While new formalist approaches to literature have been ebullient, the eighteenth century—a moment that saw the culmination of Renaissance theories of art and the introduction of a new conception of “aesthetics”—was more suspicious. Writers and artists self-consciously questioned the very practices by which they created art, refining different modes of artistic “deception” to reinvent their audience’s experience. In such visual illusions as trompe l’oeil, anamorphosis, perspectivalism, as well as literary developments such as theatrical realism, ekphrasis, and pathetic absorption, artists sought to experiment with the means by which their craft could articulate the exterior world. Yet, accounts of aesthetic deception in the eighteenth century often focus exclusively on literature or visual art. This panel brings together three papers that examine the productive intersection between visual and written mediums. By reading deceptive “surfaces,” these papers collectively ask whether deception is a special limit case for determining the boundary between art and not-art, or whether it is, in fact, foundational to the logic of representation, visual, literary, theatrical, or otherwise.
This papers on this panel present a historical approach to aesthetics. Aesthetics has traditionally been the province of eighteenth-century studies, and for good reason: aesthetics as a branch of philosophy does not emerge in a recognizably modern form until the eighteenth century. But if by “aesthetics” we mean the relationship between perception and representation, then the concept’s history reaches back to the most ancient reflections on mimesis, poetry, and theater. Amy Cooper’s essay traces the origins of eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse to debates among poets in the late sixteenth century over the nature and status of images in the representational arts. She raises an important question rarely asked by literature scholars: in what sense is a poetic image an image? Philip Sidney’s distinction between the philosopher’s “wordish descriptions” and the poet’s “speaking pictures” defines poetry as an art of image-making, reminding us that poetry was once understood to be a visual as much as verbal aesthetic form. To see text as image involves, as W.J.T. Mitchell once said, a “paradoxical trick of consciousness” whereby the verbal is rendered visual. By considering the role of images and iconoclasm in Sidney’s Defense and Old Arcadia, she argues, we see that late sixteenth-century anxieties about the deceptive nature of images motivates the historical transformation of aesthesis or “perception” into aesthetics.
The tradition in which Sidney participated was Aristotelian in origin, and Sidney’s theorizing of poetry relied heavily on Aristotle’s Poetics. Because Aristotle continued to serve as a touchstone for so many eighteenth-century theorists of the aesthetic, Michael McKeon’s talk on the formation of the aesthetic dovetails with key questions in Cooper’s paper. For Aristotle, the pleasure of imitation lies in the self-conscious conjunction and comparison of the virtual with the actual, the represented and the temporally and spatially present. The dramatic doctrine of the two unities of time and place sought to preclude the comparison of the virtual and the actual by successfully deceiving the spectator into experiencing the former as the latter. For Corneille (1663), the doctrine’s most celebrated proponent, the simpler pleasure of the theater consisted in being thus deceived. Dryden (1668) denied the necessity of deception by arguing that the spectator’s imagination could experience the more complex and dialectical pleasure of self-consciously entertaining the virtual and the actual simultaneously. Addison (1712) made “the pleasures of the imagination” the explicit means by which all art might claim the capacity of a species of knowledge that was analogous to that of the scientific understanding. Realism returns to the Aristotelian notion of mimesis and its postulation of a doubled state of consciousness that obviates deception as a mandatory feature of art. In Coleridge’s subtle formulation (1817), what is required of readers is “the willing suspension of disbelief.”
Such a “willing suspension of disbelief” precedes Coleridge, though. Maury Bruhn’s essay begins with Denis Diderot’s review of 1765’s Parisian art salon, in which he announces that a certain still life is “nature itself.” The forms and colors of the painted objects are those of reality, he says, going so far as to describe them as existing and moving in three dimensions. Diderot’s Salons (published between 1759-1783)—in particular, his reviews of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s still lives and Claude Joseph Vernet’s landscape—use a written account to simultaneously underwrite visual reality and marvelousness. Diderot’s descriptions of Chardin’s still lives constantly emphasize the “marvel” of his works, inviting the viewer to reach out and drink from his bottles, or bite his fruits, and Vernet inspires Diderot’s most lengthy meditation on the illusion of reality in art. Diderot’s ekphrasis of seven landscapes displayed in the 1767 salons begins with the fiction that the reviewer has left the salon and gone on a trip to visit a series of natural sites, and ends with the reviewer revealing he has been in front of the paintings the whole time. Here, writing paradoxically serves to highlight the instability of the mimetic connection between real objects and their representations, doubling the deceptive element of the still life through its misleading premise. Writing and visuality, then, are thrown into doubt by one another.
By contextualizing current discussions about art, suspicion, and deception within a larger historical framework, this panel seeks to place new critical and interpretive practices in productive dialogue with key figures from the past whose own theorizing of the aesthetic sprung from similar anxieties about our relation to art.