Aesthetics Commons^™

Hope And Wonder In The Wasteland: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction As Tolkienian Fairy Story, Alfredo J. Mac Laughlin

Journal of Tolkien Research

J. R. R. Tolkien’s four functions of fantasy stories, as developed in his Andrew Lang lecture “On Fairy Stories” (1939), have become a key conceptual tool for discussing human beings’ attraction to fantasy stories, particularly when attempting to push the analysis beyond the literary into the aesthetic, and beyond the aesthetic into the existential. Applying this interpretive key to an analysis of the expanding genre of post-apocalyptic fiction reveals that post-apocalyptic stories, despite superficial differences, are surprisingly close to fairy stories in their aesthetic core and orientation, and that post-apocalyptic stories are well-suited to fulfill—albeit with their own ...

Negative Dialectics In Elliott Carter: Toward An Adornian Aesthetics Of Carter's Music, Gregory J. Menillo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an attempt to lay the groundwork for an Adornian aesthetics of Elliott Carter’s music. The first chapter suggests that Theodor W. Adorno’s negative dialectics is the most appropriate paradigm for understanding the material antagonisms that characterize Carter’s music over a quasi-Hegelian “unity of opposites” as suggested in the Carter scholarship. Chapter Two demonstrates this through an Adornian reading of key aspects of the first movement of Carter’s 1948 Sonata for Cello and Piano, the watershed work for Carter’s mature style. The third chapter addresses the issue of musical time in Carter from ...

Ambiguity Of Vision: Reimagining The Hypervisible Void, Kiwha Lee Blocman

Theses and Dissertations

Asking questions about what Painting is in the 21st century and the dominant narratives it can challenge, my paintings complicate the viewer’s reading of pictorial hierarchy and the projection of human relations in the world. I de-hierarchize and decentralize the compositional components that make up a painting by using patterns to create spatial depth, not European perspectival conventions. In dialogue with modernists such as Matisse who drew from the visual vocabulary of “The Orient”, my central forms derived from architecture and ornamental fragments possess a body-like presence. Further, I reinvent ancient Asian printmaking processes with oil paint. Observing the ...

“Paint What You Hate”: Philip Guston’S Hooded Figures And The Postponement Of The Exhibition Philip Guston Now, Thomas Baldwin

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis interrogates the postponement of the Philip Guston Now exhibition, examining the justification for the postponement, the actions taken by the National Gallery of Art, and the effects of the postponement. My research examines the museum’s choice to cite social justice as the main context for understanding Philip Guston.

Attention, Reflection, And Contemplation: Approaching The Divine Through Romantic Poiesis, Katelynn Tyner

English Undergraduate Honors Theses

Often the techniques of the said and the unsaid work together. This paper will explore ways in which poets embrace iconophilic or iconoclastic postures toward divine poiesis. One objective will be to focus on the arrangement of an abundance of images into itineraries and poetic landscapes. Another objective will be to demonstrate how these patterns of cultivation can be related to a divine poiesis. Through poetry, there are ways of attending to, reflecting on, and contemplating divine images that can return us to forms of participation with the sacred. First examining poetic attention, I identify poets who demonstrate an attachment ...

Steve Mcqueen, The Filmmaker, And Kant’S Sensus Communis, Livia Melamed Margon

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reflects on the ways in which art reinforces community and reduces political polarity by stimulating shared feelings, namely through Kant's idea of sensus communis. To illustrate its argument, this thesis analyzes the work of Steve McQueen, a politically aware, ethically engaged, and broadly recognized filmmaker and artist.

Actualization Through Constraint: An Analysis Of Hegelian Self- Consciousness In Fascism- Exclusionary Expression And In Modular Orchestral Composition, Marisa Kaye Janke

2022 Symposium

How does a conscious entity become aware of itself and its place in the world? According to German Idealist Philosopher G.F.W. Hegel, there are required conditions that facilitate this movement of awareness. Recognition serves as a central requirement, for a consciousness cannot progress in an isolated space. Coexistence allows for referential points, and is often necessary for the actualization of concepts by providing social interactions wherein recognition both of and by others can occur.

This paper illustrates the progression of two such concepts, discourse and musical composition as forms of freedom “in-itself”. They are both imperfect for the ...

The Disappearance Of The Anti-Aesthetic; The Death Of Fashion, Scrap Evans

Capstone Showcase

In this essay, Scrap explores the connection between famous nihilist and postmodernist theorists, Dadaism, the concept of the anti-aesthetic, and today's high fashion. They provide a history of nihilism and follow its influence through time upon other social, political, and artistic movements. They then make direct connections between famous theorists' prose and famous fashion designers' collections. Finally, they analyze the current state of the fashion world and discuss their plan of action.

The Liberatory Potential Of Fashion, David Billie Suoth

Honors Theses and Capstones

Fashion has the potential to be liberatory and this can be seen in the ways fashion has been targeted by systems of oppression. Fashion is the use of clothes as a vessel to create a greater social meaning. According to Edward Sapir, the meaning of fashion “while it is primarily applied to dress and the exhibition of the human body is not essentially concerned with the fact of dress or ornament, but with its symbolism” (Barnard, 2007, p. 65). Fashion with the symbolism behind it is able to show the sentiments and attitudes of civilization at different points in history ...

Philosophy And Music: A Search For Truth, Zhengzhou Li

Honors Theses

For early Wittgenstein, and perhaps the early analytic tradition, the scope of philosophy is almost synonymous with the limit of language. The quietist doctrine thus abandons all metaphysical inquiry. In the history of philosophy, some German philosophers around the 19th century showed us how we can arrive at the ontological truth in ways other than with language. For these German philosophers, aesthetics and art are vital tools in searching for truth. In response to the Wittgensteinian quietism and in search of other ways of philosophizing besides through the use of language, my thesis focuses specifically on the art of music ...

