Aesthetic Project Research Articles

Rebuilding Bildung: The Middlebrow Novel of Aesthetic Education in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States

This article contributes to the formulation of an aesthetics of the so-called middlebrow novel during the early Cold War years, when the term middlebrow was in its widest circulation. It argues that in their work middlebrow authors frequently attempt to adapt the Enlightenment paradigm of the bildungsroman, or novel of aesthetic education, in order to meet the challenges of modernity; at the same time they critique a then-hegemonic version of modernism that argued that the nature of twentieth-century society required writers to make a radical break with conventional literary aesthetics. Uncoupling the term middlebrow from its familiar location within debates concerning cultural capital, “Rebuilding Bildung” locates the middlebrow at the heart of a widespread mid-century debate concerning the value of aesthetic experience. In particular, this article argues that middlebrow authors generate in their work a nonsubversive irony through free indirect discourse and the tentative deployment of conventional generic tropes. This irony allowed middlebrow authors to critique without undermining the central contention of the bildungsroman: that aesthetic pleasure might allow the individual to come to terms with his or her social world. The essay examines a number of novels, including Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny (1951), James Michener's Hawaii (1959), Laura Z. Hobson's Gentleman's Agreement (1947), and Robert Ruark's Poor No More (1959). It focuses primarily on Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt (1952), a novel that attempts to move the “lesbian pulp” genre into specifically middlebrow territory and in doing so brings the stakes of a middlebrow aesthetic project into an especially sharp focus.

Teresa Margolles's Crime Scene Aesthetics

When her exhibition “Operativo” opened at New York's Y Gallery, in July 2008, Mexican artist Teresa Margolles said, “Everyone dies but not everyone is murdered. I want people to recognize that.” Ostensibly, with this call for recognition, Margolles simultaneously gestures toward both the universality of death and the crucial differentiation of its genres. Death is not a standardized moment or an equal event; it can be untimely, premature, and violent. As such, death spotlights difference; death has a social life that is contextualized by brutality, inequality, poverty, and politics. To achieve this recognition Margolles works in medico-legal and forensic spaces, creating aesthetic pieces from the remains of crime. This essay examines a number of artworks by Margolles as she deals in death scenes that exceed the boundaries of “typical” criminological, political, or juridical discourse. The essay explores dimensions of Margolles's practice to examine additionally the constitutive value of aesthetic projects that deal in violent death.

Lírica Moderna e Surrealismo: uma leitura dos poemas “XXIII” e “XXIV” do Canto Primeiro de Invenção de Orfeu, de Jorge de Lima

Modern Lyrics and Surrealism: An interpretation of poems XXIII and XXIV of the First Canto in Jorge de Lima's Invencao de Orfeu. This work presents, in a didactic manner, a few considerations about the use made by Surrealism of some exemplary techniques in modern poetry (such as automatic writing, the dream, the image, and the collage) to achieve its aesthetic project that privileges the dream and imagination as artistic practice. As a point of convergence between poetic practice and theory, we will take as example poems 'XXIII' and 'XXIV' of the First Canto of Jorge de Lima's Invencao de Orfeu.

La condición fotográfica de las autobiografías de Ramón Gómez de la Serna: Mi autobiografía (1924)

This article addresses the presence of photographic images in Mi autobiografía (1924) by Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888–1963). The analysis takes into account not only the uses of photography in the abovementioned autobiographical text, but photography as part of an aesthetic practice that transcends the physical presence of the image and enters into the terrain of what Rosalind Krauss considers to be the 'photographic condition'. Her post-structuralist analysis of the relationships between photography and the aesthetic project of Surrealism is the starting point for our exploration of the interwoven use of literary and photographic images in relation to the creation of a discourse of identity. The result will show an innovative and multidisciplinary autobiographical writing, able to challenge the limits and characteristics of the autobiographical practices of the time in their Spanish cultural context.

