Literary Theory

Series II: Handout #10

“I just got tenure at Harvard! And I’m as cute as a hobbit!”

Stephen Pinker (1954-): His courses are very popular at Harvard (500+), supported Lawrence Summers in recent controversy (out of favor with feminists and radical Left); argues against the Lockean notion of the “Blank Slate,” that is, a dogmatic view of social construction; he prefers a historicized, culturally-contextual, but still universal zone of common human characteristics, including aesthetic appreciation; has friends in new representational art movements (e.g., the derriere guard), along with Elaine Scarry, the behaviorist E. O. Wilson, and Tom Wolfe, the novelist/social critic. Pinker would be shot on sight at the MLA. Perhaps he represents the next—and inevitable—swing of the pendulum away from absolutist socialist constructionism towards a new, more universal notion of aesthetics (though one that is aware of the factors of race, gender, class, nationalism, etc., unlike much of the New Criticism and esp. the Arnoldian view). Ecocriticism is part of this drift too.

The Blank Slate (2002): A best-selling academic book; caused huge stir because it threatened nearly everyone invested in the last thirty years of poststructuralist criticism and validated some of the claims of the elders left over from the New Critical era; BTW, you can think of this as generational war—the grandchildren and grandparents allied against all those smug Boomers who hold power by sheer force of numbers. Some questions the book proposes and answers:

Q. What is aesthetic appreciation (see list of seven things)? What do you think?

Q. What is the adaptive/evolutionary function of art? How does this get corrupted by the social function (status)?

Q. Is there such a thing as “human nature”? Are there any common aesthetic experiences? (Consider Brown’s list of human universals.)

So…tell me what you find beautiful and why?