By foregrounding significant Enlightenment and Romantic configurations of the problem of the “arts of life,” this course examines the mobile border between aesthetics and necessity in the long eighteenth century moment and in our own. In The Arts of Life (1802), John Aikin surveys the means of provision of food, clothing, and shelter in the Romantic age by means of a watchword distinction between those arts either “absolutely necessary for life’s preservation” or “conducive to comfort and convenience,” as against those “ministering to luxury and pleasure.” The same idea memorably animates the aesthetic counter-tradition running from William Blake’s “arts of life and death” to William Morris’s “lesser arts of life.”
 

In contextualizing the problem of the “arts of life,” we will resurrect productive historical thinking about an aesthetics that inextricably inheres within practices “necessary for the preservation of life.” We will explore the enduring vitality of such a notion in our own moment of ecological crisis and of casualized cultural arts (marked by eclipsed autonomy for art’s producers, consumers, and critics alike), with particular focus on new directions in design theory and the affordances of form; on literature’s evolving location among the “arts of life”; and on the present reinvigoration of craft and design in popular visions of the aesthetic.