Recent aesthetic criticism – notably by Jacques Rancière (Aisthesis, 2011), Elaine Scarry (On Beauty and Being Just, 1999), and Isobel Armstrong (The Radical Aesthetic, 2000) – has sought to reclaim the cultural and political force of aesthetics from twentieth-century critiques of its apolitical or regressive tendencies, by locating the origin of aesthetics in shifting, non-hierarchical configurations of perception and affect that mediate the gap between the perceived autonomy of form, and its place in material culture. Our panel locates an opportunity to analyze the play between these elements that is revealed by the careful analysis of the seemingly marginal elements that proliferate in nineteenth-century aesthetics.
While the profusion of marginal elements in nineteenth-century literature and culture has traditionally been viewed as participating in a turn away from aesthetics (and its associations with formal autonomy) to the prosaic everyday of modern life, the papers on this panel aim to demonstrate that this turn actually realizes the constitutive contradictions of aesthetics itself as a realm of artistic creation and affective response. In Aisthesis, Rancière traces the origin of this conception of aesthetics to the rupture of the divide between fine art and everyday life from the late eighteenth century onwards, when modes of perception and emotion reconfigured hierarchies of fine art to include symmetrical, fragmented, or otherwise imperfect forms – from damaged sculptural fragments to details of modern literature to the common existence captured in genre painting – that were previously marginalized under those hierarchies. Our panel builds on this insight by examining the process in nineteenth-century literary texts, whereby the inclusion of marginalized elements resulted in the generation of transgressive configurations of subjectivity that expanded the social, political, and affective possibilities of form.
To facilitate discussion, this panel comprises three speakers who will be limited to 15-minute papers each. Dr. Gordon Fraser, our respondent, will ask questions to the panelists as well as to the audience, to encourage an animated critical conversation. Our first presenter, Pritika Pradhan, examines an influential instance of the nineteenth-century centralization of marginal aesthetic forms in the work of the Victorian art critic John Ruskin, in her paper “The Visual Details and Verbal Details of John Ruskin’s Writing.” In his architectural treatise The Stones of Venice (1851-3), Ruskin audaciously champions the profuse, irregular and eccentric ornamental details of Gothic architecture as expressions of the Gothic artisan’s free subjectivity. In the process, Ruskin revises the marginalization of details – and of Gothic details in particular – under neoclassical aesthetic discourses that equated the perfect symmetries of Classical art with ideals of freedom and truth, and paradoxically places marginality, eccentricity, and irregularity at the core of aesthetic order. The exacerbation of the indeterminacies and disjunctions that he perceives in Gothic details enables the generation of a mode of critical subjectivity exemplified by Ruskin himself, as he attempts to recognize the individuality and uniqueness of Gothic details in terms that threaten and enliven the broader concepts he seeks to abstract from them.
Our next speaker, Janice Niemann, will examine implications of the centralization of marginal elements on literary form, with reference to the peripheral garden spaces – namely, shrubberies and lime-walks – in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2). In her paper “Ladislaw in the Limes: Middlemarch’s Subjective Garden History and Tropes of Transgression,” Niemann develops a seemingly anachronistic reference in Middlemarch to the landscape designer John Claudius Loudon’s 1834 Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture (published five years after the historical setting of the novel), to identify its garden spaces as anti-realist sites that suspend and reconfigure the domestic realism that characterizes the novel as a whole. Far from being objective geographic settings, Middlemarch’s garden spaces function as the loci for the circulation and experience of forbidden romantic desires and possibilities, ultimately enabling the generation of transgressive desiring subjectivities. As leisure spaces at the margins of the novel’s domestic spaces, Middlemarch’s gardens – and the heightened romantic possibilities they accommodate – come to define the realism of the novel itself, which they reshape to embrace expansive affective and narrative possibilities.
Shaibal DevRoy’s paper, “George Moses Horton’s Extemporaneous Poetic Style and Inspired Borrowings,” anchors the transgressive subjective potential of marginal elements in a specific and urgent socio-political context: the antebellum South. DevRoy studies the poetry of George Moses Horton (1797-1883), a slave and the first black man to publish a book in the South, whose collection The Hope of Liberty (1829) features extensive recalled phrases and rewritten passages from a variety of textbooks, including The Columbian Orator. His paper examines how Horton reused, resituated, and reinterpreted literary elements usually associated with the lack of originality and inventiveness – borrowings from other poets – to construct a subjectivity that was originally denied to him. Recent scholarship by Geoffrey Sanborn and Lois Brown challenges the Romantic valorization of ex nihilo creativity, by locating an embedded and intertextual model of creativity in the work of black authors who appropriated the nineteenth-century convention of imitation. In this context, DevRoy argues, Horton’s resourceful appropriation of white authors enables him to envisage his layered subjectivity: an enslaved but self-identified black American citizen, recognized as a poet by a society whose literary materials form the basis of his (self-)creative authorial practices.
The three papers in this session aspire to the generation of a shared critical conversation, through their related explorations of the radical, entwined reconfigurations of form and subjectivity exemplified by three diverse marginalized elements that become the centers of new modes of artistic modernity. Whether ornamental details in architecture, garden spaces, or poetic borrowings, in the conceptual similarities between these elements – and even more so, in the disjunctions between them – we hope to arrive at new modes of critical engagement that illuminate at once the culture of the nineteenth century and claims about the nature of aesthetics driven by recent social concerns.