Introduction: criticism and cartography; Part I. The Emergence of the Artist as Priest in a Secular Art Religion: 1. Portraits of modernity; 2. Framing modernity: Protestant and critical reformations; 3. The knowledge of modernity: tragedy and empiricism; 4. Melancholic borders: from Trauerspiel to 'Michael Kohlhaas'; 5. Kant and the anointment of the modern artist; Part II. Untimely Propositions on the Contracting of Art in Modernity: 6. Corollaries to the aesthetic contract; 7. Maxima moralia: millennial fragments on the public and private dimensions of language; Part III. The World at Large: Systematic Expansionism on the Threshold of Modernity's Realization: 8. From social to aesthetic contract; 9. Between sublimities: Melville, Whaling, and the melodrama of incest; Conclusion: parting shots: final portraits; Notes; Index.
Henry Sussman is Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York, Buffalo. He is the author of many books, most recently Kafka's Unholy Trinity: The Trial.
"An extremely important work of criticism and historical synthesis. [Sussman's] deepest motivation is not just to get the story straight about Western culture since the sixteenth century, but to explain to himself and to his readers how we got to be the way we are today." - J. Hillis Miller,University of California, Irvine "A rare achievement in an age when critical endeavor is still being consumed by theoretically and historically driven polemics... Sussman's The Aesthetic Contract does us a great service by demonstrating the significant level to which critical understanding can rise when it does not reliquish historical specificity in the name of textal astuteness but, through this conbination, seeks to uncover what our more limited modernities have refused to think. In this respect, [the book] makes an extremely strong and convincing argument for the pervasive operation of the aesthetic as both an historically and theoretically significant category.
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