Introduction: Aesthetics and Melville

Abstract

For the last quarter of a century, “aesthetics” has been something of a dirty word in American literary criticism. At a time when the profession as a whole has been moving in the direction of a greater textual and methodological inclusiveness, aesthetics has seemed like the relic of another age, at best, and a dangerously reactionary fetishization of dead white men’s art, at worst. “Exclusion,” writes one critic, “is the primary function of aesthetics and the rhetoric of beauty as these have conventionally been wielded” (Jones 2008, 218). The aesthetic is “always on guard against things foreign,” declares another critic, “its privileging of certain forms negatively articulated against what lies beyond the horizon of a presumably unified self or homogenous populace” (Castronovo 2003, 169). Since the 1980s, the effort of critics like these to “exorcize this spirit of elitist formalism, of political aloofness, and of repressive value judgment by emphasizing the cultural and political” has been one of the defining elements—perhaps even the defining element—of American literary scholarship (Ickstadt 2008, 265). Aesthetics, once the field of inquiry to which literary criticism was thought to belong, has become, for many critics, the fallen condition from which literary criticism must struggle to arise.