On Beauty and Ugliness

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

What makes a work of literature "beautiful"? What makes it "ugly"? Is it really in the eye of the beholder or is there an objective dimension to our aesthetic judgements? And what role might theological modes of thinking play in our perception of the beautiful in contemporary culture? In this course, we will trace the development of these aesthetic questions, paying particular attention to works that complicate the binary between beauty and ugliness, a binary that frustrates (or simply does not interest) many purely literary critical approaches but finds an echo in a range of rich theological aesthetic imaginaries. In the course of our investigation we will consider various conceptions of beauty, from the classical confluence of form and splendor to the "pleasing terror" of the Romantic sublime, reading authors ranging from John Donne to T.S. Eliot, William Wordsworth to James Joyce on our way to cultivating a nuanced theo-aesthetic vocabulary attuned both to art that attracts and repels.