Anti-Aestheticism
Anti-aestheticism refers to a rejection of traditional aesthetic values and an embrace of the unconventional, the ugly, and the mundane in literature. It challenges the idea that art should be beautiful and instead seeks to disrupt and provoke. Anti-aestheticism often aims to critique societal norms and challenge the status quo through its rejection of traditional aesthetic principles.
3 Key excerpts on "Anti-Aestheticism"
eBook - ePub- Sara Upstone(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Teach Yourself(Publisher)
...1 Aestheticism The beginnings of literary theory are often identified as an early twentieth-century development, occurring at the same time as the movements that began to consciously name and define literary and artistic production. Guides to literary theory often begin with formalism: a field of literary criticism that sprang up alongside the movement towards self-conscious artistic definition. However, there was a tradition preceding this of attempting to theorize approaches to thinking about literature within the context of wider debates surrounding artistic production. Certainly, we might see Romanticism as one such movement. We could also refer to the metaphysical poetry movement, or transcendentalism, as other examples. We are going to begin, however, not with these but with perhaps a less familiar term that is associated with the nineteenth century – and that is aestheticism. It is often neglected in accounts of literary theory, but it haunts the twentieth-century movements that follow, particularly modernism and, as we shall see at the end of the chapter, it has seen a twenty-first-century resurgence. The Pre-Raphaelites Aestheticism has its roots in the Romantic ideas of John Keats (1795–1821), the mid-nineteenth-century writings of John Ruskin (1819–1900) and the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Unlike the American transcendentalist movement or the largely English metaphysical poetry and Pre-Raphaelite traditions, aestheticism can be seen to define thinking about literature beyond national literary identities. Its significance comes, in particular, in the ways in which it defined the role of art in relation to society...
eBook - ePub- R. V. Johnson(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...1 Aspects of Aestheticism In studying Victorian literature, we soon meet with references to ‘art for art’s sake’, ‘the aesthetic movement’, ‘aestheticism’, ‘the aesthetes’. We thus gather that in the later nineteenth century there appeared a body of people who distinguished themselves by the importance they attached to literature and the fine arts and to beauty generally; and that they were often regarded with disapproval by their fellow-citizens. We may see examples of Du Maurier’s contemporary cartoons in Punch, where the aesthete figures as an affected young gentleman with long hair, velveteen jacket and knickerbockers, attended by admiring, languidly ethereal young ladies. And the name that probably most readily comes to most people’s minds – if only because it has a certain facetious notoriety in modern English folk-lore – is that of Oscar Wilde. When, however, we attempt a more precise understanding of ‘aestheticism’, ‘art for art’s sake’, and related terms, the picture blurs. When we try to pin them down, the terms become oddly elusive. ‘Art for art’s sake’ was a useful battle-cry for artists and critics claiming freedom of artistic expression; but, logically, it becomes meaningful, only if we can answer the question, ‘What is art?’ The aesthetic movement is, historically, a rather obscure phenomenon, since it is difficult to say of whom it ever consisted – apart from Oscar Wilde himself. (And Wilde was less important, as an originator of ideas, than his fame suggests.) Did there, in fact, ever exist anything sufficiently coherent and clearly defined to merit being called a movement at all? Again, an aesthete is often defined as somebody who appreciates beauty; but aesthetes, in this broad sense, have obviously existed before and since the nineteenth century. What was so special about ‘the Aesthetes’? As for the word, ‘aestheticism’: this is used to denote different features of nineteenth-century culture...
eBook - ePub- Severin Schroeder, Severin Schroeder(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...These works, while in many ways great, are clearly not beautiful in any straightforward sense, and are more appropriately classified under Nietzsche’s label of ‘interesting ugliness.’ 6 MacCarthy notices the difficulty with novels, and tries to deal with it by the ad hoc device of claiming them to be ‘bastard’ works of art, but in fact the trouble is much more wide ranging, and requires his theory to be rejected altogether. I suspect that what have been dubbed ‘no-truth’ theories of art are nourished by a too narrow a conception of the aesthetic and too narrow a conception of knowledge. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to examine in detail the reasons why some philosophers and critics find the cognitive and aesthetic impulses in tension with one another, and to provide an account of the aesthetic attitude and literary knowledge which shows that the alleged tension is only apparent. In my view, the ability to impart knowledge can sometimes be a part, and an important part, of a work’s aesthetic quality. I hope that what follows has a general application to all the representational arts, but I shall largely restrict my discussion to literature because that has always been the main focus of debate. And my discussion of literature will largely focus on fiction because that is where the most distinctive features of literary knowledge can best be seen. The first prerequisite for showing that the alleged tension between curiosity and aesthetic interest is only apparent, is to clarify the nature of aesthetic interest. 7 The aesthetic attitude is a mode of attention to an object of sight, hearing or – to a lesser extent – touch. There are two kinds of attention: willed and unwilled. In the former case my attention is an action; it is something I do for a reason. Thus I may look at a picture to try to discover whether the castle it represents had a portcullis, or whether the canvas is large enough to cover my wall safe, or whether the artist who painted it was a Mason...