Restoration Politics and Sentimental Poetics in A.-J.-B. Defauconpret's Translations of Sir Walter Scott

This essay shows how Auguste-Jean-Baptiste Defauconpret's French translations of Old Mortality and Rob Roy followed a politically conservative agenda, reconfiguring Sir Walter Scott's novels for a Legitimist, Catholic, post-Napoleonic readership. Political rewriting went hand in hand with an aesthetic project as Defauconpret refashioned Scott's protagonists to resemble the domestic heroes of the French sentimental novel, exiling them to the private sphere. Yet Defauconpret inadvertently created an influential formal hybrid which not only caused the French historical novel to diverge radically from Scott's model but played a significant role in the evolution of the French realist novel.

Avskapelsens estetik

The Aesthetics of Detachment: Negotiations of Representation in Lars Norén’s Journal.
 While Lars Norén’s confrontational and confessional En dramatikers dagbok (A Dramatist’s Journal, 2008) has spurred numerous discussions regarding the nature of confession in today’s mediated literary public sphere, less has been said about the aesthetic project of the journal. This article traces the journal’s aesthetic project back to Norén’s poetry of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Utilising comparisons with works by Lyn Hejinian and Kenneth Goldsmith, an ongoing dialectic between subjectivity and textuality is outlined. Drawing upon Hal Foster’s ideas regarding “the return of the real”, and Simone Weil’s notion of “detatchment”, the article consequently argues that the journal’s subject is aestheticized to the point of negation by means of a performative process that reconstructs the journal’s self in the realm of public debate.

How Keats Falls

KEATS'S HYPERION POSITS HUMAN FINITUDE AS THE BEGINNING RATHER than the end of aesthetic work. By finitude I mean not simply the awareness of death that informs Keats's writing, but more widely the poet's sense that the experience of traumatic historical change can beget a new kind of imaginative life. Hyperion's fall emblematizes this paradoxically generative condition, shaping both the content and form of the poem in such a way that the text comes to signify a major shift in literary history. Just as the titan's bodily suffering enables his status as an epic figure, the poem's drive toward narrative fragmentation not only performs but embraces epic poetry's historical outmoding. In both cases, the expectation of traumatic loss initiates an anticipatory imagining--Hyperion's, the poet's--that eschews recompense or consolation in Favor of an affective experience of that loss. Moving his poem toward rather than away from epic's demise, toward rather than away from the political and social circumstances that occasion that demise, Keats demonstrates that progressive historical narratives have become impossible in his contemporary moment. Yet this impossibility makes possible a new poetics--a lyric that emerges from epic's dissolution--and indeed a new mode of living amidst unrelenting political and social upheaval. Two decades of scholarship have presented us with a deeply political Keats, but one whose aesthetic engagements remain ascribable to the historical particularities of England's early-nineteenth-century political scene. Studies by Nicholas Roe and Jeffrey Cox have placed Keats squarely within the traditions of English political dissent and its Cockney variations. (1) In response to both the Harvard Keatsians' triumphal personalism and to early New Historicism's negative critique of Keats's poetics, this strain of inquiry necessarily deemphasized the ways in which Keats's aesthetic project remains committed to imagining a human life that by definition cannot be reduced to such contexts. (2) Arguing that Hyperion's highly figurative language counters without overcoming the representation of historical trauma commonly associated with the poem, I wish to reassert an approach to Keats's writing that explores how, for Keats, human identity emerges from the imagination's necessarily incomplete attempts to comprehend the fullness of its historical experience. With the term historical, I refer not solely to the events and material circumstances surrounding a text's composition and circulation (the politicized publishing scene of Regency England, for example), but also to the narratives (poetic, scholarly, or otherwise) that attempt to make sense of those events and circumstances. Keats's poetry asks its readers to consider alternatives to the kind of imagining that produces historical narratives, even as it expresses a deeply felt response to actual events. By exploring this dimension of Keatsian writing, I mean not to align Keats with that model of willful ahistoricism we have called the Romantic Ideology, but rather to consider how his poem's marking of imagination's limits--and its related commitment to feeling--is itself an historically concerned endeavor. (3) Such a consideration may in turn help Keats scholars to reexamine the affective value of poetic form, focusing on how poetry represents feeling in particular historical moments and, more vitally, how it produces feeling readers. Recent approaches to Keats have attended closely to the ways in which the poetry is suffused with feeling that registers, as strictly cognitive thought cannot, the poet's historical condition. Thomas Pfau, most compellingly, sees Keats as the paradigm of late Romanticism's affective relation to a bewildering historical life-world. For Pfau, Keats's melancholic mood continues and modifies the project of Romantic lyric developed by Wordsworth, in which lyric form aims to awaken romantic subjectivity from its dormant state and to its perilous historical situatedness, all while sheltering (at least partially) the subject of such awakening from the traumatic impact of the knowledge so produced in the cocoon of aesthetic form. …

