Samples of Beauty Needed

With college campuses becoming ever more preprofessional and vocational, it's getting harder for humanities teachers to get freshmen and sophomores to appreciate the aesthetic side of things. That goes for both their interpretation of texts and for their creation of texts. They read everything for the kernal of fact and value, the information, the point, not for the expression (whether beautiful or vulgar or flat or conventional . . .). And they write sentences that have no flair, no element of balance, rhythm, metaphor, or other aesthetic feature.

And why shouldn't they? When so much of the liberal-arts curriculum has turned toward "informational text" -- the NAEP reading exams for 12th Graders now have 70 percent of their passages as informational, 20 percent fiction, 5 percent verse, and 5 percent literary essay -- students understand their own work in the same terms.

This makes the English classroom properly assume a countercultural element, a drift against the current of anti-aestheticism. But how to do it? What examples of beauty instill a taste for it?

I often assign some pages from the greatest work on the subject, Kant's Critique of Judgment, and go over them oh-so-slowly, sentence by sentence, with mixed success.

A friend, Christopher Lane, likes to show students a clip from that bad film, American Beauty, which does have one extraordinary scene. It is when the young man next door shows the video clip of the plastic bag blowing in the wind in a blank alleyway. He describes the moment and draws the metaphysical conclusion that there is something behind what we see and hear and feel. But what really captivates is that bag darting up and down and back and forth. It embodies nicely the transformation of a thing of use into a thing of beauty.

Recently I've thought of using wine as an example. I'm no connoisseur, although a dear friend has a basement with around 50,000 bottles, lots of them first-growth Bordeaux, and I've enjoyed eavesdropping on some tastings.

It's always an experiment, for the language of wine tasting has all of the elements (and the pitfalls) of trying to convert a sense perception into an aesthetic judgment. Students should be apprised of it as a case study in humanitas (and the humanities). The translation of drinking into discernment is precisely the kind of differentiation that 19-year-olds need to recognize if liberal education is going to happen for them.

So I sometimes bring pages from a book entitled The Psychology of Wine: Truth and Beauty by the Glass, by Evan Mitchell and Brian Mitchell.

If people have other ideas, please share.

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Comments

1. charliemarlow - November 24, 2009 at 09:33 am

Thanks - very thought provoking.

2. luther_blissett - November 24, 2009 at 10:41 am

I've used a variety of texts to achieve similar purposes. I don't Kant useful because, despite his insights *about* beauty, he is incapable of producing any in his own prose about it.

Hume's "On the Standards of Taste" is a wonderful introduction for students on how to form aesthetic discernment. That the essay itself is lovely is an added bonus. Longinus's text on the sublime is similarly useful to generate discussions about the power of aesthetic energy and the phenomenon of a rough or fragmented beauty.

Pater's *The Renaissance* is a great book to show students how they might write about aesthetic experiences, while Bachelard's *The Phenomenology of Space*, while not purely about beauty, offers students a way to write carefully about experience itself.

The work of Lester Bangs is excellent for showing students how much a man might care about an aesthetic judgment. Bangs is willing to die for a great LP, and his prose makes rock'n'roll a redemptive, life or death situation.

Excerpts from *The Spectator* by Addison, Steele, et al also make for fine examples of aesthetic writing.

Finally, I think certain works of literature thematize the aesthetic world in interesting ways. John Hawkes, our most neglected of the great contemporary American novelists, has written several novels that juxtapose aesthetic and moral reactions. *Travesty* is one of his finest, as a father's dramatic monologue unfolds as he drives his son and his son's lover at high speed toward a brick wall. The terror of the ride, the murderous rage of the narrator, contrasts deeply with the narrator's insistance on this as a supreme work of art.

3. charliemarlow - November 24, 2009 at 11:19 am

luther_blissett
Yeah, but none of your stuff is on youtube.

4. dank48 - November 25, 2009 at 08:25 am

"In My Craft or Sullen Art," Thomas
"Musee des Beaux Arts," Auden
"mister youse neednt be so spry," Cummings
"I Stand Here Ironing," Olsen
"Dover Beach," Arnold
"Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?" and "My Mistress' Eyes" and probably any other sonnets once they've got these two down.
Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech.

Thanks for the cogitative provocation.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

5. tribblek - November 25, 2009 at 08:38 am

To : that was really funny... Happy Thanksgiving.

To all: I make and bottle my own wine and am still amazed with how varied and off-beat (and sometimes absurd) are the descriptions of sense and beauty. Few of us seem to be in complete agreement about the words chosen to express art and beauty. But that's the point, isn't it? In order to discern and express beauty, one has to be able to take risks. I believe that there's a sad lack of risk-taking that has permeated our American youth culture. Kids (by the time they get through elementary school) have realized that there are 2 important things in life: grades and coolness. A very few are fortunate enough to be cool AND have good grades... but most kids begin to really FEAR being WRONG (losing cool points). And that fear keeps them from being taking a chance on something innovative... something original.
I have a 21 year old stepson who is (sadly) a prime example of this. The poor guy got it in his head that to TRY and FAIL was BAD... but to NOT EVEN CARE was "funny" because you were going against what was expected (in school). So now he's 3 years out of high school, trying to figure out what the hell he's supposed to do in life... all of his reference points (those things that let him know if he's being cool or not) have left him.

