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Sep. 11th, 2009 11:10 pmOh my god, academia.
On the one hand, this article I am reading is a serious discussion of the evidence regarding a fundamental part of the personality of a major figure in the Aesthetic movement.
On the other hand, it's rehashing century-old gossip about a guy possibly sleeping with a student at Oxford.
I DO NOT EVEN KNOW.
This is for my class on Oscar Wilde and the Fin de Siécle (no, the man in question above is not Wilde). Right now, we're focusing on the Aesthetic movement in the Victorian era as a background for studying Wilde and his work. And it's kind of completely fucking crazy. In a very simplistic and uninformative nutshell, Aestheticism/Decadence was a movement in the literary/art world to focus on the beauty of art without considering or including any moral aspects of the work.
From a less formal and, in some ways, more accurate angle, it was a bunch of guys acting like jackasses and calling it an artistic lifestyle. Or so I have gathered from some of the reading, man, some of these guys were pricks.
It's possible I'm feeling more judgey because, in my Irish Literature and Culture class, we happen to be studying roughly the same time period in Ireland. (This all spans, oh, the second two-thirds of the 1800s, with Aestheticism really getting underway in the late 1800s.) This includes the potato famine and the concerted efforts of England to suppress and destroy Irish culture. And I'm supposed to give a shit about a bunch of guys who considered anything of practical or moral value to be ugly? Fuck off. Yeats was, I am gathering from the combination of these two classes, both an Aesthete and a nationalistic Irishman wanting to reclaim Irish culture. This resulted in essays where I simultaneously agree with his ideas and want to smack him for being so damn high-handed about it.
Oh, and on Wednesday, in my WWI and WWII class, we covered the era before WWI starting in 1870, so there's MORE overlap. There was a bunch of crazy shit going on in Russia, Austria-Hungary, Prussia, and like everywhere else.
And let's not forget the brief discussion of Karl Marx in Sociology, which we will apparently be having more of next week.
With the added context of my other three classes, I am finding Aestheticism even more tiresome than I suspect I would find it anyway, and look forward to moving on and reading more fiction and fewer damn essays.
On the one hand, this article I am reading is a serious discussion of the evidence regarding a fundamental part of the personality of a major figure in the Aesthetic movement.
On the other hand, it's rehashing century-old gossip about a guy possibly sleeping with a student at Oxford.
I DO NOT EVEN KNOW.
This is for my class on Oscar Wilde and the Fin de Siécle (no, the man in question above is not Wilde). Right now, we're focusing on the Aesthetic movement in the Victorian era as a background for studying Wilde and his work. And it's kind of completely fucking crazy. In a very simplistic and uninformative nutshell, Aestheticism/Decadence was a movement in the literary/art world to focus on the beauty of art without considering or including any moral aspects of the work.
From a less formal and, in some ways, more accurate angle, it was a bunch of guys acting like jackasses and calling it an artistic lifestyle. Or so I have gathered from some of the reading, man, some of these guys were pricks.
It's possible I'm feeling more judgey because, in my Irish Literature and Culture class, we happen to be studying roughly the same time period in Ireland. (This all spans, oh, the second two-thirds of the 1800s, with Aestheticism really getting underway in the late 1800s.) This includes the potato famine and the concerted efforts of England to suppress and destroy Irish culture. And I'm supposed to give a shit about a bunch of guys who considered anything of practical or moral value to be ugly? Fuck off. Yeats was, I am gathering from the combination of these two classes, both an Aesthete and a nationalistic Irishman wanting to reclaim Irish culture. This resulted in essays where I simultaneously agree with his ideas and want to smack him for being so damn high-handed about it.
Oh, and on Wednesday, in my WWI and WWII class, we covered the era before WWI starting in 1870, so there's MORE overlap. There was a bunch of crazy shit going on in Russia, Austria-Hungary, Prussia, and like everywhere else.
And let's not forget the brief discussion of Karl Marx in Sociology, which we will apparently be having more of next week.
With the added context of my other three classes, I am finding Aestheticism even more tiresome than I suspect I would find it anyway, and look forward to moving on and reading more fiction and fewer damn essays.