Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

specifically, it rebelled against the “Don Quixotes of morality [who] set themselves up as
the policemen of literature, and [who] apprehend and cudgel, in the name of virtue, every
idea which strolls through a book with its mob-cap a little askew or its skirt pulled up a
little too high” (Gautier 755). According to Wilde, “All art is quite useless” and cannot
be promoted as a means to educate or improve society by advocating morality and virtue.
Quite to the contrary, “the arts are immoral” and their aim is “simply to create a mood”
argues Wilde (912). By rejecting the emphasis placed on moral content and traditional
bourgeois values, the aesthetic movement placed an emphasis on the formal properties of
literature and promoted a rebellious temperament which would later become the staple of
the avant-garde. A concept of art that is detached from any type of moral and/or
educational consideration seems rather well-fitted to promote the diffusion of
transgressive works, a tendency which would later be regarded as a distinct characteristic
of the early Modernist period according to Anthony Julius (53). Some of the tenets of
aestheticism, especially those that aimed to reject previously established paradigms, were
echoed in the Modernist movement and in the work of critics such as Cleanth Brooks and
Georges Bataille. Modernism in art rebelled against the rigid aesthetic formulas and
excessive moralism of previous periods and experimented with genres and styles. In
addition, New Critic Cleanth Brooks questioned the notion of “use value”—that poetry
has some “value” which would justify its “use”—before concluding, “[u]ses for poetry
are always to be found, and doubtless will continue to be found” (“The Well Wrought
Urn” 1362) and in discussing the fundamental value of the word useful with regard to
human activity, Georges Bataille argues that “given the more or less divergent collection
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