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 be 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

Keren Gorodeisky, Boston University
“Humanizing Modern Art: Artistic Self-Criticism as a Response to Human Nature’s Basic ‘Homesickness’”
Fiorella Cotrina, University of Southern California
“Mechanized Dreams: Encountering the (Fe-)male…”
Joseph Mai, Clemson University
“Robert Bresson, Style, and the Return to the Human”
Rosina Neginsky, University of Illinois at Springfield
“Recapturing the Works of Gustave Moreau in Mallarmé’s poem ‘Les Noces d’Hérodiade’”

Affiliated Seminar(s):

• Aestheticism: De-humanizing or Re-humanizing Art, the Artist, and the Artistic Receptor?