THE MORAL-AESTHETIC ESSAY IN AMERICA
Abstract
Some of America's most respected authors have contributed to a distinctive discursive tradition that expressly conjoins aesthetics and morality. Works otherwise as diverse as those by Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Jefferson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Adams, and James Agee share an overt incitement to moral action and an explicit focus on the relations between beauty, art, and morality. Throughout their writings, morality and aesthetics emerge as nothing less than mutually constitutive. Such works I call Moral-Aesthetic Essays. Moral-Aesthetic discourse is an identifiable discursive form, and as such it requires its own poetics. The Moral-Aesthetic Essay may properly be called a "genre," if we construe that term to mean not a fixed form that is discernible by unchanging elements but a construct that enables us to discuss modes of discourse customarily characterized by the presence of identifiable conventions and elements. In addition to the insistence that morality and aesthetics are interrelated and reciprocally generative, Moral-Aesthetic discourse includes a valuation of the senses, emotion, intellect, and imagination; the use of a religious idiom and first-person form to emphasize the capacity of the human being to attain the beautiful life; attention to the sublimity and beauty of nature and to the poetic potential of each individual; an exhortation to become Moral-Aesthetic individuals creating a Moral-Aesthetic life; and a disclosure of the grand difficulty of that task. Analysis throughout this study is geared toward examining increasing levels of formalization within the American Moral-Aesthetic tradition. In Edward's writing one can see the emergence of Moral-Aesthetic discourse out of the field of American moral prose in general. Jefferson's works furnish a grammar of Moral-Aesthetic discourse. Both Fuller and Thoreau provide examples of complication and refinement in the Moral-Aesthetic Essay. The works of Adams and Agee may be seen as Moral-Aesthetic discourse at a meta-level.
Degree
Ph.D.
Subject Area
American literature
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