Wearying of Cultural Studies, Some Scholars Rediscover Beauty

Tentatively, they seek renewed attention to aesthetic criteria in criticism

The name of the new book had slipped Michael Kelly’s mind when he went into a large bookstore near Columbia University recently. The book was about the idea of beauty, though, and Mr. Kelly figured that a topic so out of favor among scholars would be easy to identify through a simple computer search.

Instead, he says, the bookstore clerk turned up scores of new titles. That came as a surprise to Mr. Kelly, an adjunct associate professor of philosophy at Columbia. After all, he is the editor in chief of the four-volume Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, published this past summer by Oxford University Press. And he remembered how hard it had been to find scholars to write many of the entries. Now, he says, discussions of beauty seem to be popping up all over the place.

James Soderholm, an associate professor of English at Baylor University, had to beat the bushes to find 10 literary critics willing to write about “aesthetics in an age of cultural studies,” the subtitle of his 1997 collection Beauty and the Critic (University of Alabama Press). Among those who weighed in was Christopher Beach, an assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California at Irvine.

“Despite recent attempts to exile the aesthetic from the world of literary/cultural studies,” he wrote, “the aesthetic will not be so easily dismissed or quarantined: questions concerning the nature and role of the aesthetic stubbornly persist in our discussion of both literature and culture.”

Today, Mr. Soderholm might have had an easier time. Maxed out on political analysis and cultural studies, scholars in the humanities have begun to talk again about the joys and pleasures of good, powerful -- even beautiful -- writing.

Once a week, Harvard University’s Elaine Scarry meets with graduate students for a course simply titled, “On Beauty.” Readings include Plato, Aquinas, Kant, and Schiller. Students review the most durable philosophical critiques of beauty, which hold it suspect on moral and political grounds. And they study how writers such as Shelley, Keats, Joyce, and Rilke describe objects of beauty, asking whether the qualities of the beautiful differ in depictions of gods, gardens, and people.

“This is the forbidden subject,” says Emory Elliott, a professor of English and director of the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California at Riverside. In October, he recruited some 160 professors for a conference that aimed to get scholars talking again about the relationship between aesthetic values and cultural differences.

Many scholars report that the hardest questions were skirted at the meeting, which dealt with both literature and the visual arts, and featured critics, writers, and artists. Still, even those who have doubts about what the meeting accomplished say it signals a change. “People are really tired of the old cultural studies,” says Marjorie Perloff, a professor of humanities at Stanford University. “They see that something else must be done. But they’re not sure what.”

Mr. Elliott has ambitious plans for the work presented at the conference, including several volumes of papers to be published by Oxford. Ultimately, he hopes the meeting inaugurates the arduous process by which humanists will help to define artistic standards for the new century.

“What do you mean when you say, ‘That’s a fabulous poem’ or ‘That’s a terrific novel’?” asks Mr. Elliott. “It’s been too long that we haven’t had such a language.”

In 1994, professors formed the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics as an alternative to the Modern Language Association -- a home for old-fashioned scholarship on formal and aesthetic concerns. Now, scholars who wouldn’t have allied themselves with the old guard are also seeking to make room for beauty. In 1994, Rutgers University Press published Aesthetics and Ideology, edited by Rutgers English professor George Levine. Earlier this year, professors at Texas A&M University organized their own event, called “Aesthetic Subjects: Pleasures, Ideologies, and Ethics.” They plan to publish essays from the conference in a book, presenting scholarship that finds common threads between aesthetic criticism and cultural studies, especially about a topic in recent academic vogue: the human body.

Scholars like Mr. Elliott do not wish to turn back the clock, but to nudge the pendulum just a little. They want attention to aesthetic criteria, but not just a new New Criticism, which held that literary texts should be read for formal properties, divorced from the social and cultural forces that affected their creation. “If aesthetics comes back, which I think it will, I want the best people in the profession to be in charge of taking it to new places,” says Mr. Elliott. In the canon wars, cultural conservatives have been the only ones arguing for aesthetic criticism, he notes. “I want my guys to be leading this direction,” he says.

Professors also say that graduate students are restless for change. “They want to talk about literature,” says Ms. Perloff. “And the faculty are struggling to keep up with them.”

And in an era of Oprah’s Book Club and the Modern Library’s Top 100 novels, the general reader wants help from experts in making judgments. “The public doesn’t much understand -- and isn’t much interested in supporting -- a humanities that doesn’t address the aesthetic,” says Giles Gunn, a professor of English and global and international studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

But John Carlos Rowe, a professor of English at the Irvine campus, detects a generational split around the matter of cultural studies. Older scholars trained in high theory broke down the idea of universally shared literary standards, allowing younger scholars to import popular culture into the classroom. Now overwhelmed by art forms they just don’t get, senior professors take refuge in aesthetics, says Mr. Rowe. “There’s an emotional appeal to it,” he explains. “You hear again and again, ‘I entered this profession because I loved to read. Don’t you love to read?’” His answer: “Sure I love to read. But there are limits to enjoyment.”

