Taste: A Literary History
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Even when addressed systematically, then, such common understandings presented a motive and often an obstacle to the philosophical clarification and disciplining of public conversation. Even theorizing the distinctiveness of the elite entails an assertion of the antecedent authority of wider cultural factors. The periodical essay was the zone of print culture in which such interactions most frequently and visibly occurred. These essays repeatedly return to the same philosophical problems: Poems and other literary forms similarly used general speculation about the nature of taste as a medium for often aggressive interchanges specific to certain cultural moments.
The Modern Englishman Anon. Historiography, finally, was a genre of writing in which these changes and their meaning could be most fully explored. And, because the word itself was widely recognized as new, it came to stand for newness itself: The two were obviously related but drew on different kinds of thinking.
In one way, the two naturally complement each other. The immediate excitement of stepping into the Vauxhall Gardens Rotunda could seem inextricable from its being a modern attraction in modern London, and such thrills appear mere metonyms of the historical present. Essayists treating taste, from those who portray it as a unique mental faculty to those who consider it a product of association, 42 insist on its immediate force in similar terms. These accounts of how the present of Britain came to be, in all its uniqueness in the eighteenth century, almost invariably described it as modern and adduced the modern taste to characterize its refinements and excesses.
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Particular arts had advocates who argued for their dramatic advancements in modern times. The modern taste could signify all the success that Britain had attained in the century. As the concept and historiography of the civilization of the passions developed after mid-century, it came to seem that civilized eras alone could produce minds sensitively quick enough to experience taste. Modern Britain, and more broadly the system of modern European nation-states in cultural dialogue after the Peace of Utrecht , were not only new developments.
Their subjects, polished by commerce, lived more intensely in the now than did their forebears. Gibbon here suggests not just that Goths had their own preferences. Rather, some states of society create minds incapable of having anything as psychologically vital as taste at all. They also were said to be incapable of the quick immediacy, the now of feeling on which taste depended.
On one hand, a warm immediacy and sensitivity to the moment are declared to be permanent features of feminine psychology. Women have always been considered as possessing both in a more eminent degree than men. Again, More corroborates the view: The temporal richness of taste encouraged differing accounts of its role in history beyond simply teleological ones about modernity.
Part of this flexibility stems again from simple semantics, which allowed virtually any age or nation, wherever located in space or time, to be said to have its own taste. Even eras defined by their stark opposition to modern refinement could find a place in taste, despite what some said about the insensibility of barbarians. Chairs, tables, chimney-pieces, frames for looking-glasses, and even our most vulgar utensils are all reduced to this new-fangled standard. Beyond that, as here, taste allows the now of culture sometimes to be some other time Gothic , sometimes some other place China: Concentration on the now, far from limiting taste to what lay immediately before it, encouraged a variety of competing stories to be told about the present: Scholars have long considered taste and aesthetics in general as ideological, in the sense of fostering experiences and thoughts purportedly remote from politics that nonetheless covertly enforce politically effective beliefs and behavior.
Several aspects of taste as it was in the eighteenth century could seem to make it ideological in this way. Philosophers of the period stressed that taste was grounded in universal human nature. This could seem to deny the influence of social factors on it and suppress awareness of how the present state of the culture of taste came to be. Ideological criticism has sought to reveal how supposedly natural, spontaneous responses actually have their origins in specific historical, socioeconomic conditions.
Taste carried with it both a supercharging of immediate sensation and a recognition, often a celebration, of its immersion in historical processes. So Horace Walpole exclaims,. Such avowed linkages, serving various aggressive political and historical agendas, were commonplace. Preferences, politics, and historical claims together made the discourse of taste what it was. As I have contended here and elsewhere, 66 taste in the eighteenth century and even now embraces social and historical concerns more openly than aesthetics is often said to do.
Of course, aesthetics grew out of eighteenth-century British writing about taste and criticism among other sources —it did not come out of nowhere—and tracing the history of this emergence is vitally important. But sometimes such teleological accounts must put aside elements of their topics that are not pertinent to the outcomes they anticipate.
Hume and most others took privilege and socioeconomic inequality for granted 68 and assumed that poor, illiterate, uneducated classes, by definition, could not have a refined taste in literature and the fine arts. The view, then, that taste ideologically denies the social does not result from the refusal of writers in the period to acknowledge that taste has various social and historical motives.
