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PEASE, ALLISON. Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xvi + 244 pp., illus. $54.95.
The issue of obscenity in the arts has a venerable history, hand in hand with legal challenges and book banning. Joyce's Ulysses made for a landmark case in 1933, resulting in a decision to permit work not merely exploitive of obscenity. The 1960s seemed to have settled such wrangles, with the saving phrase "redeeming social importance" rendering all objects with any aesthetic potential safe from censorship. Just as the divisions of highbrow and lowbrow art have collapsed into an all-embracing eclecticism, arguments about what is art and what is mere pornography have a stale, belated air to them, like sophomoric quarrels about basic philosophy. Yet given the recent public imbroglios over some of these supposedly dead issues, perhaps a reexamination is in order. Allison Pease's Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity takes a new look at this problem, with some intriguing, if not quite unanticipated, results.
Pease's study is historical, beginning with the question of how audiences from the Renaissance on became so inured to sexual depiction in the arts She points tellingly to the seventeenth-century shift in epistemology away from apodictic religious knowledge toward individual sensory perception. Pornography, designed to elicit pure sensation, began its ascendancy, soon acquiring the dimensions of a market enterprise. Something had to be done to educate society, particularly the upper classes. The philosophic arbiters of the eighteenth century tried encouraging taste to go with affluence. In his influential treatise, Characteristics, the Earl of Shaftesbury pushed for an aesthetic above mere sensory data, yet allied to materiality because the monied stratum could afford such contemplative luxury. Pease additionally argues that Kant's Critique of Judgment is critical to an understanding of later notions about aesthetics and obscenity, with its emphasis on beauty as a public rather than private sense, and its contention that art is tied into morality. In an anti-Romantic move that anticipated Modernism, Kant ordained the sensual as low and the intellectual as high.
Pease is particularly compelling in her tracery through the Victorian era: thorough on both data and analysis, from the number of obscene books and pamphlets confiscated by the Society for the Suppression...