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Representation & Its Limit, Neal Anderson Hebert

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis is an investigation into traditional accounts of aesthetic representation. Using the work of Noel Carroll as an exemplar of the definition put forward in canonical philosophical accounts of aesthetic representation, I look at how Carroll’s account must work. By examining both the definition in abstract and how this definition is instantiated into existent and hypothetical works of art, it becomes apparent that Carroll’s definition is overly stringent and relies upon a counterintuitive distinction between aesthetic representation and aesthetic expression. This distinction is problematic insofar as the distinction seems to be a largely semantic distinction: the mechanism by which …