On the Possibility of the Aesthetic Life: Terry Eagleton, Cather’s Tom Outland, and the Experience of Loss Adam Ellwanger University of Houston – Downtown In “he Marxist Sublime,” Terry Eagleton argues that capitalist rationality has dimin- ished the human ability to experience the aesthetic as bodily sensuousness. He advocates a Marxist reorganization of society as a means of reactivating the body’s receptivity to pleasure by claiming that a “revolution in thought” might enable an existence deined by the omnipresence of aesthetic experience. Willa Cather’s he Professor’s House poses a signiicant challenge to such an idea. hrough the novel’s embedded narrative, “Tom Outland’s Story,” Cather complicates the idealization of aesthetic life by demonstrating that the experience of loss is the structural heart of aesthetic response. Keywords: Willa Cather / aesthetics / Terry Eagleton / Marxism / rationality / embodiment / loss A perennial and compelling line of thought in Marxist criticism is that rea- son and capital have perverted our capacity to grasp aesthetic experience as bodily sensuousness and plenitude. Rather than attune us to beauty, capitalist rationality enforces an aesthetic distance, encouraging a disinterested engagement with art. his distance reconigures aesthetic response as a luxury that exists on the margins of our daily lives. It turns the artwork into a numb- ing mechanism that allows us to transcend the alienation we experience rather than modify the conditions that produce it. However, the early writings of Marx advance an alternative claim, positioning the aesthetic at the very center of the social sphere, and imagining that a diferent economic organization might make possible an aesthetic life — a life in which the labor required to perpetuate society brings about enduring and unalienated pleasure. In a chapter entitled “ he Marxist Sublime” in he Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton explicates and advocates his version of the Marxist model of aes- thetic experience. Aesthetics, as a ield that primarily produces discourse about art, is something of a paradox for Eagleton. He describes it as “a contradictory, self-undoing sort of project, which in promoting the theoretical value of its object