by Jon Lackman | 18 September 2006 | Journals, Theory
In the summer 2006 Representations, English professor Mark Canuel writes: “It would be both right and wrong to say that aesthetics has returned as a subject of urgent scholarly inquiry within the past five years … Renewed commitments to defining and defending aesthetic pleasure center mainly on … a certain restricted type of pleasure — the experience of beauty in art or nature; they therefore eschew other familiar but related terms of evaulation such as the sublime or the picturesque … more surprising still is the tendency among the same writers to award a privilige to beauty … [purportedly] because it encourages some version of mutuality, equality, or justice among persons … [these writers] continue to be conditioned by the very same normative definitions of persons and their pleasures that have been attached to the discourse of beauty at least since the eighteenth century.”
