K. Comfort, Art and Life in Aestheticism. De-Humanizing or Re-Humanizing Art, the Artist and the Artistic Receptor

Kelly COMFORT, Art and Life in Aestheticism. De-Humanizing or Re-Humanizing Art, the Artist and the Artistic Receptor

New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 248 p.
ISBN 0-230-55116-5


RÉSUMÉ

Art for art's sake addresses the relationship between art and life, between the aesthetic and the social, and promotes the former term over the latter one in each instance. Although it has long been argued that aestheticism aims to de-humanize art, this volume seeks to consider the counterclaim that such de-humanization can also lead to re-humanization, to a deepened relationship between the aesthetic sphere and the world at large and between the artistic receptor and his or her human existence.


TABLE DES MATIÈRES

List of Illustrations * Acknowledgements* Notes on Contributors * Introduction: Reflections on the Relationship between the Art and Life in Aestheticism; K.Comfort * REEVALUATING THE SEMINAL WORKS OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY AESTHETICISM * The Critic as Cosmopolite: Baudelaire's International Sensibility and the Transformation of Viewer Subjectivity; M.Murphy * Rossetti's Aesthetically Saturated Readings: Art's Dehumanizing Power; I.Martin * Dickens À La Carte: Aesthetic Victualism and the Invigoration of the Artist in Huysmans' Against Nature; P.Fox * RECONSIDERING TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY AESTHETICISM * Aesthetic Vampirism: Pater, Wilde, and the Irony of the Modern Object; A.Eastham * The Dehumanization of the Artistic Receptor: The George Circle's Rejection of Paterian Aestheticism; Y.Ivory * Art for the Body's Sake: Nietzsche's Physical Aestheticism; K.Ashbaugh * REREADING THE AESTHETICIST STRAND OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE * From 'God of the Creation' to 'Hangman God': Joyce's Re-Assessment of Aestheticism; D.M.Shea * The Aesthetic Anxiety: Avant-Garde Poetics, Autonomous Aesthetics, and the Idea of Politics; R.Archambeau * On the Cold War, American Aestheticism, the Nabokov Problem–and Me; G.H.Bell-Villeda
* REASSESSING AESTHETICISM IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY THEORY * Beauty By Damned: Or Why Adorno Valorizes Carrion, Stench, and Putrefaction; C.B.Sumner* 'This temptation to be undone...': Sontag, Barthes, and the Uses of Style; S.Garland * Art for Heart's Sake: The Aesthetic Existences of Kierkegaard, Pater, and Iser; B.De Bruyn * Notes *Index


BIOGRAPHIE

Kelly Comfort is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the Georgia Institute of Technology.