The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage: An Enlightenment Problematic

The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage: An Enlightenment Problematic
ISBN-10
0816682682
ISBN-13
9780816682683
Category
Aesthetics, European
Pages
302
Language
English
Published
2012
Author
Tony C. Brown

Description

Tony C. Brown examines OC the inescapable yet infinitely troubling figure of the not-quite-nothingOCO in Enlightenment attempts to think about the aesthetic and the savage. The various texts Brown considersOCoincluding the writings of Addison, Rousseau, Kant, and DefoeOCoturn to exotic figures in order to delimit the aesthetic, and to aesthetics in order to comprehend the savage. In his intriguing exploration Brown discovers that the primitive introduces into the aesthetic and the savage an element that proves necessary yet difficult to conceive. At its most profound, Brown explains, this element engenders a loss of confidence in oneOCOs ability to understand the humanOCOs relation to itself and to the world. That loss of confidenceOCowhat Brown refers to as a breach in anthropological securityOCotraces to an inability to maintain a sense of self in the face of the New World. Demonstrating the impact of the primitive on the aesthetic and the savage, he shows how the eighteenth-century writers he focuses on struggle to define the humanOCOs place in the world. As Brown explains, these authors go back again and again to OC exoticOCO examples from the New WorldOCosuch as Indian burial mounds and Maori tattooing practiceOComaking them so ubiquitous that they come to underwrite, even produce, philosophy and aesthetics.

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