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Within the reach of art: techniques of ineffability in eighteenth-century aesthetics
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Martin, Kirsten. Within the reach of art: techniques of ineffability in eighteenth-century aesthetics. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-8gx3-kk27

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TitleWithin the reach of art: techniques of ineffability in eighteenth-century aesthetics
NameMartin, Kirsten (author); Zitin, Abigail (chair); Silver, Sean (member); Tindal Kareem, Sarah (member); Rutgers University; School of Graduate Studies
Date Created2022
Other Date2022-10 (degree)
SubjectEnglish literature, Aesthetics -- 18th century, Visual culture
Extent1 online resource (173 pages)
Description“Within the Reach of Art” argues that eighteenth-century writers and artists located the origins of so-called “effortless” aesthetic effects in a set of replicable techniques. While many writings of the period were enamored with the idea of such an effect—what Alexander Pope famously called a “a grace beyond the reach of art”—they were often content to dismiss it as inexplicable. And critics, who have been eager to equate the rise of the aesthetic with the emergence of subjective taste, have tended to dismiss technique as irrelevant and even at odds with aesthetic appreciation. Yet, by putting literary criticism into dialogue with the fields of art history and intellectual history, I examine how an array of figures from Jonathan Richardson to Laurence Sterne, sought to trace effects like “grace” back to the practices that produced them. Even if they were still unable to describe such effects in words, these writers could at least explain how to practically achieve them. A turn to technique, I show, unsettles the popular narrative that eighteenth-century aesthetic experience depended on the bracketing of explanations, and reveals the practical dimension that undergirded so many of the period’s meditations on art. Indeed, works by Richardson and Sterne, which are littered with commentaries on painterly and literary techniques, often take the form of “how-to” manuals. But such texts also struggle to put their suggested practices into words. They strive to develop a vocabulary that can bridge the gap between the subjective experience of beholding art and the embodied one of making it. Practical writings—which I define capaciously as anything from a treatise on painting to a novel that meditates on its own techniques—suggest how works of art might be understood as made objects, for beholders as well as practitioners. In four chapters about practitioner-writers—Jonathan Richardson and Alexander Cozens, among other minor figures; William Hogarth; Adam Smith and Laurence Sterne; Joshua Reynolds—I uncover a different technique or set of techniques for achieving elusive effects. Each of these techniques, whether it be throwing a sponge at a canvas or using an Old Master’s mind as a springboard for one’s own innovations, offers a practical means to achieve an elusive effect that does not appear to be the result of mimesis or mere mechanical reproduction. And what these practical explanations ultimately yield, I argue, is a new account of eighteenth-century intellectual history that posits aesthetic knowledge as transmissible and subject to change. Beholders learned to appreciate art because of not despite the fact that they could see it as a window into the artist’s technique.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses
Persistent URLhttps://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-8gx3-kk27
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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