestheticism: De-Humanizing and Re-Humanizing Art, the Artist and the Artistic Receptor

by Kelly Comfort

Overview

Art and Life in Aestheticism examines the relationship between the aesthetic and the human realms over the past two hundred years of aestheticism's genealogy in Europe and the Americas. The chronological and transnational scope permits a consideration of the potential social import of literary and artistic creations that purportedly exist for their own sake. Drawing on and expanding the concept of de-humanization put forth by Jose Ortega y Gasset, contributors determine whether or not the de-humanization of art leads to re-humanization, that is, to a deepened relationship between the aesthetic sphere and the world at large, or between the artist or the artistic receptor and his or her human existence. Although not all contributors locate a corresponding process of rehumanization to match, counter, or accompany aestheticism's dehumanizing impulse, they share in the volume's mission of rethinking the underpinnings of the aestheticism movement and its complex treatment of art and life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780230266544
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	01/23/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	668 KB

About the Author

ROBERT ARCHAMBEAU is Associate Professor at Lake Forest College, USA
KAEL ASHBAUGH is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, USA
GENE H. BELL-VILLADA is Professor of Romance Languages at Williams College, USA
BEN DE BRUYN is a research assistant at the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research (FWO) in connection with the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium.
ANDREW EASTHAM is a visiting lecturer at King's College London, UK
PAUL FOX is Associate Professor of Literature at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates
SARAH GARLAND teaches American Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia, UK
YVONNE IVORY is Assistant Professor of German at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, USA
ILEANA MARIN is Associate Professor at Ovidius University of Constanta, Romania and is currently attending the Textual Studies Program at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA
MARGUERITTE MURPHY is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at Bentley College, USA
DANIEL M. SHEA is Assistant Professor of English at Mount Saint Mary College, USA
CHARLES SUMNER is completing his dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, USA

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations     vii
Acknowledgments     viii
Notes on Contributors     x
Introduction: Reflections on the Relationship between Art and Life in Aestheticism   Kelly Comfort     1
Reevaluating the Seminal Works of Nineteenth-Century Aestheticism     23
The Critic as Cosmopolite: Baudelaire's International Sensibility and the Transformation of Viewer Subjectivity   Margueritte Murphy     25
Rossetti's Aesthetically Saturated Readings: Art's De-Humanizing Power   Ileana Marin     42
Dickens A La Carte: Aesthetic Victualism and the Invigoration of the Artist in Huysmans's Against Nature   Paul Fox     62
Reconsidering Turn-of-the-Century Aestheticism     77
Aesthetic Vampirism: Pater, Wilde, and the Concept of Irony   Andrew Eastham     79
The De-Humanization of the Artistic Receptor: The George Circle's Rejection of Paterian Aestheticism   Yvonne Ivory     96
Art for the Body's Sake: Nietzsche's Physical Aestheticism   Kael Ashbaugh     109
Rereading the Aestheticist Strand of Twentieth-Century Literature     123
From "God of the Creation" to "Hangman God": Joyce's Reassessment of Aestheticism   Daniel M. Shea     125
The Aesthetic Anxiety: Avant-Garde Poetics, Autonomous Aesthetics,and the Idea of Politics   Robert Archambeau     139
On the Cold War, American Aestheticism, the Nabokov Problem-and Me   Gene H. Bell-Villada     159
Reassessing Aestheticism in Twentieth-Century Theory     171
Beauty be Damned: Or Why Adorno Valorizes Carrion, Stench, and Putrefaction   Charles B. Sumner     173
"This temptation to be undone ..." Sontag, Barthes, and the Uses of Style   Sarah Garland     189
Art for Heart's Sake: The Aesthetic Existences of Kierkegaard, Pater, and Iser   Ben De Bruyn     208
Index     232