The new aestheticism

Abstract

The new aestheticism: an introduction The very notion of the 'aesthetic' could be said to have fallen victim to the success of recent developments within literary theory. Undergraduates now pause before rehearsing complacent aesthetic verities concerning truth, meaning and value, verities that used to pass at one time for literary criticism. The rise of critical theory in disciplines across the humanities during the 1980s and 1990s has all but swept aesthetics from the map-and, some would argue, rightly so. Critical theory, of whatever variety, presented a fundamental challenge to the image of the old-style academic aesthete sitting in his (and it was always his) ivory tower and handing down judgements about the good and the bad in art and culture with a blissful disregard for the politics of his pronouncements. Notions such as aesthetic independence, artistic genius, the cultural and historical universality of a text or work, and the humanist assumption of art's intrinsic spiritual value have been successfully challenged by successive investigations into the historical and political bases of art's material production and transmission. Theories of textuality, subjectivity, ideology, class, race and gender have shown such notions of universal human value to be without foundation, and even to act as repressive means of safeguarding the beliefs and values of an elitist culture from challenge or transformation. The upshot of this series of interventions has been the rapid expansion of the canon, as well as a profound questioning of the very idea of canonicity. Art's relations to dominant ideologies have been exposed from a number of perspectives, as well as its potential to challenge these ideologies. What has frequently been lost in this process, however, is the sense of art's specificity as an object of analysisor, more accurately, its specificity as an aesthetic phenomenon. In the rush to diagnose art's contamination by politics and culture, theoretical analysis has tended always to posit a prior order that grounds or determines a work's aesthetic impact, whether this is history, ideology or theories of subjectivity. The aesthetic is thus explicated in other terms, with other criteria, and its singularity is effaced. Theoretical criticism is in continual danger here of throwing out the aesthetic baby with the humanist bathwater. Yet, on theoretical grounds alone, the recent resistance to aesthetics remains puzzling, not least insofar as many of the theoretical advances of the last few years-the focus on the reader's role in the constitution of meaning, the possibility that texts are

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