Aesthetics Commons^™

Symbolic Misery And Aesthetics- Bernard Stiegler, Noel Fitzpatrick

Articles

In this article I will deal with the development of a theory of aesthetics within the work of the French contemporary philosopher Bernard Stiegler with particular reference to his concept of symbolic misery. Rather than give an extensive account of Bernard Stiegler’s aesthetics this article will focus on some key concepts mobilized in the definition and analysis of symbolic misery. Firstly, I will argue that Stiegler’s understanding of the aesthetic comes from an expanded notion of aesthesis, where the political and the aesthetic are mobilized together. In this regard I will interrogate some key concepts in his work Symbolic Misery …

If You See Something, Say Something: A Look At Experimental Writing On Art, Charlotte Lucy Latham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Signs all over New York City state, "If you see something, say something," but museum studies repeatedly find viewers do not attend to pictures, just as eye witness testimony is invariably skewed. Ways of seeing have been limited to known ways of discussing. Alternative approaches offer new insights. The first section, "Experiments in Art Writing," examines two texts: T.J. Clark's The Sight of Death, a journal of his daily visits looking at two Poussin paintings, for which he maintains the ambiguity of exploration and argues to keep visual images from their dissolution into political symbols; and, Charles Simic's Dime Store …

Civilization Of The Living Dead: Canonical Monstrosity, The Romero Zombie, And The Political Subject, Nicholas Walter Robbins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the canonical monsters of Western political theory, including Plato's wolf-man, Hobbes's Leviathan and Tocqueville's mechanical mass. It argues that monster theorists - including horror film director George A. Romero, creator of the zombie and its apocalyptic narrative - utilize the horror genre in order to reveal the hidden dysfunctions and unrealized potentials of self and society. The canon features several prison-like heuristics - including Plato's cave, Hobbes's sate of nature, Tocqueville's prison, and Romero's zombie apocalypse - that bring to light the mass enslavement, intellectual dysfunction, appetitive tyranny, and cannibalism of the political subject. Theorists consistently depict …

To Each His Own Reality: How The Analysis Of Artistic Exchanges In Cold War Europe Challenges Categories, Mathilde Arnoux

Artl@s Bulletin

How to reconstruct artistic relationships among four European countries, situated on both sides of the Iron Curtain, during the period that commenced post-Stalin and lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall? This is one of the questions that faces the research program To Each His Own Reality: The notion of the real in the art of France, West Germany, East Germany and Poland between 1960 and 1989, which was initiated in January 2011. The paper discusses syntheses of the questions that the research team is facing, descriptions of its methodology, an analysis of preliminary results and what they allow …

In Search Of The Artist: The Influences Of Commercial Interest On An Art School - A Narrative Analysis, Michael Leonard Sette

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The current study will investigate how identities and roles of the artist converge with competing identities and roles fostered at the institutional level within an art college as revealed through the marketing literature that they produce to attract students and business partnerships. The sociological focus for this proposal is the tension between art as a creative expressive endeavor and art as a commodity that has entered into social transactions unintended by the original expression of the artist. The researcher documents and describes (via narrative analysis) how an art school negotiates competing relationships between the pressures to teach and promote art …

At The Threshold: Edgard Varese, Modernism, And The Experience Of Modernity, Robert Jackson Wood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The writings of composer Edgard Varese have long been celebrated for their often ecstatic, optimistic proclamations about the future of music. With manifesto-like brio, they put forth a vision of radically new instruments and sounds, delineate the parameters for spatially oriented composition, and initiate the discourse of what would become electronic music. Yet just as important for understanding Varese is the other side of the coin: a thematics of failure concerning the music of the present--a failure of old instruments to transcend their limitations, a failure of technique to achieve certain compositional ideals, and a failure of music to connect …

Agreeable Despair: Modernism And Melancholy, Derrick James Gentry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study considers a group of distinctly modernist philosophers for whom aesthetic and reflective practices represented a way out of the paralysis of a culture dominated by narrowly conceived philosophical values. These modernist philosophers, I argue, helped to give birth to mode of experimental writing that Robert Musil called "essayism." I begin in Chapter One with an account of Walter Benjamin's experimental concept of melancholy and its intersection with the avant-garde practices of French Surrealism. Chapter One begins to contrast Benjamin's concept of melancholy with Friedrich Nietzsche's therapeutic efforts to transform and overcome melancholy on both a personal and a …

"She Said Plain, Burned Things": A Feminist Poetics Of The Unsayable In Twentieth Century Literary & Visual Culture, Leah Souffrant

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the way silence, blank space, and other forms of creative withholding attempt to translate the unsayable, or to convey the unsayability of language in artistic form. Through a study of the works of Sylvia Plath, Jean Rhys, Rachel Zucker, Marguerite Duras, Anne Carson, and visual images, this work observes the connection between women's writing in the 20th century and the communication of painful subject matter through attention to absence. This study attends explicitly to how formal qualities in artistic works attend to ontological concerns through an examination of the intersection of concerns with phenomenology, feminism, and formal …

Mind, Media, And Techniques Of Remediation In America, 1850-1910, Dominique Zino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation describes the way a renewed interest in picturesque aesthetics engaged the imaginations of writers, visual artists, philosophers, landscape designers, and collectors during the second half of the nineteenth century, reinvigorating a mode of inquiry that sanctioned the act of composing representations--mental, visual, and verbal--as a suitable response to social, political, and philosophical problems. The chapters that follow describe the understanding of the relationship between language, visual representation, and feeling that picturesque aesthetics formalized alongside the surface discourse of picturesqueness that was circulating through everyday genres, such as illustrated viewbooks, by the second half of the century. This dynamic …

