(An)Aesthetic Emotions: A Pragmatist View of Sensibility Change

This article considers the evolution of Hulme’s thought from his ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’ to ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, including the development of his belief in poetry as a visual language, why he defines the ‘aesthetic emotion’ in such a limited way, and why he links these ideas to the Classicism of Action Française. What it demonstrates is that William James’s description of the distinction between Romantic and Classical art in Principles of Psychology played a part in helping Hulme to reduce Bergson’s concept of ‘aesthetic emotion’ to sensation, and to see such effects as pertaining to Classical, rather than Romantic art. However, Hulme failed to realise that Bergson’s ideas on art were in fact incompatible with William James’s. This incompatibility caused tensions between the theory and practice of the Imagist movement inspired by Hulme’s ideas. The conflict was caused partly by James’s denial of the uniqueness of aesthetic emotion, and partly because, in reducing the aesthetic emotion to sensation, he negates the importance of memory and association to the image’s aesthetic effect, which is by its very nature temporal in manifestation. The piece concludes by demonstrating how the poem ‘Hermes of the Ways’, by H.D., does not concord with Pound’s doctrine of image as an ‘intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’, and needs memory and association to unravel if the image is to work. This critique demonstrates the divergence between genuine Imagist practice and William James’s prioritisation of immediate sensation, which Hulme had communicated to Imagist theory.

Recently there has been renewed interest in the role of religion in the public sphere in the context of a 'post-secular' age characterized by the resurgence of religious identities and communities in increasingly diverse, multi-faith societies. Young people's active political and civic engagement has also emerged as a core challenge for robust democracies. While an interesting body of current research suggests that religious commitment may cultivate participation amongst youth by acting as an incubator of civic and political engagement, such literature often positions religiosity as outside of, and consequently at odds with participation in a secular public sphere. We suggest that while religiosity may indeed act as an incubator for civic and political engagement, we propose greater attention to an emergence of alternative, entwined conceptualizations of religious citizenship evident in the practices, performances and dispositions of young Muslim and Buddhist religious practitioners in Australia, whereby processes of individuation contribute to greater fluidity within and across the domains of the religious and the civic.

The text discusses three basic aesthetic concepts: the concept of aesthetic attitude, aesthetic experience and aesthetic emotions, as well as their mutual relationship. The basis of the analysis is the Maria Reicher?s determination of the structure of the aesthetic experience and Roman Ingarden?s theory of aesthetic experience. The paper shows how dynamically and mutually conditioned two basic elements - representation and feeling - constitute an aesthetic experience. The aesthetic experiences begins with the original emotion. The original emotion reveals the aesthetic qualities of the object, stops everyday life and enables the transition from everyday practical to aesthetic attitude. Aesthetic attitude based on perceived aesthetic qualities leads to the constitution of an aesthetic object. The aesthetic object re-energizes the aesthetic emotions that now complete the process od constituting the aesthetic experience. The emotional evocation of the immediate aesthetic experience is the basis for assessing the aesthetic value of an aesthetic object. The basic thesis of this paper is that least three moments should be distinguished in the aesthetic component of the aesthetic experience. In the first moment, the original emotions stops the practical everyday attitude, establishes the aesthetic attitude and starts the process of creating an aesthetic experiences. In the second moment, aesthetic emotion is an integral part of the aesthetic experiences and is closely connected with aesthetic representation. In the third moment, evocative aesthetic emotion is the basis of value evaluation of an aesthetic object.

