Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures

In the wake of radical social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, literary studies’ embrace of politics entailed a widespread rejection of aesthetic considerations. For scholars invested in literature’s role in supporting or challenging dominant ideologies, appreciating literature’s formal beauty seemed frivolous and irresponsible, even complicit with the iniquities of the social order. This suspicion of aesthetics became the default posture within literary scholarship, a means of establishing the rigor of one’s thought and the purity of one’s political commitments. Yet as Timothy Aubry explains, aesthetic pleasure never fully disappeared from the academy. It simply went underground.From New Criticism to the digital humanities, Aubry recasts aesthetics as the complicated, morally ambiguous, embattled yet resilient protagonist in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first–century literary studies. He argues that academic critics never stopped asserting preferences for certain texts, rhetorical strategies, or intellectual responses. Rather than serving as the enemy of formalism and aesthetics, political criticism enabled scholars to promote heightened experiences of perceptual acuity and complexity while adjudicating which formal strategies are best designed to bolster these experiences. Political criticism, in other words, did not eradicate but served covertly to nurture reading practices aimed at achieving aesthetic satisfaction.Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures shows that literary studies’ break with midcentury formalism was not as clean as it once appeared. Today, when so many scholars are advocating renewed attention to textual surfaces and aesthetic experiences, Aubry’s work illuminates the surprisingly vast common ground between the formalists and the schools of criticism that succeeded them.

A groundbreaking, scintillating counter-history of literary theory in the twentieth century. In extraordinarily lucid and sure-footed prose, Aubry reveals not only the ways in which political criticism trades in and on aesthetic pleasures, but also that in failing to acknowledge this fact it renders itself incapable of delineating honestly between pragmatic political stakes and disinterested aesthetic ones—frequently misrecognizing the relationship between them and vitiating its own force as an agent for the real-world change it aspires to., Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures is a wonderfully astute and thought-provoking examination of trends and paradigms in literary studies from the New Critics through the digital humanities. Aubry argues that the aesthetic vision of the New Critics continued to influence subsequent critical dispensations that announced themselves—and were accordingly received—as breaking with New Criticism and especially with the primacy of aesthetics. This book offers an innovative and persuasive analysis that will be of interest to anyone working in literary studies today., An aesthetic experience of reading, understood as productive of pleasure for its own sake, has been more or less eschewed by those involved in ideological critique, the dominant critical methodology in literary studies today. In this fine book, Aubry persuasively argues that aesthetic pleasure has been there all along.

Timothy Aubry is Associate Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York.