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American Literature 76.3 (2004) 467-494



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Romantic Electricity, or the Materiality of Aesthetics

California State University, Long Beach

Perhaps the central problem for contemporary critics who address aesthetics is defining exactly what we mean by the term. In addition to the abundance of historically specific ideas about aesthetics, various topics can be crowded under its aegis: aesthetic objects, aesthetic judgments (or values), aesthetic theories, aesthetic experience, aesthetic attitude (or function), aesthetic practice. In the past two decades, American literary criticism has tended to dismiss aesthetics in toto by identifying it almost exclusively with New Criticism's formal judgments about specific aesthetic objects. This dismissal has consisted of debunking New Criticism's idea of a transhistoric aesthetic object by revealing the sociopolitical interestedness of aesthetic judgments supposedly based on objective formal properties. Yet as Winfried Fluck has argued, "[T]he new revisionism has systematically misunderstood and misrepresented the issue of aesthetics, because it has conflated the New Critical version of aesthetic value with the issue of aesthetics in general. . . . [in part] . . . to justify their own project of an historical and political criticism." Such a conflation of aesthetics with a formal focus on "an inherent quality, structure, or gestalt," Fluck contends, "is by no means plausible" and, in fact, is "ahistorical."1 Instead of continuing to dismiss aesthetics or retreating into the defense of a transcendent canon, American literary criticism needs to explore how historically specific ideas about aesthetics and the aesthetic practices they engendered gave rise to something we might call aesthetic experience.

The earliest uses of the term aesthetic in nineteenth-century American criticism reveal the anachronism of identifying aesthetics with [End Page 467] formalism, as these references to aesthetic display less interest in distinguishing aesthetic objects from other things or in defining objective aesthetic values than in identifying a certain kind of experience of or attitude toward the world. In fact, as an article from the American Whig Review in 1846 reveals, the aesthetic approach of American romantics like Margaret Fuller was regularly attacked for its lack of attention to such formal features as "counter-point, or chiaro-oscuro, subject or composition, style or choice of words."2 In her introduction to Aesthetic Papers (1849), one of the first American volumes with "aesthetic" in its title, Elizabeth Peabody explicitly states: "The 'aesthetic element,' then, is in our view neither a theory of the beautiful, nor a philosophy of art, but a component and indivisible part in all human creations which are not mere works of necessity; in other words, which are based on idea, as distinguished from appetite."3 It is clear in her prospectus to the volume that Peabody sees the aesthetic as transcending partisan political disputes: "The Editor [of this volume] wishes to assemble, upon the high aesthetic ground (away from the regions of strife, in any bad sense), writers of different schools."4 Yet Peabody's selection of essays and sketches—including Emerson's "War," Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government," and Hawthorne's "Main-Street"—indicates that she views the aesthetic not as a withdrawal into consciousness and form but as a particular kind of engagement with the world. She describes this engagement as "the unpersonal," a kind of experience that "sinks and subordinates the observer to the object,—which, by putting my personality aside, enables me to see the object in pure uncolored light." For nineteenth-century American romantics, then, aesthetic considerations were linked by their "having a reference to the central fact of the constant relation of the individual to the universal, and of their equally constant separation."5 Rather than a code of formal laws or a canon of transcendent works of art, the aesthetic comprised attempts to bridge the gap between individual experience and universal law or truth, by turning away from the notion of a self-interested individual, driven by material necessity, toward an ideal sphere.

While new historicists have frequently used their rejection of New Critical formal aesthetics to dismiss the aesthetic as a category of analysis, more historically nuanced criticism influenced by cultural materialism has tended to focus...

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