Literary Criticism by Joseph North

Author:Joseph North
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Part One: Pendulums

As we have seen, our current historicist/contextualist paradigm was launched in part by a sweeping critique of the category of the aesthetic. Thus it is not perhaps so surprising to find that the earliest signs of what one could, thinking in hope, call the first seeds of a new, more radical critical paradigm were calls for the rehabilitation of the aesthetic on other terms. The earliest forms of something that called itself a “new aestheticism” in this sense were launched in Britain in the early 1990s, but subsequently there were many others: by the mid-1990s there was a cluster of field-spanning work going on under the same name in the USA; there were also self-described “new aestheticisms” among specific historicist specialists such as early modernists, Victorianists, and Americanists; and there were, in addition, many other uses of the phrase that do not fit easily into any of these categories, such as Rei Terada’s early proposal for a “new aestheticism” that would offer a kind of defense of deconstruction against its detractors.1 Naturally some of these clusters of work were richer than others. To my mind, the early constellation in Britain remains the most interesting, none of the subsequent groups yet having outshone it in terms of the clarity with which it was able to survey, and then respond to, the surrounding disciplinary terrain. Some of the more important sites for this early British “new aestheticism” included a largely Cambridge-based attempt to revive an advanced Kantian aesthetics; a separate debate, as interesting for its confusions as for what it illuminated, that began in the pages of the New Left Review and centered around the idea of a return to Adorno; and—to my mind the most interesting—the work of Isobel Armstrong. The fact that all these clusters of work ended up adopting the same title might lead us to conclude that we are looking at a single turn or movement, but this would be a mistake: for the most part they were developed locally, often without the benefit of any very clear sense of what others were doing under the same name in other places, and though a common mood is certainly discernable, the actual proposals made differ in their implications. It therefore seems best to consider the “new aestheticisms” of the 1990s as a fairly heterogeneous series of largely independent local clusters that offered simultaneous, sometimes parallel responses to the anti-aesthetic tenor of the dominant paradigm.

Roughly around the turn of the millennium there was a consolidation of “new aestheticist” work accompanied by a shift in terminology: reading back through the 2000s one finds first that the local clusters of work are increasingly aware of one another, the landmark edited collections having been published and read, and second that the term “new aestheticism” attracts fewer and fewer adherents, to be replaced in effect by “new formalism,” though in a broad sense quite similar arguments continued to be offered under both headings, and indeed many of the same figures continued to be claimed.

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