ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

The question as to how literature, along with other creative arts, both helps to determine and is determined by the human is at the forefront of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century aestheticism in Europe and the Americas. Art for art’s sake–both as an approach toward art and as an attitude toward life–promotes freedom and autonomy, aims for newness and originality, hails pleasure over instruction, and prefers form and beauty to content and truth. As such, aestheticism invites us to consider the relationship between art and life, between the aesthetic and the social, especially in light of its purported severance between these two spheres. By widening the distance between art and life, separating aesthetics from the economic, scientific, pragmatic, and political, and trying to avoid the fate of “art for capital’s sake” or “art for the market’s sake,” l’art pour l’art critiques the dominant social and economic values that made such a redefinition of art necessary in the first place. This seminar thus aims to explore the extent to which art for art’s sake can viewed as an attempt to rehumanize (rather than dehumanize) art, the artist, or the artistic receptor in ways that speak to the question of what makes us human. Seminar participants should thus discuss how the aestheticist view of art and literature is either life-sustaining or life-evading? Both theoretical analyses and textual comparisons are welcome.

Friday, March 24

Brian Fortune, Bucknell University
“Aesthetic Education and the Re-establishment of the Human: A Re-examination of the Schillerian Argument”
Margueritte Murphy, Bentley College
“‘Sa jambe de statue’: Baudelaire, Gautier, and ideal beauty – how human is it?”
Ileana Marin, University of Washington
“Rossetti’s ‘Aesthetically Saturated Readings’”
Jutta Mackwell, Edinburgh University
“Social Aestheticism? The Reconciliation of a Paradox”

Saturday, March 25

Jeffrey Todd, Texas Christian University
“Aestheticisms ‘Strong’ and ‘Weak’ in the Work of Stefan George”
Yvonne Ivory, University of South Carolina
“Aestheticism De-Humanized: Stefan George’s Cult of the Self”
Daniel Shea, Mount Saint Mary College
“From God of the Creation to Hangman God: Joyce’s Reassessment of Aestheticism”
Nicholas Gaskill, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“‘The Light Which, Showing the Way, Forbids It’: Chopin’s ‘Pirate’s Gold’ Aesthetic in The Awakening”

Sunday, March 26

Kael Ashbaugh, Rutgers University
“Becoming Fictions: The Aesthetic Humanizing of Being in Nietzsche and Cabrera Infante”
Angela Fernandes, University of Lisbon
“Human portraits in dehumanized novels: Gómez de la Serna and Ortega y Gasset in dialogue”
Harsha Ram, University of California at Berkeley
“Aestheticism under the Mensheviks: Art for art’s sake and National Liberation in Georgia”
Robert Hughes, Ohio State University
“Badiou, Ranciere, and the Return to the Aesthetic”

Affiliated Seminar(s):

• Beauty as Philosophy of Art, Literature, and Music