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Discovered By The Process: A Methodology For Twentieth-Century Moral Fiction, Sean Adriaan Labbe
Discovered By The Process: A Methodology For Twentieth-Century Moral Fiction, Sean Adriaan Labbe
Dissertations
One of the great ironies of the "ethical turn" that literary criticism has taken in the last several decades is that while we as literary critics strive to be ethical or moral, we usually feel embarrassed at actually taking about moral concepts, especially as they are manifested in literary texts. As I am interested in how to discuss moral issues depicted in literary texts without reading them naively and reductively for guidelines to live by or for a social program to implement, my dissertation is designed to model a method of inquiry that approaches literary texts of the twentieth century …
The Many Functions Of Taste: Aesthetics, Ethics, And Desire In Nineteenth-Century England, Julia Bninski
The Many Functions Of Taste: Aesthetics, Ethics, And Desire In Nineteenth-Century England, Julia Bninski
Dissertations
The starting point for my analysis of nineteenth-century criticism is the recognition that the word "aesthetic" was not commonly used in English until the early 1800s. For the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, English criticism still relied on an eighteenth-century vocabulary of "taste." For thinkers living in a world altered by social mobility, urbanization, technological change, and mass manufacturing, taste helped make sense of a bewildering array of relationships among individuals, objects, and social groups. As a category associated with consumption, taste foregrounds the charged interaction between aesthetic object and perceiving subject. It raises the question of how we …