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SoSe 14: V-Literary Studies: Periods-Genres-Concepts: Literary Studies I: Introduction to Aesthetic Theory

Jennifer Wawrzinek

Comments

In 1795 Friedrich Schiller proposed that people cannot transcend their circumstances without education and that art, as the vehicle of education, can liberate individuals from the constraints and the excesses of pure nature and pure mind. For Schiller, aesthetic experience allows people to reconcile the inner antagonism between sense and reason, nature and culture. Schiller's writings on aesthetic experience were part of a rise in eighteenth-century England and Germany of a discourse devoted to the question of sensory experience and the social value of the artwork. How do we define a work of art? What is art? What is the nature of our experience of and judgement of concepts such as the beautiful, the sublime and the grotesque? Why has the concept of the beautiful come under attack in the 20th Century? And why have the grotesque, the ugly and the carnivalesque been given increasing importance towards the beginning of the new millenium?

This course examines the development of aesthetic theory from the eighteenth century to the present day. Over the course of the semester students will be introduced to a range of critical texts and literary formulations that seek to address the key concerns of three primary aesthetic categories: the beautiful, the sublime, and the grotesque. We will begin by interrogating the idea of beauty. What do we mean by saying an object is 'beautiful' and what place should 'beauty' have in our lives? What did it mean for the Romantics to equate truth with beauty? And why was this such a problematic concept in the twentieth century? We will then turn to the category of the sublime in order to analyse the particular ideologies of power and submission inherent to its figuration and employment, from the Romantic era to contemporary reformulations of the sublime as a means of political empowerment. In the final weeks of the course students will examine ideas of disharmony, deformation and distortion, the misfit and the freak in the category of the grotesque in order to explore the particular relevance of this notion to queer theory, postcolonialism and the carnivalesque.

Set Texts: A selection of readings will be made available on Blackboard prior to the beginning of semester.