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1 Thomas Docherty Aesthetic education and the demise of experience The philistine is intolerant.1 love naturally hates old age and keeps his distance from it 2 In 1913, Walter Benjamin was a central figure alongside his teacher, Gustav Wyneken, in the ‘German Youth Movement’, agitating for substantial reforms in the German educational system and, beyond that, in German society. He placed one of his first serious publications, an essay entitled ‘Experience’, in Der Anfang, the magazine of the movement, as a contribution to the debates. In this essay, he points
The interest in aesthetics in philosophy, literary and cultural studies is growing rapidly. This book contains exemplary essays by key practitioners in these fields which demonstrate the importance of this area of enquiry. New aestheticism remains a troubled term and in current parlance it already comes loaded with the baggage of the 'philistine controversy' which first emerged in an exchange that originally that took place in the New Left Review during the mid-1990s. A serious aesthetic education is necessary for resisting the advance of 'philistinism'. Contemporary aesthetic production may be decentred and belonging to the past, but that is not a reason to underestimate what great works do that nothing else can. Despite well-established feminist work in literary criticism, film theory and art history, feminist aesthetics 'is a relatively young discipline, dating from the early 1990s'. The book focuses on the critical interrogation of the historical status of mimesis in the context of a gendered and racial politics of modernity. Throughout the history of literary and art criticism the focus has fallen on the creation or reception of works and texts. The book also identifies a fragmentary Romantic residue in contemporary aesthetics. The Alexandrian aesthetic underlies the experience of the 'allegorical'. 'Cultural poetics' makes clear the expansion of 'poetics' into a domain that is no longer strictly associated with 'poetry'. The book also presents an account of a Kantian aesthetic criticism, discussing Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and Critique of Judgement.
experience of sensible perfection of the beautiful. Nevertheless, Baumgarten introduced rational ascesis into modern aesthetics through the notion of the education of sensibility, a tendency advanced by Schiller in his Aesthetic Education. The modern subordination of the aesthetic to the ascetic in terms of a stage in the progression from sensibility to reason contrasts with the Alexandrian view of it as the site of a complex processional movement combining progressive and recessive tendencies. For the latter, the movement between the sensible and the ideal is not an
Clifton Olds, ‘Jan Gossaert’s “St. Luke Painting the Virgin”: A Renaissance Artist’s Cultural Literacy’, Journal of Aesthetic Education , 24:1 ( 1990 ), 89–96, 92; Johan Dambruyne, ‘Corporative Capital and Social Representation in the Southern and Northern Netherlands, 1500–1800’, in Maarten Prak, Catharina Lis, Jan Lucassen and Hugo Soly (eds