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School for Cross-faculty Studies Liberal Arts

IP120 Beauty

Module Overview

What is beauty? What does it mean to be beautiful? How do we know beauty when we see it?

Beauty can be seen as synonymous with truth, purity, and goodness, yet also aligned with deception, temptation, and immorality. Beauty can be both natural and artificial; effortless and hard work; familiar and otherworldly; objective and subjective. Beauty can be traditional and innovative; a symbol - and even symptom - of social conformity, and a radical form of self-expression.

Beauty, then, is decidedly complex, and its complexity has captivated thinkers across times, places, and cultures. On this module, we explore the intellectual, imaginative, creative, and critical possibilities that arise from such diverse understandings of beauty.

The aim of this module is not to define what beauty is, or to tell you how to think or feel about it. This module will challenge existing preconceptions and encourage you to develop critical thinking skills around the interdisciplinary issue of beauty through encounters with theoretical frameworks, detailed case studies, and focussed problems. The module will combine a wide variety of perspectives drawn from disciplines such as aesthetics, musicology, sociology, art history, gender studies, media and communications studies, literary studies, anthropology, poetics, and other relevant areas of study.

Module aims

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

  • demonstrate an in-depth understanding of beauty as a critical issue
  • critically analyse ideas of beauty across cultures, disciplines, and time periods
  • offer detailed analysis of case studies related to beauty from interdisciplinary perspectives
  • mobilise relevant academic scholarship in support of your ideas

This is a Year 1 Liberal Arts optional core module

Module leader:

Dr Kim Lockwood Clough

15 CATS

Term 1 | 10 weeks

2 workshop hours per week

Not available to students outside Liberal Arts.

Please note: Module availability and staffing may change year on year depending on availability and other operational factors. The School for Cross-faculty Studies makes no guarantee that any modules will be offered in a particular year, or that they will necessarily be taught by the staff listed on these pages.

Indicative topics:

Please note that these topics are purely indicative, and actual module content may differ.

  • Divinity, Purity, and the Ideal: Neoplatonism and Dante
  • Clean Girls, Dirty Rhetoric: Morality and Contemporary Beauty Standards
  • The Senses Reign: Desire and Courtly Love
  • Into Abjection: Horror and the Male Gaze
  • Natural Beauty: Romanticism and Sublimity
  • Exotic Others: Orientalism and Fantasy
  • Architecture and Archetypes: Beauty and the Brutalists
  • Becoming Beautiful: Fat-shaming and Body Building

Assessments

There are two assessments on this module:

Assessment Weighting Description
Beauty Portfolio 50% portfolio of tasks engaging with and responding to content and ideas encountered on the module
Beauty Essay 50% academic essay exploring an aspect of beauty

Illustrative reading list:

  • Alighieri, Dante. 2010. La Vita Nuova. Translated by David R. Slavitt. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press
  • Arrington, Lauren, Zoe Leinhardt, and Philip Dawid, eds. Beauty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
  • Black, Paula. 2004. The Beauty Industry: Gender, Culture, Pleasure. London: Routledge
  • Brillenburg Wurth, Kiene. 2009. Musically Sublime: Indeterminacy, Infinity, Irresolvability. New York, NY: Fordham University Press
  • Bruegmann, Robert, ed. 2018. Art Deco Chicago: Designing Modern America. Chicago, IL, New Haven, CT, and London: Chicago Art Deco Society, Chicago Art History Museum, and Yale University Press
  • Di Felice, Claudio, Harald Hendrix, and Philiep Bossier, eds. 2019. The Idea of Beauty in Italian Literature and Language: "Il buono amore è di bellezza disio." Leiden: Brill
  • Eco, Umberto. 2004. On Beauty. London: Secker & Warburg
  • Frueh, Joanna. 2019. Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press
  • Hyland, Drew A. 2008. Plato and the Question of Beauty. Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press
  • Jha, Meeta Rani. 2016. The Global Beauty Industry: Colorism, Racism, and the National Body. New York, NY: Routledge
  • Kant, Immanuel. 2007. Critique of Judgement. Translated by Nicholas Walker. Oxford: Oxford University Press
  • Kant, Immanuel, 2011. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings. Edited by Patrick R. Frierson and Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
  • Lewis, Reina. Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation. London: Routledge
  • Liebelt, Claudia, Sarah Böllinger, and Ulf Gierke. 2019. Beauty and the Norm: Debating Standarization in Bodily Appearance. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan
  • Martin, Morag. 2009. Selling Beauty: Cosmetics, Commerce, and French Society, 1750-1850. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press
  • Nguyen, Mimi Thi. 2024. The Promise of Beauty. Durham, NJ: Duke University Press
  • O'Donohue, John. 2004. Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace. London: Bantam Books
  • Orvell, Miles. 2021. Empire of Ruins: American Culture, Photography, and the Spectacle of Destruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press
  • Shafik, Viola. 2007. Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class, and Nation. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press
  • Strings, Sabrina. 2019. Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. New York, NY: New York University Press
  • Tate, Shirley Anne. 2016. Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics. London and New York, NY: Routledge
  • Wesselinoff, Catherine. 2023. The Revival of Beauty: Aesthetics, Experience, and Philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge
  • Wolf, Naomi. 2015. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. London: Vintage
  • Whitehouse, Tanya. 2018. How Ruins Acquire Aesthetic Value. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan