COML 6300 - Aesthetics in the Eighteenth Century

(crosslisted) ENGL 6300

Fall. 4 credits. Student option grading.

N. Saccamano.

A study of the development of aesthetics as a theoretical discipline specifying the genetic process, forms, effects, and judgments peculiar to art. Through readings of primarily British and French criticism and philosophy, we will examine the empirical and psychological basis of aesthetics as indicative of the progress of modernity, but we will also investigate Kant’s transcendental founding of aesthetics in a self-reflexive subject. Some topics orienting our discussion: the relation of empirical epistemology and linguistic theory to neoclassical conceptions of figurative language; the consequences of an aesthetics of the sublime for formal and generic theories of literature; tragedy and the pleasures of pain; ideology and aesthetics; and, especially, the relation of aesthetics to ethics. Authors include. Longinus, Boileau, Shaftesbury, Hume, Burke, Lessing, Rousseau, and Kant.