Walling Out the World: Walter Pater and the Problem of Aesthetic Historicism

Abstract

Challenges the notion that Pater offers a solution to the dominant intellectual problem of the late twentieth century, despite recent attempts to champion him as an exemplar of how to live in a state of textual, social, and historical indeterminacy. Argues that Pater’s aesthetic historicism is not a successful resolution of the problem of historical indeterminacy, but an impulse to wall out a disturbing world and substitute the satisfying pleasures of an ideal history for the imperfections, frustrations, and conflicts of real history. Claims that because teachers and critics have reduced artistic expression to projection and art to packaging, students are being pulled out of their own defining social contexts and asked to exist in the elaborate projections of autonomous subjects who have failed to recognize and acknowledge the systems that support them.