Aesthetics and the Eighteenth Century Subject

The debates about taste, judgment, beauty, sentiment, and sensation in the eighteenth century gave rise to the discourse of aesthetics as we know it today, but they also exerted a powerful influence on how knowledge, virtue, and subjectivity were imagined in the post-enlightenment period. In this course, we will examine some of the founding texts of aesthetic theory from the era (including Locke, Smith, Burke, Lessing, and Kant), and then turn to consider how aesthetic questions informed and were taken up by Goethe's narrative of subject-formation in his Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. In English.