Sorry... a bit off topic. Must be the wine. Happy Thanksgiving!

6. lbroome - November 25, 2009 at 09:18 am

Selections from Michael Baxandall's Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, especially the chapter on the period eye

Keats, On first looking into Chapman's Homer

Poe, The Philosophy of Composition

7. suomynona - November 25, 2009 at 10:08 am

I think Martha Nussbaum writes with impeccable clarity and insight in Poetic Justice. This is also a good (and short) book for students in the 'show me the payoff' mode of thinking because it links aesthetic sensibilities with practical (legal) applications of ethics and notions of justice. Nussbaum has wonderful aesthetic examples in that book, and talks about them more convincingly than Elaine Scarry in On Beauty and Being Just (IMHO). It's still one of the best books I've ever read; and it doesn't hurt that Nussbaum's prose is very rich as well.

Another thing that led me as a student to seek out my own 'aesthetic examples' was reading BH Smith's Contingencies of Value. It had a reverse-psychology effect, made me return to Kant and Schiller, and then Wilde and Pater, and then more recent texts like Loesberg's A Return to Aesthetics and Hal Foster's collection The Anti-Aesthetic.

I suppose what I'm trying to get at is students may be more likely to find their own aesthetic examples, beyond some Radiohead video, if they can get worked up about the ways in which the very notion of the aesthetic has been embattled.

8. peterplagens - November 25, 2009 at 10:23 am

If you're talking about the beauty of the English language itself, here's an odd suggestion: the "Harpur & Isles" series of detective novels by the 80-year-old Welsh writer Bill James. It's a pseudonym. His real name is James Tucker, and he also wrote a well-received study of the novels of Anthony Powell in 1976. My personal favorite, perhaps partly because it was the first one I read and the one that set me in pursuit of the entire series, is "Panicking Ralph." The compactness, irony, humor of the language, with its ability to shift in and out of different characters' viewpoints is breathtaking. One almost has to read it out loud to appreciate it fully. You probably won't get any prestige points for putting Bill James's work on your list. But the proof is, as they say, in the pudding.

9. jupiter125 - November 25, 2009 at 12:31 pm

For brilliant (rhythm, image, character) and hilarious English prose, one can hardly do better than Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis--though I have yet to forgive him for "a skein of untiring facetiousness by filthy Mozart."

10. 22277502 - November 25, 2009 at 05:57 pm

If you really want to explore with your students (aka "contemporary rhetoric"), how about "The Poetical Dictionary" by Lohren Green?

11. markbauerlein - November 26, 2009 at 04:48 pm

A comment sent to me by email:

Back in the nineties, I proposed to FIPSE that a general education multi-lingual "mega-course" might be developed in a residential "global living and learning center" environment -- to include faculty, international scholars, and student mentors returning from study abroad -- integrating gen ed level learning in many disciplines in a "brick and click" team-taught odyssey worth a full semester of credit: around the subject theme of wine.

Not only the literature and aesthetics of wine, but also the geography, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, and religious significance of wine would be explored -- with the added benefit of confronting cultural influences and differences in the uses of wine and alcohol. A positive side effect would even have been a way of combatting the growing trend toward alcohol abuse on campuses by substituting academic reflection on the substances.

The official readers of the pre-proposal loved the idea but the proposal was not "called in" for a full submission. I phoned the U.S. DOEd's Program Officer at the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education for more information as to why the glowing reviews were ignored -- and I was informed that such learning communities are "on the way out."

Sure was news to me then -- and now.

- vfichera

12. luther_blissett - November 27, 2009 at 09:28 pm

I'm surprised no one on the thread has questioned the idea of teaching aesthetic analysis through wine tasting.

Over and again, we hear complaints that colleges are teaching worthless material: television shows, comic books, chick lit, popular fiction, etc. So when did wine tasting become some legitimate field of academic study?

However, my favorite advice on wine comes from an article in *The Guardian* from 2001, in which the resident wine critic wrote that no bottle of wine is worth more than ten quid.

13. markbauerlein - November 28, 2009 at 09:17 pm

The post wasn't about wine tasting. It was about the language of wine evaluation, more generally, the translation of a perception into a rational judgment.

14. natemawdur - December 03, 2009 at 10:12 am

I was not sure if you were looking for examples specifically related to English, text, language, etc., but regarding aesthetics, taste and critique more generally, what about film reviews from The Onion's AV Club website? The language might be a little crass, but the reviews could provide a more immediately accessible example of people who absorb themselves in a particular artform, who turn their immediate reaction to a work into a larger discussion of values and standards in that genre. It might provide a clever segue to more tradtional examples.

Forgive this more personal example...
There's that great scene in "Amadeus" where Salieri describes reading the score for the Adagio of Mozart's Gran Partitia: it always struck me as a good example of taking something immediately beautiful, and then taking the time to see 'how' it becomes that thing we find beautiful, what's going on underneath it to give us that reaction. F. Murray Abraham as fictional Salieri then imitating a good musicologist!