As Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen framed the issue in their landmark collection Ideology and Classic American Literature (1986), the concentration on artistic qualities and literary effects among previous generations of critics diminished both the social impetus and the radical potential of literature. If we attend to the historicity of beauty and form, as this case against aesthetics goes, the scales of appreciation will drop from our eyes to reveal aesthetics as an evasion of culture. While this assessment is dead on, it finds its target only by aiming at notions of aesthetics that are themselves culturally thin, cut off from larger—and potentially alternative—histories of form, emotion, and representation. In short, the cultural critique of aesthetics risks overlooking varied strategies of interpretation, expression, and collaboration enabled by the aesthetic project itself. As a central term for American cultural studies, “aesthetics” can enable a questioning of the forms by which we organize domains of politics and art in the first place.

This is an excerpt from Russ Castronovo’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (pp 11-12).