Escape from aesthetic confinement: Finding the way back out of Pater's transfigured world

The dissertation investigates a problematic aestheticism located in the writing of Walter Pater and transmitted to contemporary critical discourse via the Modernists who inherited Pater's aesthetic. It proceeds from a recognition that the unresolved epistemological problem at the center of Pater's aesthetic has enormous consequences both for constitution of the Modernist canon and for the procedures of academic criticism sanctioned by Structuralism and Deconstruction. A view that nothing can be known but one's own perceptions gives rise to an aesthetic of denial and projection in which the idealizing distortions shaped by the impulses of the desiring subject are substituted for historical reality.; I read in the history of Pater's writing a process of defensive and compensatory denial ending in defeat and reactionary conversion. Situating Pater's confessional discourse in a larger material history, I use the conceptual tools of historical materialism to identify the impinging forces in response to which Pater's defenses are activated. My history of Pater's work reveals the consequences of unresolved conflict between the impulse to seek sanctuary and longing for homosexual and social liberation.; Given the limits of his Positivist-historics ideology, I demonstrate Pater's inability to resolve that conflict because he lacks the systematic terms by which to identify and counter the forces which constrain him. Whereas Baudelaire reverts from a materialist aesthetic of revolutionary practice to a visionary idealism, unlike Pater he retains the theological categories by which to indict a world disfigured by capitalism.; Pater's failure to write a "poetic prose" which "contradicts fact" in such a way as to release the revolutionary potential of the aesthetic response informs the subsequent failure of Modernism to find in private metahistory any alternative in history to fascism.; The consequences of the Paterian fixation on forms and surfaces can be seen in the manipulative techniques of commercial television. Having deconstructed the categories by which to realist such invasions, academic theorists playing indiscriminately with techniques properly specific to Structuralism, Deconstruction, Freudian psychoanalysis, or even Marxism leave human agents defenseless against the onslaughts of technology privately held hostage to the profit motive.