Introduction
Cultures of Aestheticism—Before and After Oscar Wilde
To be held at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
Directed by Clark Professor Joseph Bristow (UCLA)
The University of California, Los Angeles' Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library annually present a core program of interdisciplinary events developed around a common theme. The core program for the 2010–11 year is Cultures of Aestheticism—Before and After Oscar Wilde directed by Clark Professor, Joseph Bristow.
Cultures of Aestheticism will feature a series of conferences that cover a fairly broad historical span, starting with the emergence of British assimilations of ideas about “art for art's sake” (from French sources such as Théophile Gautier) in the 1850s and 1860s to the legacies of the Aesthetic Movement to interwar and post-war cultures around the world. The critical questions raised by aestheticism reverberate through many of the most decisive interventions into critiques of aesthetics (notably Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory), and their reappearance is evident in recent postmodern debates about “the new aestheticism.” The conference series will address the growth of l'art pour l'art in ways that expand our understanding of this movement beyond its more familiar cultural, disciplinary, and geo-political contexts.