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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