Aesthetic horizons: "Modern" encounters with the aesthetic idea in the literary and visual arts

Literary and "aesthetic" criticism today has ironically sustained itself as a discourse uninterested in sensibility or "aesthetic knowledge" and remains committed to an ideological formalism consisting of relict scientism and aging power and identity dialectics. "Theory" has become a substitute for the "missing truth"--truth that is impossible to recognize objectively in art--so that "theory" becomes "truth," or the nearest approximation to what truth might be. Well-used, theory tells us something about how truth claims are formed (and disguised), but more often than not, theory is tendentious self-promotion. Why is contemporary theory obsessed with making universal claims in an age where few, if any, educated readers, academics, or "theorists" believe that such claims are possible at all? This work will examine the progress of what I call the "aesthetic idea," the declining insistence on sensuous knowledge after Schiller and Kant, and the renewed interest in aesthetics today as a tonic for the malaise of post-structuralist aesthetics and Hegelian-derived power/identity discourses.