Sátira e humor em Machado de Assis: dois casos exemplares

This article promotes a compared analysis between “O caso da vara” e Quincas Borba, by Machado de Assis, observing the way by wich satire and humor are inserted in the aesthetic project of the author, especially in the configuration of a “realism of evaluation”. Narrator and focalization construct a critical dimension by the mean of the comical forms mentioned, visualizing the “minor social interval” that, in according to Alfredo Bosi, characterizes Brazilian Realism under Machado de Assis.

Technical and aesthetic project in British philosophy

The paper examines the mutual influence of two major currents in European culture, advocating the idea that British philosophy is the cradle of both. A turning point was reached with the philosophy of Francis Bacon and his view that the real value of knowledge is utilitarian. With his insistence that man has rights over nature and study and conquer nature in order to increase his own power, Bacon laid the philosophical foundation for technological civilization. The paper goes on to trace the transfer of utilitarian values from the field of knowledge to the whole spiritual space particularly the aesthetic, and identifies a so-called aesthetic project emerging in reaction to the overwhelming utilitarianism of the modern world.

Gold, Allegory, and the Commodity Form: Reflections on José Donoso's Casa de campo

Gold, Allegory, and the Commodity Form:Reflections on José Donoso's Casa de campo Alessandro Fornazzari (bio) According to the poet Pablo Neruda, José Donoso was destined to write "the great Chilean social novel."1 Yet instead of being recognized as the Chilean Balzac, Donoso's literary project has perhaps become best known for its modernist disarticulation of the very possibility of a realist novel capable of accessing a vision of totality. This modernist approach is based on a partial analysis of Donoso's work, privileging his formally experimental novels such as El obsceno pájaro de la noche and Taratuta: Naturaleza muerta con cachimba over more realist-oriented work such as Coronación, Este domingo and El lugar sin límites. This essay does not attempt to claim Donoso for one faction or the other. Rather, it works towards a reformulation of the question regarding whether Donoso is really a Lukacsian realist whose novels "reflect" the unity of economics and ideology as an objective whole (the ever elusive concept of totality), or on the contrary whether he achieves a high modernist vision, tearing heterogeneous bits of reality away from their social contexts and juxtaposing them in order to produce subjectivist narratives. The argument that this essay advances is that it is the unrelenting tension—and ultimate crisis—of these two aesthetic and cognitive forms (realism and modernism) in Donoso's work that makes him so valuable for understanding the historical transformations brought upon by the Chilean neoliberal transition. The crisis of these two forms coincides with a historical turning [End Page 31] point in Chile, the 1970s transition from one regime of accumulation (an industrial and traditionally agrarian order) to another (neoliberal capitalism). Since his earliest writings Donoso has expressed an ambiguous and at times capricious relation with the different variants of the Latin American realist tradition. He has explicitly rejected the criollista novel's mimetic realism, its exclusive concern for the rural (understood as a nostalgia for an agrarian past in an era of immigration and economic expansion), and its search for an autochthonous literary expression. This position vis-á-vis a certain form of the Latin American realist novel would seem to situate Donoso firmly within the Latin American literary boom's cosmopolitan aesthetic project; it reinforces the boom's parricidal tabula rasa myth and the claim that the preceding realist narrative project had been devoured by a descriptive and documentary passion for nature. Yet two immediate problems result from this positioning of Donoso within the modernist boom project—this approach cannot account for the entirety of his literary production (including some of his best work such as El lugar sin límites), nor can it go beyond the cliché that conceives the rich and varied tradition of Latin American realism in terms that are too mimetic, too rural and too local. Donoso's novels represent a continuation—however contentious—of a critical realist tradition rather than its rupture. Because of the split in the critical reception of his work, his novels have been read as both a notable expression of realist narrative and as marking a seemingly radical break with it (El obsceno pájaro de la noche is generally considered the paradigmatic example). Realist readings of Donoso's realist novels emphasize his description of the fragile and decadent upper crust of Chilean society with a language that is richly local and transparent (as in the work of critics Hugo Achugar, Hernán Vidal, and Antonio Cornejo Polar, for example), whereas modernist perspectives emphasize Donoso's radical signifying strategies, subversive and experimental attitude toward social institutions and language, and refusal of totalizing narratives (Philip Swanson, Sharon Magnarelli, Ana Dopico and Adriana Valdés, among others). The question then is—how do we understand or resolve this realist/modernist tension that has polarized the reception of Donoso's work? Can it be simply explained as a progressive change in his writing and aesthetic project? Is there an early realist Donoso versus a late modernist Donoso? Alternatively, I argue that the dyad is a constant and productive tension throughout his work; one that will reach both its pinnacle and ultimate limit in the 1978 novel Casa de campo, which...

