Beauty’s Return

In the face of such strong expression of our human need for beauty in uncertain times, is it a coincidence that beauty appears to be on its way back? While Wendy Steiner is surely right to suggest that Venus was, for much of the twentieth century, “in exile,” there is plenty of evidence to suggest that beauty is once more, and increasingly, part of ongoing conversations in classrooms among students. As we noted earlier, the nature of aesthetic experience and its implications for the central acts in literary criticism of appreciation, judgment, and evaluation, have always been of great interest to students, but for several decades that interest was demoted in terms of its relevance to the study of literature. Our argument thus far has been that that demotion was not only negligent of the actual reading experience of vast numbers of students but also significandy detrimental to the well-being and integrity of English literature as a discipline and to those persons who make their living by it. It is therefore heartening that, in tandem with the more public nature of conversation about beauty, a significant number of scholarly works on the subject have been published in the last decade or so; and the very fact that such works originate from a range of disciplines—philosophy as well as art history, biology as well as literature—suggests that the consequences of a disregard for the importance of beauty have been felt as a wider impoverishment than perhaps we previously recognized.