19 - An allegory of aesthetics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2009
Summary
A few years ago I was asked for an essay on ‘my aesthetics’ for a review partly devoted to my work. One of the editors put the word in scare-quotes as if sensing there might be a problem. There was, apart from the quasi-impossibility of writing in critical terms about oneself. In fact there were two main problems: one derived (perhaps naively) from the inherent or at least the original meaning of aesthetics, which is clearly a matter of reception (so how can an author write about that?); the other, more complex, deriving from the ‘modern’ use of the word from the Enlightenment on. At the time, I only responded to the first, and decided I could only write about the supposed ‘difficulty’ of my work – and the resulting essay was certainly not among those I have wanted to rehandle for this book.
Since then, however, I have thought more about the second problem, particularly in relation to the strange feminist use of the word ‘aesthetics’ in phrases like ‘the search for a feminist aesthetic(s)’ or this or that writer's ‘aesthetic(s)’. What does it mean, and why are feminists using it?
Aesthetikos
But first a brief return to the first problem: ‘aesthetics’ is not a concept an author can apply to him or herself (and therefore he or she cannot be asked about it or make declarations about it).
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- Stories, Theories and Things , pp. 275 - 284Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991