From everyday emotions to aesthetic emotions: Towards a unified theory of musical emotions

Transformation of Public Sphere: Knowledge, Politics, Identity. Gaurav Desai, ed. London, UK: Routledge, 2013. 307 pp. $105 hbk.To participate in today's public sphere, one must necessarily participate virtually. To have any agency as a world citizen, one must engage with individuals and communities through conduit of virtual space. proverbial conversation begins, ends, and extends in perpetuity in cyberspace.So what is public sphere in digital era? What are its rules of engagement? How and why do identities, artifices, and intertextualities of digital communication intertwine to yield a virtual space for deliberation of political, social, and cultural?Editor Gaurav Desai's compendium of eighteen essays originally presented at a conference in Chandigarh, India, in 2010 offers a variety of perspectives and disciplinary approaches to ponder topic of possibilities for public deliberation and civil society in cyberspace. Desai states that the book is best read as a freeze frame on how a particular group of scholars were thinking about issues at a very specific time and place. Well enough.Although perspectives in Desai's compendium are certainly diverse, authors share an overarching sense that today's virtual public sphere (VPS) is rhizomatic, a multiplicity of interlocked networks of (more-or-less) mutual influence. Fittingly, essays in collection overlap and/or intersect just enough to justify their inclusion in this collected work.The book examines ways that participating in VPS impacts communities (both virtual and in lived world), aesthetics, identity, commerce, subject positions, subconscious, and unconscious. essays are consistently sharp, well written, and provocative.Like VPS itself, volume's many articles are broad in subject matter and scope. As such, for me to attempt to summarize eighteen dense, highly theoretical essays in limited space of this review would be to give them all even shorter shriftthan what I will provide in brief synopses of select essays to follow. For expediency, I will focus on articles (with truncated titles) that match my own interests- both as a scholar and as a (at times reluctant and begrudging) participant in VPS.Nicholas Mirzoeff's The Right to Choose contrasts act of looking upon one another from a perspective of love and friendship with regimes of overview imposed by panopticons of slave states, repressive societies, capitalist states (after all, we are surveilled as consumers) and, especially, militaries. Mirzeoffasserts that today's televisual recognizance of the enemy yields modern warfare that is something like a video game-distanced, disconnected, and deployed from a point of remove.Sukhdeep Ghuman's The Ever-Expanding Sphere of Cyber Communities examines political engagement (or simulation of political engagement) in VPS, positing that much of communication touted as political empowerment and engagement actually serves to isolate, disengage, and disempower.Contrastingly, Hiba Aleem's Virtual Activism, Real Repercussions notes that while sites like Facebook and Twitter can indeed facilitate faux political engagement, these forums are also capably used to transcend cyberspace. …

This article analyses the concept of ‘aesthetic emotion’ in John Dewey's Art as experience. The analysis shows that Dewey's line of investigation offers valuable insights as to the role of emotion in experience: it shows emotion as an integral part and structuring force, as a cultural and historical category. However, the notion of aesthetic emotion is characterized by a fundamental ambiguity. There is a conflict between a mechanical and an organic understanding of emotion, a confusion of emotion as structure and of emotion as process, of emotion as content and as agency. The central problem may consist of the conception of aesthetic experience as the ideal. While evil and despair are thereby excluded from the art, everyday life is left wanting, as it cannot live up to the ideal.

Comparing Students’ Political Engagement and Knowledge in Introductory American Politics Courses When a Nontraditional Textbook is Used

The use of instant messaging platforms such as WhatsApp for civic and political purposes has been observed and reported to be growing faster than other social media platforms especially in recent years. Using empirical research on WhatsApp studies published from 2009 to 2019 as its corpus of data, this article systematically reviews them to provide more robust conclusions about WhatsApp and its relationship with political and/or civic engagement. This paper seeks to answer three central questions related to WhatsApp and engagement: 1) What are the motivations in using WhatsApp and how do they manifest in the use of WhatsApp as a communication tool? 2) What is the role of WhatsApp in civic and political engagement? 3) How do researchers study the use of WhatsApp in civic and political engagement? The review finds that across empirical studies, while WhatsApp is used by activists and organisational networks for mobilisation and coordinating actions, it is also used by users who draw on the affordances of the medium for informal and ‘de-politicised’ conversations. The findings contribute to the theorising of social media-mediated movements and activism and highlight methodological gaps of ongoing research on WhatsApp.