Once Upon A Time/There Was A Story That Began: Novelty, Endings, And Chronotope In John Barth’S The Tidewater Tales, Zachary K. Gibson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the use of frame tales, genre blending, multi-voiced narration, and circular structure in John Barth’s 1987 novel, The Tidewater Tales. It tracks the isomorphy of Barth’s general aesthetic project, set forth in his essays, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” “The Literature of Replenishment,” and “Very Like an Elephant: Reality Versus Realism,” onto the theoretical aesthetics of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Both Barth and Bakhtin praise the novel its omnivorous capability to accommodate, and juxtaposes conflicting genres against one another; they each see the novelist as an “arranger” or “orchestrator,” who reassembles pre-existing forms to make them ...

Aestheticized Tragedy (Karuṇarasa) As An Intellectual Virtue, Lisa Widdison

Comparative Philosophy

In contemporary virtue epistemology, responsibilist intellectual virtues in the tradition of Aristotle's moral theory are acquired character traits involving a motivational component and a success component. The motivational component is an emotion that regulates inquiry but which would ordinarily, and problematically, carry bias. In order to monitor the patterns of fallibility in emotions, reflection can correct beyond perceptual errors or logical fallacies. Emotions which survive reflection are less partial and hold more epistemic valance than egotistical emotions. Since the framework of virtue epistemology might be at a loss for monitoring emotions reflectively, given the fact emotions operate rapidly and ...

Manila’S Black Nazarene And The Reign Of Bathala, Antonio D. Sison

Journal of Global Catholicism

A consideration of how the dynamics surrounding Manila's Black Nazarene express crucial themes in the Filipino psyche. The article specifically addresses the importance of "felt-experience" (pagdama) in devotion to the Black Nazarene as well as its connections to indigenous Filipino religion.

Catholicism In Context: Religious Practice In Latin America, Gustavo Morello Sj

Journal of Global Catholicism

A critical problem to study Catholicism in the context of Latin American modernity, is that the conceptual tools we use to study religion were designed to understand the transformations that modernity provoked in European religiosity. Studies on the religion of Latin Americans have largely explored the religiosity of the population through surveys that measure attendance, adherence and affiliation. While some anthropologists have explored religious practices among particular groups, we do not know how ordinary, urban Latin Americans practice religion. To fill this gap, a group of researchers from Boston College, Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, Catholic University of Córdoba, and ...

Fraternity, Martyrdom And Peace In Burundi: The Forty Servants Of God Of Buta, Jodi Mikalachki

Journal of Global Catholicism

During Burundi's 1993-2005 civil war, students at Buta Minor Seminary were ordered at gunpoint to separate by ethnicity—Hutus over here, Tutsis over there! They chose instead to join hands and affirm their common identity as children of God. The forty students killed were quickly proclaimed martyrs of fraternity. Their costly solidarity defused the cry for reprisals and continues to inspire Burundians and others on the path of reconciliation. Drawing on fifty interviews with survivors, parents of martyrs, neighbors, religious leaders and other Burundian intellectuals, this essay examines how Burundian Catholics understand the significance of the Buta martyrdom to ...

Editor's Introduction, Mathew N. Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

No abstract provided.

Neoliberalism, Institutionalism, And Art, Declan Hoy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

As contemporary art has expanded to encompass further disparate activities under its umbrella, the various institutions of art can be looked to as the only constant and defining characteristic of art. These institutions are often seen in sharp contrast to spontaneous collectivism, the real, and radical creativity—attributes deeply valued within contemporary art. This creates a troubling situation in which institutions are seen as limiting the possibility of what art could be, and artworks are perceived as needing to escape the very institutions which define them in order to be deemed worthy. In this structure, contemporary art follows and validates ...

Worlds Without End: A Platonist Theory Of Fiction, Patrick Grafton-Cardwell

Doctoral Dissertations

I first ask what it is to make up a story. In order to answer that question, I give existence and identity conditions for stories. I argue that a story exists whenever there is some narrative content that has intentionally been made accessible. I argue that stories are abstract types, individuated by the conditions that must be met by something in order to be a properly formed token of the type. However, I also argue that the truth of our story identity attributions---sentences like, "Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings is the same story as JRR Tolkien's Lord ...

Indigenous Impositions In Contemporary Culture: Knotting Ontologies, Beading Aesthetics, And Braiding Temporalities, Darren Lone Fight

Doctoral Dissertations

This work covers Indigenous philosophy, history, aesthetics, ethics, axiology, pedagogy, temporality, and language. This is the necessary result of a central but implicit claim made throughout the project, which is that any exploration of Indigenous culture that does not work within such a multi- and inter-disciplinary approach and instead parses and isolates these elements from each other runs the risk of attenuating the complex-systems features of the Indigenous culture it examines. Indigenous cultures are a processual holism. I offer here a piece of cultural analysis/synthesis that is Indigenous from the inside and, as such, does not neglect philosophical foundations ...

Essays On Communication, Shawn M. Simpson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

One of the central issues of contemporary philosophy and biology is the nature of communication. Early accounts of communication tended to focus on just one side of the communicative divide – the speaker side or the receiver side – and took as their starting point the case of human language. Animal communication, historically, was largely treated as a special case. Now things are different. Now it appears we might have a model that makes sense of sign use in both the human and animal realms and brings together both sides of the signaling divide. It’s still to be seen, however, how ...