Aesthetics Commons^™

Sexual Morality And Owning Our Own Bodies, Sarah E. Foreman

Augustana Center for the Study of Ethics Essay Contest

In our current age of “hook-up cultures” and premarital sex, the issue of sexual morality in our society is one that must be addressed. As the younger generations become sexually active at earlier times in their lives, we need to discuss appropriate views of sexual activity and the moral limitations of sexual acts. Conventional sexual morality will tell us that sex outside of marriage is immoral. Another sexual ethic might claim that sex without love is not morally permissible. However, in today’s changing and ever more liberal society, it is important for us to come to terms with a new …

Announcings, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

The Annunciation is often thematized in the critical literature and foremost among these thematizations, recently to be sure, are feminist readings, which matter for this essay although this essay can only refer to these in passing.

The focal concern is personal correspondence and intimate address or intrigue. This essay thus offers a hermeneutic reading less of the presumptive purity of our perception of this painting, as indeed of its reception, involving a distinction to be noted between male and female subjects than it reviews a recollection of the divine inclination to beauty in both pagan, Greek, and Judaeo- Christian traditions. …

Kind Of Borrowed, Kind Of Blue, P.D. Magnus

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

In late 2014, the jazz combo Mostly Other People Do the Killing released "Blue", an album which is a note-for-note remake of Miles Davis' 1959 landmark album "Kind of Blue". MOPDtK (to abbreviate the band's cumbersome name) transcribed all of the solos and performed them with meticulous care so as to produce a recorded album that replicates, as much as they could, the sound of the original. This is a thought experiment made actual, the kind of doppelgänger which philosophers routinely just imagine. I explore some of the ontological and aesthetic puzzles which the album poses. I argue that what …

Fantasy Incarnate: Of Elves And Men, Simon J. Cook Dr.

Journal of Tolkien Research

This essay proposes the idea of incarnation as a key to unlocking Tolkien’s conception of fantasy as set out in the 'Origins' section of On Fairy Stories. Tolkien's intellectual context is explored and his conception of mythology as a blending of imagination and history examined. The essay also establishes the differences between mortal and Elvish fantasy and argues that Tolkien's Elves engage in a different kind of incarnational art than do mortals. In conclusion it is claimed that in ‘Origins’ Tolkien reworked the speculations of mid-Victorian comparative philology into an aesthetic theory of artistic creation grounded upon the notion …

Export / Import: The Promotion Of Contemporary Italian Art In The United States, 1935–1969, Raffaele Bedarida

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Export / Import examines the exportation of contemporary Italian art to the United States from 1935 to 1969 and how it refashioned Italian national identity in the process. I do not concentrate on the Italian art scene per se, or on the American reception of Italian shows. Through a transnational perspective, instead, I examine the role of art exhibitions, publications, and critical discourse aimed at American audiences. Inaugurated by the Fascist regime as a form of political propaganda, this form of cultural outreach to the United States continued after WWII as Italian museums, dealers, and critics aimed to vaunt the …

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …

Wabi-Sabi Mathematics, Jean-Francois Maheux

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Mathematics and aesthetics have a long history in common. In this relation however, the aesthetic dimension of mathematics largely refers to concepts such as purity, absoluteness, symmetry, and so on. In stark contrast to such a nexus of ideas, the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi values imperfections, temporality, incompleteness, earthly crudeness, and even contradiction. In this paper, I discuss the possibilities of “wabi-sabi mathematics” by showing (1) how wabi-sabi mathematics is conceivable; (2) how wabi-sabi mathematics is observable; and (3) why we should bother about wabi-sabi mathematics

A Beautiful Proof By Induction, Lars-Daniel Öhman

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

The purpose of this note is to present an example of a proof by induction that in the opinion of the present author has great aesthetic value. The proof in question is Thomassen's proof that planar graphs are 5-choosable. I give a self-contained presentation of this result and its proof, and a personal account of why I think this proof is beautiful.

A secondary purpose is to more widely publicize this gem, and hopefully make it part of a standard set of examples for examining characteristics of proofs by induction.

