Aesthetics and Aestheticism

Aestheticism — the late-Victorian conviction that beauty is the proper criterion for judging art — is the through-line here, but the course treats it as the endpoint of a long philosophical argument rather than a self-contained literary moment. You spend the first half tracing how an "aesthetic space" emerges in European thought from Plato through Kant, Schiller, and Hegel, then read Swinburne, Pater, and Wilde closely in light of that genealogy, with most of the work happening in discussion, term papers, and an oral exam. It's a seminar that rewards students already comfortable with close reading, and it gives the philosophical scaffolding that makes later modernist and theory-heavy courses click.