Aesthetic Bliss Research Articles

Reading for Pleasure

Geniessen, jouissance, bliss: with these words some contemporary thinkers would like to remind us of the tenor of a truly aesthetic experience. That aesthetic experience culminates in pleasure is a view which is sanctioned as much by the history of aesthetics as by aesthetic experience itself. Reading for pleasure has surely only gained its dubious reputation among philosophers and aestheticians. Nevertheless, even the most high-brow of thinkers may sometimes be surprised enjoying a good book. It is aesthetic enjoyment, pleasure or, however rare it may be, aesthetic bliss that Hans-Robert Jauss and Roland Barthes examine apologetically in a number of writings. They deem such an apology necessary because in certain trends of thought, such as Marxism, neo-Marxism and phenomenology, pleasure is thought to be a purely bourgeois and extra-aesthetic phenomenon. Barthes and Jauss set out to rehabilitate this victim of contemporary aesthetics by reminding its detractors of a simple but illuminating fact: pleasure existed before capitalism and will exist long after it has gone the way of all ideologies. Nevertheless, Jauss and Barthes do not agree on a number of important points. Jauss will in fact take Barthes to task for his vagaries. I shall therefore compare and contrast Jauss and Barthes on the notion of pleasure in reading. If pleasure is anything, it is polemical. In his Aesthetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik, published in 1977 in Munich, Jauss states that, among other things, he is attempting to clear the way for a reintegration of pleasure into aesthetic experience. Jauss believes that pleasure will allow him to account for the aesthetic aspect of the communication of norms from aesthetic experience into everyday experience-a communication assured by catharsis. The German word Jauss chooses to refer to pleasure is geniessen.

Kunstens museer, museernes kunst?

The Art in Museums, the Art of Museums? Some time in the late twenties my father, wanting to introduce me to the delights of higher civilisation, invited myself, then hardly ten years old, and my somewhat younger cousin to visit the Thorwaldsen Museum. Losing himself in enthusiastic expoundings, my father soon forgot all about time until my candid cousin pulled his sleeve, asking him with evident signs of boredom when does it begin? thus indicating expectations not of aesthetic bliss but of excitements similar to those so very familiar to an already experienced cinéaste.

Murder as a Fine Art: Basic Connections Between Poe's Aesthetics, Psychology, and Moral Vision

The theories of art and the mind which Poe advances systematically in his criticism and elaborates into the cosmology of Eureka are also expressed in his literary works on all levels of theme and form, including recurrent actions, symbols, settings, patterns of characterization, and narrative stances. Despite his separation of beauty from truth and duty, and of the imaginative faculty from reason and conscience, Poe's aesthetic is a self-contained metaphysics and ethics. Unity, the essential condition and supreme value of art, is the condition likewise of death, as pursued by Poe's fictional characters through destructive acts which are vicariously and finally suicidal. Often literally artists or connoisseurs, these protagonists are motivated by a “perversity” indistinguishable in its goals and techniques from those of the divinely inspired imagination. In killing others, they impose unity upon the diverse and particular, assimilating into themselves identities which were tangible reflections of their own beings, and were, so to speak, imperfect art objects. When the hero is victim rather than aggressor, his passage into unconsciousness or mystic awareness is again governed by his longing for unity and attended by aesthetic insight. The relationship in Poe's essays between artist and critic illuminates the ratiocinative tales. Here, the detective's solutions arise from imaginative identification with the criminal and internal enactment of his deed. Obedient to the same intuitive forces, the critic-detective and the creator-criminal display a kinship which conforms to the doubling of aggressive and passive figures in the tales of terror. Life, in Poe's value system, is inimical to an aesthetic bliss; and the didactic implications of his poetry and fiction are reversals of conventional humanistic judgments.