Book Description
Considered an exemplar of "Art-for-Art's Sake" in Victorian art and literature, Walter Pater (1839-1894) was co-opted as a standard bearer for the cult of hedonism by Oscar Wilde, and this version of aestheticism has since been used to attack deconstruction. Here Jonathan Loesberg boldly uses Pater's important work on society and culture, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), to argue that the habitual dismissal of deconstruction as "aestheticist" fails to recognize the genuine philosophic point and political engagement within aestheticism. Reading Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man in light of Pater's Renaissance, Loesberg begins by accepting the charge that deconstruction is "aestheticist." He goes on to show, however, that aestheticism and modern deconstruction both produce philosophical knowledge and political effect through persistent self-questioning or "self-resistance" and in the internal critique and destabilization of hegemonic truths. Throughout Loesberg reinterprets Pater and reexamines the contributions of deconstruction in relation to the apparent theoretical shift away from deconstruction and toward new historicism. ... Read more

Book Description

Into the Open is a philosophical and literary inquiry into the deeper meanings of genius.What precisely do we mean when we describe someone this way?What legacy do we invoke when we apply this term?

To address this question, Benjamin Taylor here explores how three great minds—Walter Pater, Paul Valry, and Sigmund Freud—viewed a figure widely considered the first great modern genius, Leonardo da Vinci.For each of these great thinkers, Da Vinci is of central importance because for each the received idea of genius has ceased to be a romantic certitude or sacred truth and has become a problem.

Invoking Nietzsche's drastic critique of genius, Taylor assesses the less programmatic and more anxious cases of Pater, Valry, and Freud.Whereas Nietzsche sought for and found an escape from romantic humanism, Pater, Valry, and Freud cannot relinquish the idea of genius and serve as troubled witnesses to the dilemma posed by the notion of genius. A myth of genius has been our way of making good the losses romantic modernity entails, Taylor writes, A myth of genius has existed to affirm that, among human lives, some have sacramental shape; that, among human lives, some put into abeyance the equation between life and loss.Such is the post-theological, post-metaphysical role into which we have compelled our geniuses.They make for us one last claim on the sublime.

A shift away from the special pleading that has lately plagued literary studies, Taylor's unfazed humanism reasserts the timeless standards of substantiveness, clarity, and grace.

Book Description
This book argues for a new attention to the importance of beauty and the aesthetic in our response to poetry. Charles Martindale explores ways in which Kant's aesthetic theory, as set out in the Critique of Judgement, remains of fundamental importance for the modern critic. He argues that the Kantian 'judgement of taste' is not formalist, and explores the relationship between the aesthetic and the political in our responses to art. Finally he urges the value of aesthetic criticism as pioneered by Walter Pater and others. The (mainly Latin) poems discussed are all translated, and the book will be of interest not only to classicists but to anyone interested in aesthetics, aestheticism, poetry, reception, comparative literature, and critical theory. ... Read more