One True Theory and the Quest for an American Aesthetic

by Martha Banta

• ISBN13: 9780300122978
• ISBN10: 0300122977
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2007-12-04
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

Martha Banta reaches across several disciplines to investigate America's early quest to shape an aesthetic equal to the nation's belief in its cultural worth. Marked by an unusually wide-ranging sweep, the book focuses on three major "testing grounds" where nineteenth-century Americans responded to Ralph Waldo Emerson's call to embrace "everything" in order to uncover the theoretical principles underlying "the idea of creation." The interactions of those who rose to this urgent challengeartists, architects, writers, politicians, and the technocrats of scientific inquirybrought about an engrossing tangle of achievements and failures. The first section of the book traces efforts to advance the status of the arts in the face of the aspersion that America lacked an Art Soul as deep as Europe's. Following that is a hard look at heated political debates over how to embellish the architecture of Washington, D.C., with the icons of cherished republican ideals. The concluding section probes novels in which artists' lives are portrayed and aesthetic principles tested.

Author Biography

Martha Banta is professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.  She is the author of several major books, including Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History and Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. xiii
An American Aesthetic and Its Travails	p. 1
The Burning Question	p. 1
Measuring Up to Veblenism	p. 7
Lagging Arts/Advancing Sciences	p. 11
The Economics of Cultural Deficit	p. 14
Angers of Influence	p. 21
Technics, Technics!	p. 24
Nature, God, Art, Science	p. 28
God's Time/Government Time	p. 30
Raw, Ripe, Rot	p. 36
Transitions without Resolutions	p. 41
Anxieties of Modernity	p. 47
Case Studies: Adaptations to Veblenism	p. 50
"The Normal Man"	p. 54
Capitol of Best Intentions	p. 58
The Perfect Republic: Comparative Perspectives	p. 58
Creation Ab Ova: How Washington, D.C. Came About (1783-1790)	p. 64
The Southern Factor	p. 66
Celebratory Histories: Old and New Style	p. 70
Republican Virtue on Display	p. 75
Waiting for Greatness to Happen (1820-1860)	p. 81
From a National Aesthetic to Nationalist Art	p. 88
The Washington Problem	p. 93
Reacting to Rome et al.	p. 100
A History of One's Choosing	p. 108
Montgomery Meigs and the Remaking of Washington, D.C.	p. 115
America's "Freedom"/Venice's "Justice"	p. 120
The New Washington, D.C.	p. 129
The White City	p. 136
The Unbearable Lightness of the Void	p. 140
Aesthetics of Death: The Mall and Beyond	p. 145
Washington by Moonlight	p. 160
Paraphrases of the Ideal/Allegories of the Real	p. 165
Aesthetic Lives: The Literary Approach	p. 177
Beyond the Terrace	p. 177
Math and Emotion	p. 178
Bifurcated Minds	p. 182
Pride of Knowledge	p. 184
Costs of Knowing	p. 186
Theories Incarnate/Forms Divine	p. 190
Les Objets d'Art	p. 196
Aesthetics of Fellowship	p. 202
Create, Decay, and Destroy	p. 206
Fatal Muses	p. 212
Rivals to the Death	p. 216
Piercing the Wall	p. 220
Notes	p. 229
Index	p. 302
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