Beyond disciplinary dysfunction and seemingly terminal wrong-footedness during poststructuralism’s ebb tide – and these are enough of a problem, believe me – the other thing that prevents the writing of aesthetics (rather than simply the history of aesthetics) is that we don’t know what we mean when we apply the a-word to literary works in the first place.
I don’t actually think this is a true absence in lit crit, or at least not a complete one. People who write on contemporary poetry, and especially those among them who are poets, have been making claims like this for the last twenty years, with no sign of a let-up. Granted, much of it isn’t very good. But there’s plenty of interest in trying to forge an aesthetics that applies to contemporary writing. Indeed, this is pretty much what I want my own dissertation to do, whatever my chances of success.
Chris Nealon and Sianne Ngai seem like good examples of the best of it. And Marjorie Perloff, too, whose work is usually rather disappointing, can’t stop writing sentences like the above. Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian and Charles Bernstein of the poet-critics. . .
If I seem cantankerous of late, apologies. Chalk it up to a voracious need for methods of procrastination. I take my qualifying exam in two weeks. . .
No, no. You’re right about the poetics types. There are other reasons why I’d have some reservations about holding them up as a model for what I’m thinking about (the coterie factor has something to do with it, rather than something like a broad and, say, relatively disinterested approach to aesthetics) but, yes, they certainly bear mentioning in this regard.
I’ve read a bit of Ngai, but I don’t think I’ve seen what you’re talking about. Where is it? In the Ugly book?
Ah! I’ll have to read this… sounds right up my alley. And the Ngai needs to go on my very long reading list too.
Why _do_ we apply the term aesthetics to literature? It seems that rather than ask if it’s any good, we should ask if it’s _interesting,_ and the colossal messes and failures and kitsch is way more interesting than something that does exactly what its aesthetically supposed to.
@ Sisyphus: well, yeah. Except also: I dunno. By which I mean, “interesting” seems like a far better desire than the version of aesthetics you suggest, which is well-wrought and self-consistent and etc. But this raises two related issues, I think. One is that, in practice, such critical approaches in the last couple decades have tended to render — too-swiftly — all literature as symptomatic, in the Lacan-processed-by-Jameson sense; what turns out to be interesting is the particulars of anisomorphisms between the text and the world/history/etc. I’m not rejecting that reading strategy at all (though I do think it makes more sense for prose/fiction than poetry), but I do think it’s a mistake to go entirely away from the possibility of constructivist activities in literature.
This leads me to the second problematic issue, deeply imbricated with the first: I don’t finally make sense of the (longstanding) proposed opposition between the aesthetic (with its imputed New Critical well-wroughtness, its blind formalism, its aesthetic autonomy) and whatever its supposed other is — theory, or historicism, or even in this case interest. I’m not sure such an opposition is any more sustainable than interiority/exteriority, or for that matter form/content. Aesthetic form is always form adequate to history; that adequation is itself first content; interest, for me, stems exactly from the dialectical relationship here.
The special situation of poetics, existing between the mfa and phd tracks, partaking of both but also with a special spot between, is unique and arrives via a unique institutional history, and one that to a certain extent I have had a look at up close. From outside but up close.
And agreed re: the aesthetic and history. And overall, point taken re: my bracketing in general. Point was taken at Jasper’s first suggestion. Point is even more taken now.