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 1. I have nothing to declare except my genius. (Oscar Wilde)2. 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)

3. I have put my talent into my works. I have put my genius into my life. (OW)

4. The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered. (OW)

5. Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know. (H)

6. A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. (OW)

7. The only duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. (OW)8. To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. (OW)9. Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are

curious; both are disappointed. (H)10. My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the

other of us has to go. (OW)11. 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