Publisher's Synopsis
What if the aesthetic strategy was solved? What if the real and the ideal were reconciled? Would postmodernists continue to question the legitimacy of the traditional Western canon? And would it, by its very own definition, have to be entirely reconstructed?A revelation in the field of traditional literary aesthetics, "A Place for a Patch to Be Patched" proposes answers to these and other questions. Referencing Terence, Antar, Juan Latino, Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Alexander Pushkin, Langston Hughes, and others, it argues that a handful of literature from the African diaspora actually solved the aesthetic strategy, unifying empiricism and idealism and ultimately illustrating absolute truth.from "A Place for a Patch to Be Patched"...modernism is, aesthetically speaking, a romantic-realism philosophically best defined as idealist-empiricism. It attempts to change the world from what it is into what it ought to be (to solve the conflict between the real and the ideal) by disconnecting the romantic aesthetic from its source in idealism and connecting it to a realism that is aesthetically compatible with the empiricist environment in which modernism operates...Rather than solving the aesthetic strategy, modernism produced the "modernist dilemma," emphasizing the disunification between empiricism and idealism. Herein, I contend that this "dilemma" was resolved and that it was resolved long before the onset of modernity.Paul R. Haynes currently teaches in Texas, where he resides with his wife and their three sons.
