This course explores notions that have conditioned twentieth-century attitudes toward beauty:  among them, ornament, form, fetish, and the artifact "woman."  The class will begin with foundational works on beauty by Plato, Horace, and Kant and then move to twentieth-century fiction, art, manifestos, theory, and such phenomena as beauty contests and art adjudications.  Along the way we will try to fill in the catagories of modernism and postmodernism, observing the early fetishing of form and the contemporary fear of fantasy, and following the fate of  "the beautiful woman" from Lily Bart to Madonna.  Works discussed will be by Adolf Loos, Zelda Fitzgerald, Andrea Dworkin, John Hawkes, Vladimir Nabakov, E.H. Gombrich, Jacques Derrida, Laura Mulvey, Dave Hickey, Arthur Danto, Naomi Wolfe, Edith Wharton, John Fowles, Jan Mukarovsky, Praeger and Pietz, Thomas Pychon, Clive Bell, Cleanth Brooks, James Joyce, and numerous visual artists.  Students from English, Comparative Literature and other national literatures, and art history are welcome.

Requirements:  seminar paper delivered in class and then developed into a term paper due at the end of the semester.