Mathematical Proofs: The Beautiful And The Explanatory, Marcus Giaquinto

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Mathematicians sometimes judge a mathematical proof to be beautiful and in doing so seem to be making a judgement of the same kind as aesthetic judgements of works of visual art, music or literature. Mathematical proofs are also appraised for explanatoriness: some proofs merely establish their conclusions as true, while others also show why their conclusions are true. This paper will focus on the prima facie plausible assumption that, for mathematical proofs, beauty and explanatoriness tend to go together.

To make headway we need to have some grip on what it is for a proof to be beautiful, and for …

Post Critical Again, Charlie Cannon

Articles

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Making Futures, Pelle Ehn

Articles

No abstract provided.

Double Or Nothing: Reflections On Bridge Design, Hillary Brown

Articles

No abstract provided.

Positive Sum Design And The Economics Of Sharing, Ian Gonsher

Articles

No abstract provided.

Sex Objects And Sexy Subjects: A Feminist Reclamation Of Sexiness, Sheila Lintott, Sherri Irvin

Faculty Contributions to Books

No abstract provided.

The Aesthetic Experiences Of Aura, Awe, And Wonder: Reflections On Their Nature And Relationships, Russell Quacchia

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The aim of this essay is to examine the semantic nature and linkage between the experiential phenomena of aura, awe, and wonder, central to matters of the aesthetic experience. In aesthetic commentary these terms are generally used rather loosely, often independently of each other and, most often, without regard to the connections between them. It would seem worthwhile to examine the nature of each of these terms to move toward understanding them and their mutual relationships. The conclusions drawn are that the aura effect appears to operate universally at the cognitive level of the aesthetic experience while those of awe …

The Institutional Margins Of Aesthetics: A Study Proposal, Jozef Kovalčik, Max Ryynänen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

A considerable number of classical texts in aesthetics and cultural philosophy were originally published outside of the framework of institutionalized academic scholarship. One can begin the modern story with two loners, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, then continue with the Frankfurt School and end the short list with the French “wave” (Blanchot, Bataille). Contemporary aesthetics benefits also from the work of thinkers like Susan Sontag and Nicolas Bourriaud, who have a huge scholarly impact but who built their careers outside academia. We intend to 1) sketch out a short historical overview of the scholars within aesthetics who could be considered to have …

Edward Yang's Confusion, Law Nga-Chun, Lo Chun-Cheong

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Edward Yang (in Chinese 楊德昌, 1947-2007) is one of the most renowned Taiwanese directors, whose works raise criticisms of modernity. Since the New Culture Movement in the 1910s and 1920s, Chinese literati have queried the place of traditional Chinese culture, especially Confucianism, on the road to modernization. This paper gives an account of Yang’s understanding of modernization and the Confucian tradition as illustrated in his work, A Confucian Confusion (1994). We argue that, though he despised politically endorsed Confucianism as ideology, without sufficient justification Yang nonetheless reserves the possibility of taking Confucianism as a supplement to modernity.

Index

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.

Moving Letters In Eighteenth-Century Epistolary Writing Arrivals And Departures, Hélène Dachez, Allan Ingram

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

No abstract provided.

Motion In (Eighteenth-Century) Poetry, Bill Overton

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

No abstract provided.

Picturesque Movement In Ann Radcliffe's Novels, Julien Morel

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

No abstract provided.

Kinetic Metaphors In Alexander Pope's The Rape Oe The Lock, Essay On Man, And The Dunciad, Michael Szczekalla

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

No abstract provided.

Swift's Concept Of Physical Exercise: The Gravel Path To Human Perfection, Esther F. Sommer

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

No abstract provided.

Drifting Unguided Or Involuntary Motion And The Enlightenment Sense Of Direction, Kevin L Cope

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

No abstract provided.

Stability Turned Into Motion Erasmus Darwin's Recourse To Ovid's Metamorphoses, Sonja Fielitz

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

No abstract provided.

Turning Round Or Standing Still Movement And Stasis In Defoe, Pope, And Sterne, Allan Ingram, Hélène Dachez

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

No abstract provided.

The Creative Cost Of Jane Austen's Move To Bath, Gerald J Butler

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

No abstract provided.

Thomas Jefferson, Travel Writer, Kevin J Hayes

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

No abstract provided.

Traveling To Rome For Artistic Purposes The Theoretical Background In Eighteenth-Century France And Britain, Elisabeth Martichou

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

No abstract provided.