Having one’s Kant and eating it
Terry Eagleton
- Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks 1982-90: Volume One edited by Robert Denham
Toronto, 418 pp, £45.00, September 2000, ISBN 0 8020 4751 3 - Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks 1982-90: Volume Two edited by Robert Denham
Toronto, 531 pp, £45.00, September 2000, ISBN 0 8020 4752 1
If someone were to ask why art and culture have proved so vital to the modern age, one might do worse than reply: to compensate for the decline of religion. It is certainly a more convincing response than claiming that modern society finds art particularly valuable, as opposed to richly profitable. What modernity finds precious is less works of art, which are just one more commodity in its marketplace, than the idea of the aesthetic. And this reverence for the aesthetic reflects the way in which art, or at least a certain exalted notion of it, is forced in the modern age to stand in for a religious transcendence which has fallen on hard times.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
Vol. 23 No. 8 · 19 April 2001 » Terry Eagleton » Having one’s Kant and eating it (print version)
Pages 9-10 | 3079 words