CFP: Aestheticism: Dehumanizing or Rehumanizing? (5/1/06; collection)

full name / name of organization: 
Kelly Comfort
contact email: 

Aestheticism: De-humanizing or Re-humanizing Art, the Artist, and the Artistic
Receptor? (Book Project)

Call for chapter proposals for the book project "Aestheticism: De-humanizing
or Re-humanizing Art, the Artist, and the Artistic Receptor?" to be submitted
by August 2006. Cambridge Scholarly Press has already contacted me to express
an interest in publishing an edited collection on this topic.

Deadline for chapter proposal (500-1000 words): May 1, 2006.

Deadline for the completed manuscript (15-30 pp. including notes and works
cited) for accepted proposals: July 1, 2006.

Contact: Kelly Comfort (kcomfort_at_gatech.edu)

The question as to how literature, along with other creative arts, both helps
to determine and is determined by the human is at the forefront of nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century aestheticism in Europe and the Americas. Art for
art's sake–both as an approach toward art and as an attitude toward life–
promotes freedom and autonomy, aims for newness and originality, hails
pleasure over instruction, and prefers form and beauty to content and truth.
As such, aestheticism invites us to consider the relationship between art and
life, between the aesthetic and the social, especially in light of its
purported severance between these two spheres. By widening the distance
between art and life and separating the aesthetic from the social (i.e. from
the economic, scientific, pragmatic, political, etc.), l'art pour l'art
critiques the dominant values that made such a redefinition of art necessary
in the first place.

This edited collection aims to explore the extent to which art for art's sake
can be viewed as an attempt to re-humanize (rather than de-humanize) art, the
artist, or the artistic receptor in ways that speak to the question of what
makes us human. Chapter proposals should thus discuss how the aestheticist
view of art and literature is either life-sustaining or life-evading.
Both theoretical and textual analyses are welcome. I am particularly
interested in papers that treat the following authors:
• Gautier, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Verlaine, de Montesquiou, Mallarmé,
        Debussy, Rimbaud, Proust
• Swinburne, Moore, Rossetti, Whistler, Pater, Wilde, Joyce
• Kant, Schiller, Georg, Nietzsche, Rilke, Mann
• Ortega y Gasset, Baroja, Unamuno, Gómez de la Serna
• Kierkegaard
• D'Annunzio
• Poe, James, Chopin
• Darío, Silva, Casal, Nájera, Infante

Additionally, I hope to broaden the scope beyond Western Europe and the
Americas and also to expand the temporal period beyond the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Comparative studies are also of great interest.

Please send chapter proposals of 500-1000 words as a Word attachment to Kelly
Comfort (kcomfort_at_gatech.edu) by May 1, 2006.

--Kelly ComfortAssistant Professor of SpanishSchool of Modern LanguagesGeorgia Institute of Technology613 Cherry StreetAtlanta, Georgia 30332-0375Phone: 404-385-0198Fax: 404-894-0955kcomfort_at_gatech.eduwww.modlangs.gatech.edu ========================================================== From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List CFP_at_english.upenn.edu Full Information at http://cfp.english.upenn.edu or write Jennifer Higginbotham: higginbj_at_english.upenn.edu ==========================================================Received on Tue Mar 28 2006 - 09:32:40 EST

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