Abstract
The original meaning of “aesthetics”—sensitivity—has, for centuries, tended to be narrowed down to only pleasurable impressions, excluding “terrible beauty” (the frightening, shocking, and alienating). Moreover, it has tended to be reduced to European standards of beauty or deformity. This reduction in popular usage is, however, misleading, rendering us blind to the fact that aesthetics has always been, not least due to increasing doubts about the viability of neo-Platonic kalokagathia and increasing cultural contacts with non-European aesthetics from classical antiquity (Egypt, Phoenicia, Persia, etc.) via the Middle Ages (Muslim Arabia) and Preromanticism (Arabia, Persia, India, China, etc.) to the present day. Globalization has, so far, continued and intensified a long-running development: the ongoing provocation of comfort by estrangement, of the ever changing Self by the ever intruding Other.
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Notes
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Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956, pp. 25–43.
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Padmaja Challakere, Aesthetics of Globalization, in: Liam Connell/ Nicky Marsh (eds.), Literature and Globalization: A Reader, London: Routledge, 2011, pp. 218–30.
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Literature
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Connell, Liam / Marsh, Nicky (eds.), Literature and Globalization: A Reader, London: Routledge, 2011.
Friedrich, Hugo, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956.
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Jauß, Hans Robert, Die nicht mehr schönen Künste. Grenzphänomene des Ästhetischen, Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1968.
O’Brien, Susie / Szeman, Imre (eds.), Anglophone Literatures and Global Cultures, in: South Atlantic Review, Special Edition 100 (2001).
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Lessenich, R. (2019). Aesthetics. In: Kühnhardt, L., Mayer, T. (eds) The Bonn Handbook of Globality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90382-8_1
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