Art's Undoing : In the Wake of a Radical Aestheticism / Forest Pyle.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pyle, Forest, Author.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (328 p.)

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2021]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Radical aestheticism describes a recurring event in some of the most powerful and resonating texts of nineteenth-century British literature, offering us the best way to reckon with what takes place at certain moments in texts by Shelley, Keats, Dickinson, Hopkins, Rossetti, and Wilde. This book explores what happens when these writers, deeply committed to certain versions of ethics, politics, or theology, nonetheless produce an encounter with a radical aestheticism that subjects the authors’ projects to a fundamental crisis. A radical aestheticism offers no positive claims for art, whether on ethical or political grounds or on aesthetic grounds, as in “art for art’s sake.” It provides no transcendent or underlying ground for art’s validation. In this sense, a radical aestheticism is the experience of a poesis that exerts so much pressure on the claims and workings of the aesthetic that it becomes a kind of black hole from which no illumination is possible. The radical aestheticism encountered in these writers, in its very extremity, takes us to the constitutive elements—the figures, the images, the semblances—that are at the root of any aestheticism, an encounter registered as evaporation, combustion, or undoing. It is, therefore, an undoing by and of art and aesthetic experience, one that leaves this important literary tradition in its wake. Art’s Undoing embraces diverse theoretical projects, from Walter Benjamin to Jacques Derrida. These become something of a parallel text to its literary readings, revealing how some of the most significant theoretical and philosophical projects of our time remain within the wake of a radical aestheticism.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction: “From Which One Turns Away”

1. “A Light More Dread Than Obscurity”: Spelling and Kindling in Percy Bysshe Shelley

2. “I Hold It Towards You”: Keats’s Weakness

3. What the Zeros Taught: Emily Dickinson, Event-Machine

4. Hopkins’s Sighs

5. Superficiality: What Is Loving and What Is Dead in Dante Gabriel Rossetti

6. “Rings, Pearls, and All”: Wilde’s Extravagance

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 26. Mai 2021)

ISBN:

0-8232-9095-6

OCLC:

1309058215