Instead, it arises from a sense that these acknowledgments are not as socially enlightened as we might wish them to be. The contention that taste in such works functions ideologically by denying the social devolves into a less dramatic observation that the social beliefs about empire, royal power, social hierarchy and teleologies of progress underwritten by taste in the period differ from ours.
But then, some states of society, political systems, nations, and historical periods also are better than others, most writers assumed. Ironically, however, the very richness of his documentation of links between taste and slavery—attending to numerous visual representations of masters with their slaves and a range of other cultural expressions—shows how productively Europeans, especially the planter class in America, wove slavery into their self-presentation as tasteful.
But histories of domination and success, no matter how aggressive, openly added taste to the list of European accomplishments rather than placed it in a sanitized cultural zone of its own. Another repression said to be enacted by the eighteenth-century discourse of taste is that of the body itself. The sometimes sharply divided temporal register of taste can nonetheless produce something like an ideological effect inasmuch as its immediacy at least temporarily renders historical and other contextual reflection impossible.
The man savoring a well-prepared steak must perhaps repress, or at least not dwell too much on, what he knows happened in the slaughterhouse a little while before. As Hutcheson says, we need not reflect on the source of our pleasures to have them, but he also implies that we may.
Taste: A Literary History by Prof. Denise Gigante PDF
And for those who do, in what ways are such feelings and reflections distinguished and joined? In such cases, the questions become phenomenological rather than ideological. It may be that pleasure inscribes a subject in a narrative of social power that she recognizes only after feeling it or seems to start in one social narrative and end in another.
Because the culture of taste explicitly and often aggressively pitted various social stations, nations, and visions of British history against each other, pleasure is always to be fitted into some narrative—if not by the subject of experience, then by moralizers of it like Hutcheson.
Each momentary pleasure can be configured with narrative imperatives in its own way.
Such phenomenological richness appears, for instance, in reactions to Stowe Landscape Garden from the s onward. They stop, they read—and make speeches like this, at the Temple of British Worthies: Scholars of later eras may continue to find in aesthetics a repression of those functions, although most people even today use the word tastes to notice changes from season to season and variations from class to class, culture to culture. Ask any contemporary high school student what her taste in music and clothes says about her place in a social world. The aim here is not to replace a focus on elite philosophy with one on a demotic culture of taste, which cannot be done.
Taste served as an arena of conflict, dominated to varying degrees by social if not intellectual elites, between social stations, understandings of gender, nationalisms, and visions of British, European, and world history. Finally, taste both stimulated and historicized consciousness and produced new ways in which feeling and history could constitute each other. Taste, the Poetical Fop: Addison, Joseph, and Richard Steele et al.
The Spectator 5 vols. Oxford University Press, Avery, Benjamin et al.
Denise Gigante by Kenneth 4. The word taste suddenly burst into prominence in English discussions of beauty, elegance, and sublimity around the turn of the eighteenth century, as did cognate terms in other European languages. Instead, it arises from a sense that these acknowledgments are not as socially enlightened as we might wish them to be. The periodical essay was the zone of print culture in which such interactions most frequently and visibly occurred. Skip to content Home. Allow this favorite library to be seen by others Keep this favorite library private. Written on the Water:
Baker, Henry [Henry Stonecastle]. The Man of Taste. University of Notre Dame Press, Colman, George, and Bonnell Thorton et al.
The Art of Painting, and the Lives of the Painters: Wesleyan University Press, An Essay on Taste. The Female Spectator 4 vols. The History of England 6 vols. Kames, Henry Home, Lord. Elements of Criticism 3 vols. Sketches of the History of Man 2 vols. Critique of Judgment , translated by Werner S. Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de.
The Spirit of Laws , translated by Thomas Nugent. The World 6 vols. The Woman of Taste. The Dunciad, An Heroick Poem.
The Looker-On 3 vols. The Theory of Moral Sentiments , edited by D.
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Addressed to a Young Lady. Monthly Review Press, Harvard University Press, The Logic of Practice , translated by Richard Nice. Stanford University Press, Attitudes Towards Culture as a Commodity, — The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Chicago University Press, Cambridge University Press, Please enter your name. The E-mail message field is required.
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