Dr Nicholas Gaskill: List of publications

This essay argues that any adequate account of literary studies as an intellectual discipline has to reckon with the aesthetic nature of literary works. To make my case, I draw on the philosophy of John Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead, the aesthetics of Susanne K. Langer, and accounts of criticism by Louise Rosenblatt and Kenneth Burke, all of whom I show to be indebted to William James. Key to my argument is their redefinition of knowledge in terms of “modes of abstraction” and their elaboration of concepts geared towards registering the distinctive kinds of abstractive thinking at work in criticism and the arts.

This chapter argues that a new aesthetic paradigm requires a new paradigm of aesthetic education. I elaborate what this paradigm looks like in Whitehead’s work, starting with his educational writing and moving through his meditations on abstractions and ‘aesthetic significance’ in Modes of Thought (1968, first published 1938). Throughout, I show how Whitehead turned to aesthetics to combat what he saw as the primary intellectual evil of his age: the problem of disciplinary specialization, which he regarded as the institutional manifestation of the modern habit of letting nature bifurcate. Arguably, this problem is with us more than ever, with the added danger that many disciplines – those that fall short on research-based metrics – are in the process of being cut from the university entirely. Whitehead’s notion of aesthetic education, framed to address this threat but made ever harder to grasp because of it, forces us to ask: how can we justify and institute modes of thought that fall outside the ‘knowledge factory’ model of the modern research university?

Most of us experience the real world as colorful. Apples are red or green; the sky is blue or grey; your shirt is white or striped. The mundane objects of our lives come to us with and through their colors. It comes as a surprise, then, that realism – the literary style credited with having a fidelity to the real world – should be so lacking in colors, at least compared to its counterparts at the turn of the twentieth century. Scan the works of Henry James and Edith Wharton for color terms, and you’ll get the occasional description of an outfit, a room, a landscape. But these won’t be dwelt upon. This is due in part to the fact that the reality that realism commits itself to describing is, at heart, social reality rather than physical or even perceptual reality. If you search James and Wharton for “color” itself, you’ll mostly turn up instances of that preeminently social use of the term: Winterbourne “colors” when Daisy Miller bluntly invokes her “reputation”; Lily Bart’s “color deepens” when Selden suggests she come up to his room at The Bendick. And so on.

The first major literary and cultural history of color in America, 1880-1930 Chromographia tells the story of how color became modern and how literature, by engaging with modern color, became modernist.

Once largely ignored, the speculative philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead has assumed a new prominence in contemporary theory across the humanities and social sciences. Philosophers and artists, literary critics and social theorists, anthropologists and computer scientists have all embraced Whitehead's thought, extending it through inquiries into the nature of life, the problem of consciousness, and the ontology of objects, as well as into experiments in education and digital media.The Lure of Whitehead offers readers not only a comprehensive introduction to Whitehead's philosophy but also a demonstration of how his work advances our emerging understanding of life in the posthuman epoch. Contributors: Jeffrey A. Bell, Southeastern Louisiana U; Nathan Brown, U of California, Davis; Peter Canning; Didier Debaise, Free U of Brussels; Roland Faber, Claremont Lincoln U; Michael Halewood, U of Essex; Graham Harman, American U in Cairo; Bruno Latour, Sciences Po Paris; Erin Manning, Concordia U, Montreal; Steven Meyer, Washington U; Luciana Parisi, U of London; Keith Robinson, U of Arkansas at Little Rock; Isabelle Stengers, Free U of Brussels; James Williams, U of Dundee.