Read more
A multi-authored volume of original essays by scholars in literary studies and philosophy on the question of the aesthetic in the current critical climate.
List of contents
- Introduction
- PART 1
- 1: Derek Attridge: The Experience of Art
- 2: Richard Prum: The Ontology of Artworlds: A Posthuman, Coevolutionary Framework for Aesthetics, Art History, and Art Criticism
- PART 2
- 3: Jonah Siegel: Beauty and her Sisters in the Nineteenth Century and After
- 4: Herbert Tucker: Gates of Horn in Ivory Towers: On Beauty's Truth
- PART 3
- 5: Isobel Armstrong: What we do: The New this and the New That
- 6: Josephine McDonagh: Is the Migrant a Metaphor? On Representation of Migration in Contemporary Art, Film, and Literature
- 7: Edgar Garcia: Aesthetic Poison
- 8: Ankhi Mukherjee: Aesthetic Criticism and the Post-Colonial
- PART 4
- 9: Myra Jehlen: On the Last Paragraph of the 1859 Edition of Darwin's Origin of Species
- 10: Philip Davis: Wild Aesthetics: D.H. Lawrence's 'Art for My Sake'
- 11: Richard Eldridge: 'whose eye darted contagious fire': Aesthetic Form, Performative Action, and Paradise Lost
- 12: Susan J. Wolfson: Tennyson's Tears and Brooks's Motivations
- PART 5
- 13: Helen Small: Do Birds Disagree?: The Place of Aesthetic Value in Advocacy for the Humanities
About the author
George Levine is Emeritus Professor at Rutgers University. His work has focused on Victorian fiction, George Eliot, and Darwin and his relation to the novel and, more recently, on the relation of science to literature and aesthetics, and secularism.
Summary
This book establishes an argument for deeper attention to the aesthetic qualities of literature, to the question of the relation between the aesthetic and more immediate, practical, and urgent social and political matters. It attempts to establish the intrinsic value of the aesthetic at the same time as it demonstrates that focus on the aesthetic does not preclude attention of the urgent questions with which works of art consistently engaged. It argues that attention to the aesthetic does not diminish attention to these larger issues, but in effect increases the power both of art and criticism to engage them fruitfully.
Additional text
Each author here is touched deeply by beauty, and I assume they inspire the experience in one student at a time.
