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3/27/14. Bellwork: Consider the word (noun)‘aesthetic’, which means ‘concerning art or beauty’ or ‘pleasing in appearance’ Write down the definition as well as 3 sentences using the word. Example sentence: There are practical as well as aesthetic reasons for planting trees. AGENDA:
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3/27/14 • Bellwork: • Consider the word (noun)‘aesthetic’, which means ‘concerning art or beauty’ or ‘pleasing in appearance’ • Write down the definition as well as 3 sentences using the word. • Example sentence: There are practical as well as aesthetic reasons for planting trees. • AGENDA: • Bellwork: page 98 - aesthetic • Handout: background Info – Page 99 • Notes – Aesthetic movement: page 101/assignment 100
Wilde and Aestheticism (notes for page 101) Left side assignment for page 100: create a full page illustration that some how represents the elements of the Aesthetic movement and find ONE quote from Earnest that illustrates it
Characteristics of Aestheticism • Reaction against • Realism, Didacticism, and Morality that characterised earlier and even concurrent cultural fashions • The monotony and vulgarity of bourgeois life • Belief in Art for Art’s Sake • Unconventional lifestyle • Appreciation of Beauty at the expense of utility and social value • Pursuit of Pleasure & Worship of the Senses (Hedonism) • Evocative Use of the language of senses • Excessive attention to the self • Typical representative: dandy see picture • Anti-Natural: belief in the ornate, extreme artifice, performance, and exotic • Walter Pater (theorist) :“to burn always like a hard gemlike flame”, filling each passing moment with intense experience, feeling all kinds of sensations
Aestheticism: • places art above life • holds that • life should imitate art • not art imitate life
“Art for art’s sake” in Wilde • “All art is quite useless” (Preface to DG) • Rejection of Victorian didacticism and realism • Wrote only to please himself • Moral imperative • Soul can be cured only by the senses only by “Art as the cult of beauty” • The artist: an alien in materialistic world • Superior being social outcast
Art for Art’s sake • This was one of the reactions against the materialism and commercialism of the Victorian industrial era, as well as a reaction against the Victorian convention of art for morality’s sake, or art for money’s sake.
Wilde’s dandy • Aristocrat (vs. Bohemién) • Pursuit of pleasure Indulgence in the beautiful (language, clothes, food, boys…) • Elegance: symbol of spiritual superiority • Uses wit to shock (and criticize) • Individualist: absolute freedom
Quotes by Oscar Wilde • I have nothing to declare except my genius. (Oscar Wilde) • Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the sense but the soul. (Harry from The Picture of Dorian Gray) • I have put my talent into my works. I have put my genius into my life. (OW) • The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered. (OW) • Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know. (H) • A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. (OW) • The only duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. (OW) • To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. (OW) • Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed. (H) • My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go. (OW) • Modern morality consists in accepting the standards of the age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standards of his age is a form of the grossest immorality. (H)
Credits • www.sfu.ca/~ccolliga/Eng330--Wilde&Aestheticism.ppt • Spiazzi-Tavella, Now & Then, Zanichelli