International Conference
29. November – 1. Dezember 2018
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
Institut für England- und Amerikastudien

Aesthetics is coming back.
For the past forty years, scholars across the humanities have routinely rejected aesthetic inquiry as ideological, exclusionary, or politically quietist. In American Studies particularly, this anti-aesthetic attitude has congealed into the field’s common sense. Only in the most recent past have several scholars begun to pay renewed attention to the aesthetic and to rethink its relationship to the spheres of the social, economic, and political. “The Return of the Aesthetic in American Studies” critically takes stock of recent returns to the aesthetic and extends their scope.

Scholars working in such diverse areas as media studies, identity theory, animal studies/posthumanism, and democratic theory have begun to put the aesthetic dimension of their objects of study at the center of their work, even if they do not necessarily consider their scholarship to belong to the field of aesthetics proper. To bring these approaches into the conversation, we propose to broaden the definition of “aesthetics” so as to reflect that in American Studies – as much as in many other disciplines within the humanities – “the aesthetic” is increasingly recovering its original reference to sense perceptions (aisthesis). At the same time, however, scholars have also begun to rethink traditional concerns of aesthetic theory. In particular, they have been revisiting the question of aesthetic autonomy. Far from conceiving of aesthetic autonomy as apolitical, the resurging debate explores its potentially oppositional and utopian position vis-à-vis recent economic, social, and political developments.

These two major strands of recent aesthetic inquiry are often in tension with one another. While conceptions of the aesthetic that emphasize the notion of aisthesis tend to assume that the aesthetic is a driving force of recent social, political, and economic developments (like the solidification of neoliberal capitalism or the rise of populism in Western democracies), conceptions of the aesthetic related to artworks tend to regard the aesthetic as a potentially oppositional force to these very developments.

So far American Studies practitioners have not yet adequately reflected on the co-presence of these two concepts of the aesthetic. Thus, the conceptual differences between them and the ramifications that these differences have for assessing the relation between the aesthetic and various social forces have hitherto remained unaddressed. Can the two major strands of aesthetic inquiry mutually challenge each other to interrogate uncritically accepted premises? To what extent do they unwittingly borrow from each other? And what are the avenues to aesthetic inquiry outside of the two strands sketched here?

Flyer (PDF)

Watch our speakers in conversation with fellow experts. These conversations were recorded in the course of the conference.

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
Institut für England- und Amerikastudien
Abteilung Amerikanistik
Campus Westend
Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz 1
60323 Frankfurt am Main

Map of the campus (PDF)

Prof. Dr. Johannes Voelz
voelz@em.uni-frankfurt.de

Prof. Dr. Johannes Völz
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
Institut für England- und Amerikastudien
Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1
60629 Frankfurt am Main
069-79832358

Haftungsausschluss

Haftung für Inhalte

Beim Aufrufen dieser Website werden durch den auf Ihrem Endgerät zum Einsatz kommenden Browser automatisch Informationen an den Server unserer Website gesendet. Diese Informationen werden temporär in einem sog. Logfile gespeichert. Folgende Informationen werden dabei ohne Ihr Zutun erfasst und bis zur automatisierten Löschung gespeichert: IP-Adresse des anfragenden Rechners, Datum und Uhrzeit des Zugriffs, Name und URL der abgerufenen Datei, Website, von der aus der Zugriff erfolgt (Referrer-URL), verwendeter Browser und ggf. das Betriebssystem Ihres Rechners sowie der Name Ihres Access-Providers. Die Möglichkeit, diese Daten auf der Rechtsgrundlage nach Art. 6 Abs. 1 S. 1 lit. f DSGVO für Zwecke wie die Gewährleistung eines reibungslosen Verbindungsaufbaus der Website, die Gewährleistung einer komfortablen Nutzung unserer Website, die Auswertung der Systemsicherheit und -stabilität sowie zu weiteren administrativen Zwecken zu nutzen, wird derzeit von mir nicht wahrgenommen. Sollte ich diese Möglichkeit künftig nutzen wollen, werden ich die erhobenen Daten in keinem Fall dafür verwenden, Rückschlüsse auf Ihre Person zu ziehen.