Aesthetic Mediation And The Politics Of Technology: (Re)New(Ed) Strategies For A Critical Social Theory, Andrew J. Pierce

Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

There is a rich history in early critical theory of attempting to harness the power of aesthetic imagination for the purposes of political liberation. But this approach has largely faded to the background of contemporary critical theory, eclipsed lately by attempts to reconstruct and apply norms of rationality to processes of democratic will formation a` la Habermas. This paper represents a small attempt to return the aesthetic element to its proper place within critical theory, by investigating the aesthetic aspects of certain forms of resistance to technological domination, forms of resistance that become ‘‘embodied’’ in technologies themselves. The phenomena of …

A Psychoanalytic Exploration Into The Memory And Aesthetics Of Everyday Life: Photographs, Recollections, And Encounters With Loss, Dimitrios Mellos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The project at hand explores some of the psychological functions of photography as both an everyday and an artistic cultural practice from a psychoanalytic perspective. It is proposed that, contrary to commonsensical opinion, photographs are not accurate depositories of memory, but rather function as a functional equivalent of screen memories, thus channeling the subject's memory in ways that are objectively distorted and distorting, but psychologically meaningful and important; moreover, they are a special kind of screen memory in that they are often created pre-emptively and are physically instantiated.

Additionally, it is suggested that, by dint of their materiality, photographs achieve …

Coming Of Age During The Sixties: A Narration Of Lives Through Music And Battle, Jennifer L. Oliveri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis has been written based on my retrieved memory, as it concentrates on autobiographical memories and the lives of two politically opposing men, from the American sixties. I discuss the effect of music and the war in Vietnam as it was experienced by these men--a moderately angry veteran and a "hippie." I examine how their stories were "retold" to me, which in turn created new memories. This is a study in the memory of memories.

The Literature Of Political Things And Places: Reading And Writing Design, Susan Yelavich

Articles

No abstract provided.

Brain And Aesthetic Attitude: How To Integrate "Old" And "New" Aesthetics, Gianluca Consoli

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

At present, various efforts are being put forward to naturalize aesthetics. One of the most controversial disciplines of aesthetics is neuroaesthetics. The first applications of neuroimaging of the aesthetic experience of paintings occurred ten years ago. Over this decade, neuroscientific findings have determined three common centers of visual aesthetic experience: top-down processing; reward and evaluation; and cortical sensory processing. Undoubtedly, these common centers require better identification and further investigation. However, the experimental data currently available make it possible to falsify or corroborate traditional philosophical theories of aesthetic perception and evaluation. Within an integrated approach to aesthetics, this selective function might …

Mechanical Reproduction In An Age Of High Art, Chris Barker

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper reopens the question of the place of high art in the period identified by Walter Benjamin as the age of mechanical reproduction. Walter Benjamin, Bruno Latour, and Adam Lowe are wrong to think that mechanical reproduction has transformed the concept of art, destroying the aura of art or transmitting that aura from original to copy. The concept of art cannot be redefined by the modern change in the capacity to reproduce art unless art was initially defined primarily by its uniqueness/nonreproducibility. Photographic reproduction has caused major changes in the visual arts and in the way we consume art, …

Dewey And Everyday Aesthetics - A New Look, Kalle Puolakka

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

John Dewey is frequently mentioned as an important forerunner of everyday aesthetics. In this article, I attempt to provide an updated view of Dewey’s place within everyday aesthetics by drawing attention to aspects in Dewey’s own work and in contemporary interpretations of his philosophy that have not been thoroughly discussed in the context of everyday aesthetics. In the first part, I offer a reading of Dewey’s notion of aesthetic experience that unties its content through noting the important position Dewey ascribes to imagination in aesthetic experience in the later parts of Art as Experience. The second pillar of the pragmatist …

Parisian Sacred Space In L.-S. Mercier's Tableau De Paris, Michael Mulryan

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Robert Dodsley Eighteenth-Century Play Collector And Theater Historian, John Pruitt

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Caricaturing The Vanity Of Human Prayer In Juvenal, Dryden, And Johnson The Ups And Downs Of Poetic Imitation, John J. Burke Jr.

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

"My Apologies For This Inconvenient Abduction" Rakish Reformation In Sarah Fielding's History Of Ophelia, Mary Ann Rooks

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

The American Pioneer Farmer It Is Time To Kill The Myth, A. G. Monaco

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Sacred Space, Michael Rotenberg-Schwartz

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Stewarding Affective Landscapes In Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries Of Udolpho, Melissa Smith

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

The "New" Nature In The Language Of Travel Domingo Navarrete's And John Locke's Natural Law Rhetoric, Matthew Binney

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

John Adams And The Balance, Zebulun Q. Weeks

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

The Holy House Of Loreto Politics And Idolatry In The Long Eighteenth Century, Hilary Teynor Donatini

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Religious Exchanges Solomon's Temple, Holy Land Travel, And A Georgics Of Sacred Space In Seventeenth- And Eighteenth-Century English Writing, Michael Rotenberg-Schwartz

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Book Reviews

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Berkeley And The Value Of The Arts, Tom Jones

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.