Shooting Crows with a Canon: Notes on the Poetics of Shaul Tshernikhovski's Early Works

A b S t R A C t As thinking about canon formation becomes ever more sophisticated, the connections between canons and culture are likewise understood as equally complicated. This article seeks to look at one poem by Shaul Tshernikhovski in order to shed light on that complex. Despite the fact that Tshernikhovski’s position as a canonical Hebrew poet continues to be secure, his works often challenge many of the preconceptions about the nature and role of nationalism in the so-called Hebrew Renaissance. In “The Two Ravens,” Tshernikhovski’s translation-adaptation of a Scottish ballad, the poet foregrounds a personal aesthetic project as an important contribution to Hebrew letters.

Tours de Babel et lettres de feu : motifs bibliques dans le Berlin de Vladimir Nabokov

When examining the critical responses to Vladimir Nabokov’s representations of Berlin in his Russian fiction, it is quite surprising to notice that two antithetical positions have been formulated, one which stresses the absence of Berlin as a city in Nabokov’s texts, and a more recent position emphasizing, on the contrary, the substantial presence of the city in terms of references, landmarks and recognizable sites. This article adopts a different stance, focusing on two Old Testament motifs that appear in Nabokov’s last Russian novel (The Gift) and in his autobiography, namely the Tower of Babel and the letters of fire from the book of Daniel. Starting from these motifs involving shop signs, letters and light, I attempt to connect the urban scene of exile with the issue of bilingualism, and to show in what ways Nabokov’s use of these two biblical topoi points to a vision of literary creation as transgression. The problem of Berlin’s existence or non-existence in Nabokov’s work is therefore shifted from the domain of mimetic representation onto a different plane, where the signs of Berlin are closely examined and decoded, thus giving access to a possible understanding of the writer’s change of language and of his larger aesthetic project.

The Wise Fool in the Slovak Oral and Literary Tradition<br>Múdry hlupák v slovenskej ústnej a literárnej tradícii</br>

The article discusses the wise fool cycle in Slovakia, which includes tricksters not in the sense of a mythical character, but rather as a wise-fool hero a cunning trickster as well as hero that is often underestimated. In the narrative tradition of Slovakia there are several heroes known in the rural environment as well as wise fool heroes in the urban environment. At the narration level a hero ceases to be a real man and becomes an aesthetic projection of his community needs. He becomes a code, expressing the details of human experience in a sensitive way, different from proclaimed requirements, thus projecting a more universal and true statement.

Outplaying Kronos' Hunger: Massimo Bontemplelli's GENTE NEL TEMPO

This essay offers an interpretation of Massimo Bontempelli's “novecentista” novel, Gente nel tempo, by examining and expanding upon the implications of the “modernized” classical Greek myth of Kronos. In the light of the author's ideas on artistic creativity, history and time, this myth lies at the very core of the work and suggests that this novel, while pointing to the destructive, devouring pattern of time intended as Kronos, could also hint at a way in which an alternative, more human time (Kairos) might be salvaged and re-experienced. Bontempelli's desired “recovery of the individual” and his related aesthetic project of escape from the negativity of History may derive from an alternative “kairotic” experience in which time is characterized by its qualitative rather that its quantitative nature and artistic creativity reacquires a preeminent, active role. For Bontempelli, I ultimately argue, the category of “play,” in all its ramifications, represents this sort of salvific experience.