Within the academic community, a return to aesthetic criticism is so far tentative at best. You won’t see much on aesthetics at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association later this month, for example. Only two of the more than 500 papers presented at the American Studies Association meeting in November professed to be about beauty.

“Aesthetics for a while has been the bad child no one wants to talk about,” says Anne A. Cheng, an assistant professor of English and American literature at the University of California at Berkeley. “To engage with aesthetics was seen as engaging in a kind of political quietism, not dealing with the pressing cultural issues of the day.”

At the Riverside conference, Ms. Scarry argued against the reigning idea that beauty is elitist and therefore stands against justice and equality. “The political arguments against beauty are incoherent,” she says. Citing philosophers such as Plato, Aquinas, and Simone Weil, she contended that “beauty assists us in our commitment to justice.”

In recent articles in the journal Representations, and in Dreaming by the Book, due out next year from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Ms. Scarry delves into the ways literary writing helps conjure up mental images. Drawing on cognitive psychology, she wants to describe how mere marks on a page can make whole worlds come alive. “One of the things that’s amazing about the verbal arts -- poetry and literature -- is that all those extraordinary pictures have to be produced in the live tissue of the human mind,” she says. “Bringing that about requires an almost athletic ability to follow a set of mental practices that writers know a great deal about.”

Even scholars who’ve staked their reputations on including a wider variety of writers in the canon say it’s now time to justify their place on more than political grounds.

Working in American literature and British Romanticism, respectively, Paul Lauter and Anne K. Mellor are among those scholars who’ve recovered works by lost or marginalized writers. Mr. Lauter is the lead editor of the Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ms. Mellor is the author of Romanticism & Gender (Routledge, 1993).

Mr. Lauter, a professor of English and American studies at Trinity College, in Connecticut, has been a passionate advocate for the inclusion of more works by women and minority-group members in the American canon, as well as writings that are not strictly literary. Even he says that it’s time now to step back and evaluate what makes these writings most effective.

“We never got to cases about what these works were doing aesthetically,” he says. At the Riverside conference, he spoke about the writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and her deceptively simple poem, “Aunt Chloe’s Politics.” Some reviewers of the Heath Anthology criticized the inclusion of poetry that was historically interesting but not verbally inventive. Yet a poem such as “Aunt Chloe’s Politics” was meant to be delivered in public to a black audience more attuned to oral performance than to the written word. For those purposes, Mr. Lauter argued, the poem is quite sophisticated.

Ms. Mellor, a professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles, believes it’s time to discuss the merits of the women writers who’ve been added to the canon of British Romanticism. “By bracketing or simply ignoring the question of aesthetic value, of whether or not a given literary text is ‘beautiful,’ ‘well written,’ or as ‘good’ as another text already in the canon, we -- as scholars of literature -- have undercut the very rationale for our existence,” she said at the Riverside conference. “What do we now teach that historians could not teach as well?”

Taking her lead from the women writers she has studied, Ms. Mellor argued for the links between artistic form and moral value. “I’m puzzling over whether we can recuperate the aesthetic,” says Ms. Mellor. But “we’re losing something in the present if we don’t try to make an equation between the good and the beautiful.”

In many quarters, scholars are rereading the founding texts of aesthetics, looking to complicate the notion that judgments are inevitably political and usually underscore the tastes of the powerful. “The word ‘aesthetics’ is tricky,” points out Lindsay Waters, the executive editor for humanities at Harvard University Press. “We’ve had aesthetics for the last 200 years, but a lot has been missing from the definition.”

“People tend to forget that the aesthetics-politics contrast has a rich history,” says Mr. Kelly, editor of the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. “We try to provide as full an account of those debates, hoping that will make the current debates themselves richer.”

While that goes on, however, scholars are facing the toughest question of all: how to make judgments. It’s a tricky proposition, because standards of excellence are seen as culturally specific, and matters of value and hierarchy remain highly suspect. At Riverside, “people were so wary of the notion of assigning value that no one was doing that,” says Ms. Cheng.

Yet, Ms. Scarry says, why must praise be equated with playing favorites? “Crediting one person, or one poem, or one flower’s beauty does not mean denigrating another,” she says. “To want to be in the presence of beauty, to create and to revere the beauty of the world, is a shared aspiration.”

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