Problems of subjectivity, criticism, and the interdisciplinary origins of aesthetics

This comparatist genealogy of aesthetics examines eighteenth-century and Romantic writings about connoisseurship, art instruction, and poetic experience in order to demonstrate that each of these domains has a properly aesthetic dimension understood in the Kantian tradition as a mode of inquiry and reflection which is vitally concerned with problems of autonomy of the subject, productivity of self-consciousness, and reflective contradiction. This view of the aesthetic, which anticipates the broad ranging set of interests and procedures that we now associate with interdisciplinary work, is advanced through extended readings of Kant's Critique of Judgment, Reynolds's Discourses On Art, and Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, engaging along the way a series of commentators who have attempted to situate the aesthetic with respect to key critical terms such as "the subject" and "culture." As these case studies demonstrate, the practical or pedagogical dimension to aesthetic reflection in the eighteenth-century---grounded in the making of and critical reflection upon exemplary art-works themselves (broadly conceived)---is often in tension with the theoretical conceptualization of the category. Understanding this tension as the proper site of aesthetic investigation makes the category more useful for thinking about interdisciplinary work in the humanities.