Introduction: the literary function -- Being constructivist -- Rethinking the performative in pragmatics -- The literary function and the cartographic turn: performative philosophy -- The literary function and society, I: affirmation of immanent aesthetics -- The literary function and society, II: community and subjectification -- The reader and the event of fiction -- Conclusion: degrees of freedom.
This singular work presents the most comprehensive and nuanced studies available in any Western language of Chinese aesthetic thought and practice during the ...
Foreword Large parts of Monroe Beardsley's production in the field of aesthetics treat literature, the theory of meaning, and the philosophy of language. ...
Recent philosophical discussion about the relation between fiction and reality pays little attention to our moral involvement with literature. Frank Palmer's purpose is to investigate how our appreciation of literary works calls upon and develops our capacity for moral understanding. He explores a wide range of philosophical questions about the relation of art to morality, and challenges theories that he regards as incompatible with a humane view of literary art. Palmer considers, in particular, the extent to which the values (...) and moral concepts involved in our understanding of human beings can be said to enter into our understanding of, and response to, fictional characters. The scope of his discussion encompasses literary aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology, and he makes extensive reference to literary examples. (shrink)
The paper argues that there is a proper place for literature within aesthetics but that care must be taken in identifying just what the relation is. In characterising aesthetic pleasure associated with literature it is all too easy to fall into reductive accounts, for example, of literature as merely “fine writing”. Belleslettrist or formalistic accounts of literature are rejected, as are two other kinds of reduction, to pure meaning properties and to a kind of narrative (...) realism. The idea is developed that literature—both poetry and prose fiction—invites its own distinctive kind of aesthetic appreciation which far from being at odds with critical practice, in fact chimes well with it. (shrink)
The Picturesque (a set of theories, ideas, and conventions which grew up around the question of how we look at landscape) offers a valuable focus for new investigations into the literary, artistic, social, and cultural history of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This volume of essays by scholars from various disciplines in Britain and America incorporates a range of historically and theoretically challenging approaches to the topic. It covers the writers most closely identified with the exposition of the Picturesque (...) as a theory, and also traces the influence and implications of its aesthetic in a variety of fields in the Romantic period, including literary and pictorial works, estate management, and women's fashion. Several essays deal more specifically with radical critiques and appropriations of the Picturesque in the nineteenth century, while in others, its influence is traced beyond traditionally accepted geographical or historical bounds. (shrink)
This book examines the complex and varied ways in which fictions relate to the real world, and offers a precise account of how imaginative works of literature can use fictional content to explore matters of universal human interest. While rejecting the traditional view that literature is important for the truths that it imparts, the authors also reject attempts to cut literature off altogether from real human concerns. Their detailed account of fictionality, mimesis, and cognitive value, founded on (...) the methods of analytical philosophy, restores to literature its distinctive status among cultural practices. The authors also explore metaphysical and skeptical views, prevalent in modern thought, according to which the world itself is a kind of fiction, and truth no more than a social construct. They identify different conceptions of fiction in science, logic, epistemology, and make-believe, and thereby challenge the idea that discourse per se is fictional and that different modes of discourse are at root indistinguishable. They offer rigorous analyses of the roles of narrative, imagination, metaphor, and "making" in human thought processes. Both in their methods and in their conclusions, Lamarque and Olsen aim to restore rigor and clarity to debates about the values of literature, and to provide new, philosophically sound foundations for a genuine change of direction in literary theorizing. (shrink)
This is a paperback edition of what has become an important contribution to aesthetics and the theory of literature. The author analyses in detail how the reader responds to literature and how he begins to evaluate it. Mr Olsen characterizes literature as an institution and thus forges links with contemporary philosophy which sees all human action as ordered and defined by social institutions.
In the process, Swirski takes stock of the recent work in evolutionary theory, arguing that the analysis of narrative truth may be grounded in the neo-Darwinian ...