Baudelaire's “Dark Zone”: The Poème en Prose As Social Hieroglyph; or The Beginning and the End of Commodity Aesthetics

Lyric poetry collides with the prose of history in Baudelaire's Petits poèmes en prose (1869), one of modernité's inaugural aesthetic projects. While the “prose poem” persists today with its own canons, anthologies, and journals, Baudelaire's poème en prose remains irreducible to the genre it is typically said to have originated. This essay makes a case for the generic singularity of Baudelaire's poème en prose by way of Paul de Man and Theodor Adorno, whose oblique references to Baudelaire's innovation are rich in unexamined implications, implications which illuminate the work of both theorists as much as they help us to understand the stakes of Baudelaire's prosaic experiment. The essay goes on to argue that modern lyric's rarefied aim for an autonomy beyond language's referential function persists critically, albeit paradoxically, in the seeming transparency of the Petits poèmes en prose, where poem and commodity collapse in an internal identification, while maintaining the distinctions of external disparities.

Formal Investigations: Aesthetic Style in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Detective Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Formal Investigations: Aesthetic Style in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Detective Fiction Heather Worthington (bio) Formal Investigations: Aesthetic Style in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Detective Fiction edited by Paul Fox and Koray Melikoglu; pp. 239. Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2007. $42.20 paper. It is not often that the words "detective fiction" and "aesthetics" are coupled; certainly there is an aesthetic pleasure to be found in the perfection of the puzzle epitomized in the work of Agatha Christie, but detective fiction's popular success has tended to locate it as lowbrow literature and hence inappropriate for aesthetic consideration. Early critical work on detective fiction, perhaps most notably by Dorothy L. Sayers and Howard Haycraft, sought to relocate this popular form as artistic and aesthetic, as a genre of fiction that imposed order on chaos and that in its conformity, methodology, and satisfying closure could be argued to improve on nature. In similar spirit, Formal Investigations deliberately considers fin-de-siècle detective fiction in terms of aesthetic style. Paul Fox's masterly introduction analyzes an 1888 Punch cartoon depicting the transgressive pleasures of reading about murder in order to demonstrate how art imposes order in the representation of crime whether visually or textually, through aesthetic form. He suggests that "the detective's craft is the personification of aesthetic ordering within crime fiction" (ix). As Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes represents the apotheosis of the detective, the collection appropriately commences with Holmes, analyzing both the Victorian and Edwardian periods, before culminating with an analysis of E.C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1913). While Holmes is a recurring figure, the delight of Formal Investigations resides in the contributors' selection of eclectic literature, a selection that brings to the reader's attention detective fiction that has previously attracted little criminographic criticism while simultaneously offering new insights into canonical crime narratives. Most closely engaged with aesthetics are Paul Fox's "Devolved Forms: Aesthetic Solutions to the Contentious Style of Arthur Machen's 'The Great God Pan'" and Elizabeth Anderman's "Interpreting the Work of Art and Reading Clues: Aesthetics and Detection in Wilkie Collins's The Law and the Lady." Both [End Page 267] use the concept of art ordering chaos, and Fox argues convincingly that in Machen's "detective story," a chaos of seemingly fragmented and multi-generic narratives represents "the chaotic nature of existence" (62). Anderman considers the plenitude of visual imagery in The Law and the Lady, focusing on the physically deformed Miserrimus Dexter and his paintings. She suggests that, as in Pater's theorization of aesthetic artistic appreciation, visual clues in Collins's detective fiction must be read at a sensory as well as a literal level in order to see and appreciate—to comprehend—the whole picture. Lucy Sussex's "The Art of Murder and Fine Furniture: The Aesthetic Projects of Anna Katharine Green and Charles Rohlfs" makes a direct link between the crafts of furniture making and of writing detective fiction, demonstrating the couple's "shared aesthetic project in terms of Arts and Crafts ideals [...] that the fine art of fictional murder can be paralleled with the creation of fine furniture" (159) and its representation in their work and lives. The essay adds an American dimension to the collection and introduces the theme of domesticity, which is also the focus of Rudolph Glitz's "Horrifying Ho(l)mes: Conan Doyle's Bachelor Detective and the Aesthetics of Domestic Realism." Glitz suggests that, while Holmes's detection makes commonplace the apparently exotic crimes with which the detective engages, providing aesthetically pleasing closure and a superficial restoration of order, in their location of crime in the domestic sphere and in the context of interfamilial relationships, the narratives also criticize contemporary social reality. The domestic is again foregrounded in Alison Jacquet's "Domesticating the Art of Detection: Ellen Wood's Johnny Ludlow Series." Jacquet contends that "the domestic is the operating aesthetic" (181) in Wood's short detective fictions and that the domestic sphere proves to be a site of struggle, the female-authored stories demonstrating a discursive complexity absent from contemporaneous masculine detective narratives. The proliferation of the female detective in the 1890s is explored in Therie Hendrey...

