ENGLISH 283: The Sublime and the Ugly

Course Description

Why is it that the aesthetic pleasures resulting from artistic representation so often depart from the "pure" ideal of beauty? Is tainted beauty more, or less, than beautiful? Is there any such thing as a "pure" aesthetic category, after all, or is all experience in relation to the arts hybrid? Pain may enhance pleasure in the case of the sublime, but where does disgust fit in? or does it? And what about ugliness? Campiness? Grotesqueness? The uncanny? This course is designed to put literary, psychoanalytic, sociological, architectural, post structural, and queer theory as well as philosophical and art historical writings in conversation with poetry, narrative fiction, creative nonfiction, and film, in order to develop a critical skill set designed not only to address such questions but, more critically for an active mind, to posit new ones.