Why do people respond emotionally to works of fiction they know are make-believe? Boruah tackles this question, which is fundamental aesthetics and literary studies, from a totally new perspective. Bringing together the various answers that have been offered by philosophers from Aristotle to Roger Scruton, he shows that while some philosophers have denied any rational basis to our emotional responses to fiction, others have argued that the emotions evoked by fiction are not real emotions at all. In response to (...) this, Boruah contends that fictional emotions are rational because they are based on the same sorts of beliefs that we form about real situations and real people. He illustrates this argument with literary examples ranging from Shakespeare to Tolstoy. (shrink)
In 1764, Kant published his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime and in 1790 his influential third Critique , the Critique of the Power of Judgment . The latter contains two parts, the 'Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment' and the 'Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment'. They reveal a new principle, namely the a priori principle of purposiveness ( Zweckmäßigkeit ) of our power of judgment, and thereby offer new a priori grounds for (...) beauty and biology within the framework of Kant's transcendental philosophy. They also unite the previous two Critiques , the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason . Besides contributing to general and systematic aspects within his transcendental philosophy, Kant's aesthetics also offers new insights into old problems. It deals with feeling versus experience, subjectivity versus objectivity, disinterested pleasure, aesthetic universality, free and adherent beauty, the sensus communis , genius, aesthetic ideas, beauty as the symbol of morality, beauty of nature versus beauty of art, the sublime, and the supersensible. In this article I will limit myself to this critical aesthetics of Kant. But I will also discuss the ugly and the possibility of beauty in mathematics and see whether Kant's theory can successfully explain or deal with them. I will also compare his theory with philosophical ideas from a very different tradition, namely from Confucius, not only as a challenge to Kant's theory, but also because there is a growing interest from the Chinese side in combining ideas from Confucius and Kant, an interest that might well become influential in both East and West during the 21st century. (shrink)
Sleepy Hollow : fearful pleasures and the nightmare of history -- Lacan and the beyond of language : from art to ethics -- Brown's Wieland and the ethical circumscription of death -- Heideggerian ethics : the voice of art and the call to being -- Levinas: art and the transcendence of solitude -- Endings : ethics, enigma, and address in The marble faun -- Riven : Badiou's ethical subject and the event of art as trauma.
The Promethean background As the scientific rationality of Western civilization began to bear its full fruit, it became increasingly conscious of its ...
Criticism and Modernity traces the conditions under which criticism emerges as a socio-cultural practice within the institutionalized forms of European modernity and democracy. It argues that criticism is born out of anxieties about national supremacy in the late seventeenth century, with the consequence that the emergent national cultures of the eighteenth century and since become sites for the regulation of the democratic subject through the academic form of arguments about the proper relations of aesthetics to ethics and politics. The (...) central issue is that of legitimation: how can subjective aesthetic experiences regulate the norms of ethical justice? That question is posed not as an abstract philosophical issue, but rather as a question properly located within the struggles for national culture. -/- The usual Germanic source of modern aesthetics and criticism is here placed in the broader European context, involving contests between England, France, Scotland, Ireland, and the emergent Germany and Italy. Writers addressed include Corneille, Dryden, Molière, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer; and, throughout, the legacy of these thinkers is found in the most recent contemporary theory, in work by Agamben, Badiou, Lyotard, MacIntyre, and others. A closing chapter considers the formation of the university across modern Europe, in Vico's Naples, Humboldt's Berlin, Newman's Dublin, Blair's Edinburgh, the France of Alain and Benda, the England of Leavis, as well as our contemporary institutional predicaments. (shrink)
René Girard’s mimetic theory has significantly influenced the fields of comparative literature and cultural studies, as well as sociological anthropology and philosophy. Nevertheless, I argue that a somewhat different line of interpretation, an interdisciplinary one, has not been sufficiently investigated. This involves an interpretation which focuses on the vicissitudes of the mimetic and “victimage” circle not (or not only) in sociological terms, but by analysing their articulation on the level of knowledge. The sociological and epistemological perspectives do not exclude (...) each other, but can be integrated. The main aim of this paper is to clarify this articulation, and to show that integration between these two perspectives is possible only by bringing into play a real ‘literary aesthetics’. The notion of literary aesthetics needs to be considered in both the common and the etymological sense, as a theory of feeling and of experiencing. In doing so, I firstly cover in brief the main stages of Girard’s thought in the light of this perspective, to then focus on the relationship between literary aesthetics and knowledge. Finally I argue that this picture, if seriously considered, could lead to a mystical outcome, and will discuss the possible alternatives to that outcome. (shrink)
The essays in the final section of the book, "Japan's Literary Hermeneutics, " rethink the notion of "Japanese literature" in light of recent findings on the ...