"Anything Can Be an Instrument": Misuse Value and Rugged Consumerism in Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men

creative relationship between men and manmade objects that populate their worlds grounds aesthetic project of Cormac McCarthy's Western novels. Parham fashions from a paloverde tree and rope serves as material intermediary between Parham and she-wolf that he traps, enabling a communion of sorts between young boy and last vestiges of a disappearing wild. John Grady Cole, romantic hero of All Pretty Horses, recalls his grandfather's stories of Native Americans as he gazes upon telegraph poles early in novel. In their ongoing attempts to disrupt communication between white settlers, the Comanche would cut wires and splice them back with horse-hair (11), a symbolic triumph of improvisational over technological that colors Cole's subsequent journey through surveyed and fenced enclosures of Western desert. Along similar lines, in Blood Meridian, Judge Holden establishes his status as suzerain of nature (198) through his interactions with objects - chief example being his creation of gunpowder from urine and volcanic sulfur. Within McCarthy's nostalgic novels, these instances of material manipulation and creation resonate with older, mythic notions of American identity. Despite their clear differences, Parham, John Grady Cole, and Judge are all self-made and selfsustaining men who would feel quite at home in nineteenthcentury literary worlds of Natty Bumppo, Huck Finn, or Henry David Thoreau. Each character resists modern world of economic

Ivan Vladislavić and the possible city

The article explores the literary significance of Johannesburg in the writing of Ivan Vladislavić in the context of recent debates about how to read the African city. In his most recent work, Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (2006), Vladislavić opens his personal archive of everyday life in the city to imaginative reinterpretation by readers. To read Vladislavić's “portrait” is to imagine the city as a space that might be written, read and experienced differently – to imagine it as a possible city. The self‐reflexive nature of this project throws into critical relief recent calls to read Johannesburg as an “aesthetic project” rather than a “space of division” (Mbembe and Nuttall 353).

Michael Ondaatje's “Well-Told Lie”

Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family is nominally a memoir, but this classification does not do justice to the textual play found in the work or to the author's elusive identity as both writer and subject. I argue that Ondaatje creates a historiographic identity that is both historically referential and textually created. This identity is significant first in that it renders irrelevant ethical critiques leveled at Ondaatje: that his work acknowledges neither his own ethnic identity nor his ancestral complicity in the colonization of Sri Lanka. It is also important to Ondaatje's aesthetic project and is crucial to the emotional climax of the work, in which Ondaatje and his alcoholic father merge within the grammar of the text, accomplishing a reunion that would be impossible in real life. In my analysis, the criticisms of Ondaatje actually point to the central success of his memoir: the translation between and transcendence of both generic and referential expectations.

L'espace et le jeu des Cent Nouvelles nouvelles

The oral tradition the prose tale inherited from the fabliau, as well as the thematic proximity it shares with farce, reveals that this growing genre in the 15th Century, represented by the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles, bears the signs of theatricality. Indeed, as in the theatre, there is a significant exchange between the spatial framework and the physical presence of the characters in the prose tale. The example of the observing, hidden character wonderfully illustrates the process. The role played by visual and auditory perception is thus amplified. Similarly, the physical space occupied by the characters in relation to objects can carry narrative importance, which sometimes allows a narratological reading of the stories. In the case of the written text, the miniatures can insure the visualization of these processes. The interdependence of space and action contribute to the author’s aesthetic project and thus insure the collection’s originality.