Pope’s Perversity: Tastemaking in Liberal Culture

Autor:	Joshua Branciforte
Rok vydání:	2019
Předmět:	Literature and Literary Theory Philosophy 0602 languages and literature 06 humanities and the arts Theology 060202 literary studies
Zdroj:	Modern Language Quarterly. 80:261-286
ISSN:	1527-1943 0026-7929
DOI:	10.1215/00267929-7569611
Popis:	Alexander Pope envisioned his poetry as conducive to a social order shaped and guided by taste. However, unlike later arbiters of taste who sought to project idealized norms, Pope used techniques that were oppositional, individualized, materialist, and perverse. His aesthetic strategies aimed at achieving homogeneity across diverse populations without normative prescriptions. Pope drew on the skeptical notion of the “ruling passion” to model his understanding of taste as a social process. Construed solely as a model of personality, his theory is frequently dismissed; read as a model for tastemaking, it becomes intelligible. While Pope’s classicizing moral and aesthetic values can seem distant from the assumptions of our late liberal culture, the techniques he uses to “rule” tastes indirectly remain fundamental imperatives in liberal aesthetic culture.
Databáze:	OpenAIRE
Externí odkaz:	https://explore.openaire.eu/search/publication?articleId=doi_________::ac99533f2e45a92aa06f9ae18f759f40 https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-7569611 Zobrazit plný text záznamu