This book offers the first full-length study of philosophical dialogue during the English Enlightenment. It explains why important philosophers - Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Berkeley and Hume - and innumerable minor translators, imitators and critics wrote in and about dialogue during the eighteenth century; and why, after Hume, philosophical dialogue either falls out of use or undergoes radical transformation. Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment describes the extended, heavily coded, and often belligerent debate about the nature and proper management of dialogue; and (...) it shows how the writing of philosophical fictions relates to the rise of the novel and the emergence of philosophical aesthetics. Novelists such as Fielding, Sterne, Johnson and Austen are placed in a philosophical context, and philosophers of the empiricist tradition in the context of English literary history. (shrink)
Offers a through examination of the philosophy of literature, looking at the place of literature in human culture, what literature can be defined as and much more.
This book provides a collection of some 400 passages on music from early Christian literature - New Testament to c. 450 AD - newly translated from the original Greek, Latin, and Syriac. As there are no musical sources of the period, music historians must rely upon remarks about music in literary sources to gain some knowledge of early Christian liturgical music. This volume makes a large and representative collection of the material conveniently available. The passages are arranged chronologically and (...) regionally in eleven chapters with brief commentary. An introduction sets out the major subjects and themes of the original source material. (shrink)
This book is about aesthetic processes and play from the perspectives of psychologists, philosophers, and semiologists. They explore the underlying processes from many viewpoints, including the prehistoric roots of language and art; the historical evolution of artistic, literary, and musical styles; the structure of artworks from both gestalt and semiotic perspectives; the biological and psychological processes underlying production and appreciation; the appeal of sentimental art; emotional responses to art and other aesthetic forms; personality in relation to artistic style; the testing (...) and measurement of art-related skills; the relations between social life and literary understanding; literature in relation to media; as well as neurobiological, developmental and individual growth perspectives on play activity. (shrink)
From its dissonant musics to its surrealist spectacles (the urinal is a violin!), Modernist art often seems to give more frustration than pleasure to its audience. In Untwisting the Serpent, Daniel Albright shows that this perception arises partly because we usually consider each art form in isolation, even though many of the most important artistic experiments of the Modernists were collaborations involving several media--Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is a ballet, Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts is an (...) opera, and Pablo Picasso turned his cubist paintings into costumes for Parade. Focusing on collaborations with a musical component, Albright views these works as either figures of dissonance that try to retain the distinctness of their various media (e.g. Guillaume Apollinaire's Les Mamelles de Tiresias ) or figures of consonance that try to lose themselves in some total effect (e.g. Arnold Schoenberg's Erwartung ). In so doing he offers a fresh picture of Modernism, and provides a compelling model for the analysis of all artistic collaborations. Untwisting the Serpent is the recipient of the 2001 Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship of the Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University. (shrink)
Originally published in 1987, this book forms a conceptual account of the relationship between music and poetry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth ...
Introduction In "search of instances where the American imagination demands the real thing, and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake," Umberto ...
From the seventeenth-century rift between 'Poussinistes' and Rubénistes', to the genesis of Romanticist aesthetic theories in early nineteenth-century France, ...
Melopoetics, the study of the multifarious relations between music and literature, has emerged in recent years as an increasingly popular field of interdisciplinary inquiry. In this volume, noted musicologists and literary critics explore diverse topics of shared concern such as literary theory as a model for musical criticism, genre theories in literature and music, the criticism and analysis of texted music, and the role of aesthetic, historical, and cultural understanding in concepts of text/music convergence. These fourteen essays - (...) united here not by a common ideology but by common subject matter - demonstrate how musical and literary scholarship can combine forces effectively on the common ground of contemporary critical theory and interpretive practice. The concluding essay by interdisciplinary historian Hayden White locates this ambitious enterprise of contemplating 'music and text' in the larger context of intellectual history. (shrink)
The renowned Israeli novelist and critic Abraham B. Yehoshua considers these crucial questions and illuminates his reading of nine texts -- from the story of ...
