Aesthetic Matters: Writing and Cultural Studies (original) (raw)
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The role of aesthetics in cultural studies
2005
Bashing cultural studies is a popular pastime. While critics often dismiss the field as mere fashion, nowadays it is attacks on cultural studies that are highly fashionable. But which cultural studies? I have a hunch that ''cultural studies''has overtaken ''postmodernism''as one of the most misused words in contemporary intellectual life. In the recent tidal wave of epitaphs, elegies, and jeremiads on what's happening to the humanities, cultural studies has a starring role as chief villain and scapegoat.
At the end of the conference that spawned this volume, the editors expressed to me the hope that the volume would accurately reflect that conference which, as they rightly noted, had been marked by a willingness to look optimistically across one’s disciplinary fences, and commitment to engaging with the concerns of others, while recognising the commonalities between their approach and one’s own. As I then pointed out, achieving this character in the volume would require that presenters — in writing up their contributions for publication — both respond to the event itself (where appropriate) and yet retain the flexibility and fluidity that might be associated with oral presentations. For only a ‘juggling act’ of this sort would achieve what they hoped (and desired) for the volume.
Reclaiming Aesthetics; 16 notes
Artnodes, 2017
This article explores the idea that the increasing satiety and institutional jadedness of the currently ubiquitous research-based discourse may lead to new forms of aesthetics and aesthetic thinking. How can the art academy, as a sanctuary for experimental (thinking) processes, facilitate and possibly anticipate such a development?
Editor's Introduction, Literature & Aesthetics, 2015
Literature & Aesthetics, 2015
It is a pleasure and an honour to commence my term as Editor of Literature & Aesthetics in the twenty-fifth year of this journal’s production, and I thank Dr Catherine Runcie, Honorary President of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics, for the opportunity to contribute to the SSLA and the journal. This twenty-fifth volume is a milestone that merits celebration, as the SSLA (while being formed in 1990 with a seventeen member Executive drawn from various departments in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney), has always been an independent organisation, separate from the University that has provided it with a home. Literature & Aesthetics’ flourishing over two and a half decades is testimony to the goodwill and hard work of previous Editors, members of the Editorial Board, office bearers of the SSLA, and the scholars who have published their work in it. Catherine Runcie wrote a short history of SSLA to 2005, which showcased the activities of the Society to that date: these included evening seminars, local conferences, and hosting the highly successful First and Second Pacific Rim Conferences in Transcultural Aesthetics in 1997 and 2004.
Challenging Aesthetic Canons, Language Poetry and the Institution.doc
The continuing processes of canonization by the various aesthetic institutions of contemporary cultural life create, perhaps, the biggest hurdle in the way of serious artistic experimentation and questioning. Credibility in the public perception of what constitutes creativity seems to have been the exclusive property of such institutions; be them the school, the university, the various ‘High Councils’ of arts, the politically mediated mass-media apparatuses, or even the Galleries, for as long as memory can serve. By standardizing certain aesthetic ideals and practices, labelizing their structures under definitive, easily digestible, terminologies, and publicly offering them as ‘the correct’ artistic forms and formats, aesthetic institutions simultaneously delegitimize experimentation as naturally unworthy, inconsequential, or, at best, peripheral to the ”original” or the historically “established” creative praxes, even when such institutions sometimes embrace it. This paper attempts to discuss this question with regards to a specific experimental school of American poetics; the Language Poets, which has been able, for the past forty years or so, to challenge their culture’s institutional canonization processes while keeping their antithetical edge both alive and influential. The question, therefore, is not whether or not “the institution” offers a certain valuable service to the public, but rather that, in doing so, does it cost more in cultural capital? Does it, in other words, limit the scope of the very kind of creativity it upholds by ignoring the naturally enriching interrogative potential of the ‘new’, while concomitantly positioning itself in the kind of authoritative hierarchy that undermines all aesthetic praxes including its own?