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Marianne Moore, John Dewey, and the Aesthetics of Animal Life
- Texas Studies in Literature and Language
- University of Texas Press
- Volume 61, Number 3, Fall 2019
- pp. 311-333
- Article
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ABSTRACT:
This essay explores the similarities and interconnections between John Dewey's explicitly naturalist concept of art, laid out in his 1934 text Art as Experience, and the work of the modernist poet Marianne Moore. At the heart of this investigation is the claim that both writers valued ordinary animal life (human and nonhuman) as a representative and renovative source of aesthetic experience and thus of artistic and social transformation more broadly.