Hamilton explains why "drama" is a category of literature rather than of theater, even though it is appropriate to describe many theatrical performances as "dramatic." Consideration of the possibilities of theatrical performance are especially important to this category of literature, but need not be (and often are not) decisive in constraining interpretations of dramatic works.
Nuestro tiempo es el de la caída en el presente. Es imposible construir nuevos pactos sociales y, por tanto, las oportunidades para imaginar el futuro son pocas. No hay utopías, sólo un pragmatismo que apuesta por lo útil. Nuestra sociedad sufre el desencanto de la democracia, la lógica del mercado y la globalización, incapaz de producir ideas para el porvenir ¿Cuál es la salida? Richard Rorty diría: no es la razón lo que cambia las cosas, sino la imaginación. A partir (...) de este principio, este libro hace un elogio del optimismo desencantado, donde las preguntas son más importantes que las respuestas ¿Cuál es el papel que las palabras juegan en el actual estado del arte? ¿De qué modo están conectados el mundo y la llamada República de las Letras? ¿Qué idea de generación tienen los escritores nacidos a partir de la década de los setenta? ¿Por qué niegan el concepto de colectivo? ¿Cuál es la relación entre política y literatura? ¿En qué momento el crítico se convirtió en redactor de obituarios? ¿La literatura forma parte del espectáculo? Éste es un ensayo sobre el lenguaje, la idea de generaciones y las estéticas de la literatura contemporánea; pero también es una denuncia que señala los mecanismos que han provocado el distanciamiento entre la creación y la acción, la ética y la estética, la literatura y el espacio público. (shrink)
Preface -- Introduction -- The burden of English -- Who claims alterity? -- How to read a "culturally different" book -- The double bind starts to kick in -- Culture: situating feminism -- Teaching for the times -- Acting bits/identity talk -- Supplementing Marxism -- What's left of theory? -- Echo -- Translation as culture -- Translating into English -- Nationalism and the imagination -- Resident alien -- Ethics and politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and certain scenes of teaching -- Imperative (...) to re-imagine the planet -- Reading with Stuart Hall in "pure" literary terms -- Terror: a speech after 9/11 -- Harlem -- Scattered speculations on the subaltern and the popular -- World systems and the creole -- The stakes of world literature -- Rethinking comparativism -- Sign and trace -- Tracing the skin of day. (shrink)
In this essay, I argue that it is sometimes inappropriate to appeal to moral criteria in artistic judgments, even when the moral content of an artwork contributes to its artistic value. I suggest that this is the case with artworks that (1) are “interrogative” in form, posing a question or problem that remains unresolved in the work, and (2) have moral dilemmas as a principal theme. Using Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as an example of morally interrogative artwork, (...) I critique Wayne Booth’s moral defense of the novel. I argue that because Booth incorrectly attributes a moral stance to the book, he overlooks its value as a provocation to critical reflection about morality. (shrink)
I defend Hume's account of tragic pleasure against various objections. I examine his account of the emotions in order to clarify his "conversion theory". I also argue that Hume does not give us a theory of tragedy as an aesthetic genre, but rather elucidates the felt experience of a particular work of tragedy. I offer a partial reading of King Lear by way of illustration. Finally, I suggest that the experiences of aesthetic pleasure, and aesthetic sadness, share certain qualities. "Tragic (...) pleasure" is possible, in part, because the pity of tragedy is realised through the pleasure of the aesthetic. (shrink)
Psychoanalysis : an art or a science? -- Aesthetic concepts of Bion and Meltzer -- The domain of the aesthetic object -- Sleeping beauty -- Moving beauty -- Psychoanalysis as an art form.
Originally published in 1988, this book provides a comprehensive anthology in English of the major texts of German literary and aesthetic theory between Lessing ...
