A Poetics of Art Criticism
The Case of Baudelaire

202 pp., 6 x 9, 1 halftones, notes, bibl
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Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-9238-1
Published: January 1989
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Distributed for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Romance Studies
Raser questions criticism's predilection for a scientific discourse, arguing that aesthetic categories are better indicators of a text's literary qualities. Although aesthetics has claimed subjective pleasure as its sole criterion since the time of Kant, aesthetic judgments tend always to ground themselves in logic or reference. In art criticism, description serves as this ground and is no more productive than in Baudelaire's art criticism, where it leads to poetry.