Abstract

Can we talk about Beauty or aesthetics anymore? Do we always risk quashing freedom of expression if we regularly judge what is "valuable" or "good"? Can such judgments be made not on the basis of who a writer is or the context of their work but rather on their artistic content? Of course book and film reviewers give audiences their "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" all the time, but the criteria that they use for making such judgments aren't objective or scholarly, are they? Using the literature of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville as case studies, this paper will argue that examining a work of art in terms of its vision of Beauty is both fair and necessary if one is to maintain that the Humanities are at all relevant to public life. Such an examination, I will show, does not have to result in canonizing certain works or excluding "strange" visions, but rather such an examination can free the Humanities to engage larger issues of critical thinking.