ENGLISH 45C Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Walter Pater, Antimilitarism, Aestheticism
Document Summary
Traveled to italy, vienna, => inspired work, renaissance. Decadence: wilde, algernon charles, joris-karl huysmans, a rebous (against. Aestheticism: art for art"s sake, beauty, sensuous pleasure. Contrast to art being used to improve society. Anti-militarism: against what is valuable is what is useful . Art should be created for its own sake. Critique of victorian age, modern emptiness in meaning. Decadence: artificiality; perversity, decay, depravity, self-conscious, refinement, synthesia. When society is falling from prosperity => decline. Synaesthesia: medical condition: one sense => provokes another sense. Art education - cultivate one"s susceptibility to impressions. Job of critic is to identify the beauty/genius in each period of art/fashion, etc. Accused/rumored to have an affair with a 19 year old boy. Embodied in his style of prose, highly wrought. Enemy of life is habit (cotton wool of life) Life is short, a reprieve from death. Point of life is in the living of it, instead of working towards goal.
