Organized by Professors Peter H. Reill, University of California, Los Angeles, Peter Wagner, Universität Koblenz-Landau and Frédéric Ogée, Université Paris Diderot

Co-sponsored by the Deutsch-Französische Hochschule/Université Franco-Allemande and the Université Paris Diderot (Laboratoire de Recherche sur les Cultures Anglophones)

April 13–14, 2012
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

This international conference will include contributions by scholars from the United States, France, and Germany. It focuses on a few crucial aspects of the relations between taste and the senses in the long eighteenth century.

In the wake of the study of moral psychology inspired by Locke and Shaftesbury, the critical Enlightenment inquiry became concerned with the way in which art affects our emotions. Thus Dubos, in Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture (1719), defines taste as a sixth sense. Hutcheson (1725) follows Shaftesbury when he regards taste as an internal sense concerned with both morals and art, and Montesquieu sees it as an organ of the “body machine.” Many writers of the Enlightenment agreed that good taste is based on universally valid principles: Hume (1742) and Voltaire (1764) wrote on standards of taste while William Hogarth, in his Analysis of Beauty (1753), was, typically, preoccupied with “fixing the fluctuating Idea of Taste” for a new middle-class audience. A more relativist viewpoint emerged in the second part of the eighteenth century when Alexander Gerard (1759) defined the term as a responsive faculty of the imagination complementing the effort of the artist—taste is to the critic what genius is to the artist. Kant, in the context of discussing the sublime, insists on the varying notions of taste championed in different periods.

Clearly, then, taste is an issue relating to aesthetics, philosophy, art history, literature and literary criticism, but also to social history, class distinctions, and gender. For much of the discussion briefly outlined above turned out to be, implicitly, a defense of the attitudes of an exclusive, male, elite. Papers will address taste in the contexts of sight (fashion, chinoiserie, and art); hearing (music) and smelling (for example, odor in literature); tasting (as found in travel literature and fiction); and touching (as in health care).