Overview

This book reconsiders the fate of the doctrine of mimesis in the eighteenth century. Standard accounts of the aesthetic theories of this era hold that the idea of mimesis was supplanted by the far more robust and compelling doctrines of taste and aesthetic judgement. Since the idea of mimesis was taken to apply only in the relation of art to nature, it was judged to be too limited when the focus of aesthetics changed to questions about the constitution of individual subjects in regard to taste. Tom Huhn argues that mimesis, rather than disappearing, instead became a far more pervasive idea in the eighteenth century by becoming submerged within the dynamics of the emerging accounts of judgement and taste. Mimesis also thereby became enmeshed in the ideas of sociality contained, often only implicitly, within the new accounts of aesthetic judgement.

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9780271024684

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Reviews

Huhn's study is exactly what one hopes for from scholarly monographs - it is a learned and incredibly well-informed exposition of major figures in intellectual and artistic history, coupled with an exciting and innovative new perspective.... This is one of those wonderful books that one can recommend to anyone interested in either Burke, Hogarth, or Kant - as well as anyone interested in Adorno, contemporary aesthetics, or the theory of mimesis. - S. Barnett, Choice Tom Huhn has written a riveting, brilliant book about mimesis in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory. In a series of nuanced analyses, Huhn demonstrates that Burke, Hogarth, and Kant were in effect producing aesthetic theories that were fully modernist. Art and/or aesthetic experience emerges in them as the revelation of the suppression of nature and sensuous experience, and of the conflictual social relations responsible for that suppression. Huhn's account of Hogarth on drawing is simply irreplaceable. - Jay Bernstein, The New School

Author Information

Tom Huhn teaches aesthetics and philosophy at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

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