The Birth of Aesthetics

Graduate / Professional

This is a course on the emergence of aesthetic theory in Enlightenment and Romantic era Europe. We'll examine how a new language of art and nature focused on the experience of the beholder and track evolving categories of the sublime, beautiful, and picturesque in key texts of philosophy and literature. We'll connect ideas of aesthetic judgment and autonomy to central institutions and ideologies of the modern era, including the public sphere, secularism, the private subject, racial capitalism, and the market. Readings begin with empirical philosophies of perception and early accounts of the aesthetic in Locke, Addison, Hutcheson, Pope, Hume, and Burke and continue through the watershed moment of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Kant, and Schiller. The seminar ends with a consideration of aesthetic theory in the long contemporary period of Adorno, Scarry, Rancière, and Ngai. Previously ENGL 768. Th 1:30pm-3:25pm