File spoon-archives/marxism-feminism.archive/marxism-feminism_1997/marxism-feminism.9712, message 7


Date: Tue, 2 Dec 1997 23:18:59 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: M-FEM: On Beauty, Contradiction, and the Capitalist Sublime (was Re:


Doug wrote:
>Pardon me for being an aesthete, but both Baudelaire and Whitman wrote
>beautiful poetry. As did Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, who were
>politically objectionable in their own ways.

Of course they all did. But shouldn't we also ask why we think of their
poetry as beautiful? What structure of feelings (to borrow Raymond
Williams' term) does their poetry (or the dominant interpretation of their
poetry) encourage?

Don't the modernist poets you mention all end up mining and exploiting
contradictions in capitalism as sources of aesthetic pleasure, the
paradoxes productive of experiences of the renegade bourgeois sublime? (I
think one of the chapters from your book Wall Street actually suggests
something like this.)

Yoshie

p.s. I haven't had the time to respond to Doug or other people who
commented on my "Identities..." post on M-I. I will try to do so tomorrow.




   

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