Aesthetics and Cultural Theory

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
  
• Convenor: Professor Esther Leslie
• Assessment: a 5000-word essay (100%)
  

In this module we focus on a series of important works on aesthetic theory from Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790) to digital and decolonial Aesthetics. We will examine some of the key concepts in the philosophical aesthetics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Kant and Hegel) and the ways in which they have been developed, challenged or overturned by contemporary cultural theory and art practice. We also address the problematic status of the concept of the ‘art work’ in the wake of modernist, and postmodernist and decolonial debates, and consider how cultural theory can contribute to an understanding of contemporary art practice (taking that term in its most expansive and capacious sense).

Themes considered will include:

• the status of the art work
• taste and subjectivity
• art and schizoanalysis
• stickiness, immersion, distraction and the ‘inaesthetic’.

Figures looked at more closely include, among others:

• Kant
• Hegel
• Heidegger
• Benjamin
• Adorno
• Rancière
• Moten
• Ngai.

By the end of this module, you will have:

• an understanding of the debates around aesthetics in cultural and theoretical senses that developed from Kant through Hegel and the tradition of German Idealism through Marx and Modernists onwards to the present day
• developed historical, cultural and theoretical languages for the study of literature, visual arts and other cultural forms in context
• been provided with an introduction to the study of aesthetics in relation to social and political questions
• been supported in developing your own essay work.