Notes about the Preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray by O.Wilde (28/5/12)

The philosopher who give the basis of the Aesthetic movement is Walter Pater. He is interested into how the sense of life could be stated and he established that the only way to stop the flux of life is the ecstatic moment (the archetype of V. Woolf's moment of being), that is the extreme of Romanticism. Mr Pater refuses Utilitarian reason to cultivate art because it has an inner value and it is the only way to stop the time.
The manifesto of the Aesthetic movement is Oscar Wilde's preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. The preface is a literary criticism where he explains the new features art has to follow.
Looking at the layout of the text, the reader notices that it is made up of a list of very short sentences. It creates an epigramatic effect and what is said sticks into reader's mind.
For Mr Wilde art has to hide the artist, because it has not to be personal, like Romantic art was.
He reviews also the position of the critic: he interpretates the work of art and for the true critic finding biographic elements in it is very interesting.
Mr Wilde says that the Victorian do no like Realism because it shows them how they actually are.
Unlike the Victorian, Mr Wilde thinks that moral aspects of someone's life may be part of the work of art, but that moralità is not everything: in this way he states that art has not a teaching function. Another important element of the preface is the new importance of the reader: there is anymore an author and the reader has to give a sense to what he reads (it will be very important during Modernism). The reader has to reflect about what there is of him in the work of art and if there were many opinion about a work of art, it means that it is vital, timeless and temporal.