Aesthetics
by
The neglect of sustained, theoretical inquiry into the aesthetics of children’s literature is a symptom of our discipline’s history. As it developed in North America, the academic discipline of children’s literature emerged in the context of the canon-busting and -expanding cultural studies movements of the 1960s and ’70s, a theoretical milieu newly suspicious of objective claims of aesthetic value. In recent years, however, the global field has seen renewed interest in aesthetics as “sensuous knowledge,” a mode of apprehension inextricably bound to both history and ideology. The word aesthetics has ancient roots, its earliest forms the Greek aisthanomai and aisthetikos (both summoning the idea of perception). In his seminal study Aesthetica (1750–58), Alexander Baumgarten reworked these ancient terms—including aisth_ē_sis (sensation)—into our more contemporary understanding of aesthetics. The term has oscillated between apparent opposites: aesthetic value as both subjective and universal, as perceived sensually but primarily understood via intellectual contemplation, and as inhering in objects themselves yet requiring cultivated judgment to be experienced. As Raymond Williams reminds us, Baumgarten uses the term to describe “beauty as phenomenal perfection” (1983a, 31). Lars-Olof Åhlberg argues that since Baumgarten, aesthetics “has mostly been conceived of as the philosophy of art, or, as the theory...
This essay may be found on page 4 of the printed volume.