Being a master of metaphors

The centrality of media to political and civic engagement has received tremendous exploration in many climes across the globe. Similarly, the dynamism that characterised media landscape has oftentimes called for continuing interrogation of the role of media in democratic and civic movements, discourses and participations. While the advent of new/social media led to the comparative exploration of the potency of legacy and novel media, mixed findings have characterised these research endeavours. Besides, most of the findings originated from advanced democratic hemisphere. In view of this gap in the literature, this study sampled 350 Nigerian university students in Kwara state during the 2015 Nigerian General Election to examine the differential contributions of legacy and novel media to the youths’ political engagement. Premised on media displacement theory, the study anticipates differences in the contribution of mainstream and new media to youths’ political engagement, with new media precipitating more civic engagement than the mains- tream media. Findings offer important contributions on the role of media to youths’ political engagement in general and the continuing importance of the mainstream media to civic and political participation among the youths.

Mentions of aesthetic experiences tied to occupation in everyday life appear in the occupational science literature but aesthetic experiences have not been a focus of study. Building on the definition of aesthetic emotion, we draw on key conceptual sources from anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and the science of neuroaesthetics to explore everyday aesthetics from the perspective of occupation. Objects are critical to an aesthetic event and significant at an occupational, societal, and cultural level. The neurological process of object appraisal is a key source of aesthetic emotion in everyday life. We propose everyday aesthetics as a useful concept for identifying and describing aesthetic experiences that stir humans to act in ways related to occupation and social interaction. Reactions to aesthetic emotions stimulated by the appraisal of objects and events result in acts that potentially support or undermine health and well-being. Everyday aesthetic experiences are a source of motivation present in creative acts and in occupation. Aesthetic emotional processing in everyday life is an aspect of decision-making impacting pleasure, displeasure, agency, and subjective quality of life.

Whether in its deliberative aspect or other variants, democracy is in many ways a form of government fundamentally based on processes of communication and persuasion. As such, it is only natural that communications scholars should be interested in studying relationships between communication processes and civic or political engagement. These studies have traditionally drawn on scholarship in political science, which has an even longer standing engagement with concepts of political and civic engagement. More recently, the increasing significance of interactive communication technologies in the realm of politics and broader forces of sociotechnical change have opened the door for communications scholars to join in fundamental conceptual discussions concerning these topics. More often, however, communication scholarship, particularly through the interdisciplinary field of political communication, has focused on civic and political engagement as a set of outcome variables that, given their central place in democratic governance, provide opportunities for scholarship with particular relevance and value to the broader society. Along these lines, political communication research has investigated the effects of various kinds of communication and media on civic or political engagement, including interpersonal interactions, newspapers and television, political advertising, talk radio, and political entertainment programming as well as many communication phenomena related to the Internet.

In this article I consider David Olson’s account of how literacy produces a new kind of consciousness, one in which a process of metacognition makes possible both knowledge and an understanding of language itself. This, he argues, enables readers and writers to reflect upon language, understand what constitutes reasoning, and recognize any logical flaws embedded in written texts. I then locate Olson within the cognitivist tradition of Jerome Bruner, critically analyzing Bruner’s concept of emotion as well as Olson’s account of experience. While he acknowledges the place of experience in John Dewey’s account of literacy, he tends to regard it as a form of consciousness rather than something more primordial. I go on to argue that experience, rather than consciousness, is a fundamental ingredient in the life of the mind and learning in general, where aesthetic emotions play a significant role. A theory of literacy that fails to take these elements into account is incomplete, however powerful it may appear. In order to make this argument, I utilize the work of John Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead, who afford experience and aesthetic emotions a primordial place in their process philosophies. I also contrast the organic concept of mind advocated by Whitehead and Dewey in their theory of learning with the mechanistic account Olson inherits from Bruner. Furthermore, I analyze the importance Whitehead ascribes to art education, and go on to show why he believes art to be the source of consciousness itself. Once again, this contrasts with Olson’s cognitivist account. I conclude that without experience and aesthetic emotion our capacity to reflect upon them through language would not be possible.

Recent evidence suggests that the presence of music experienced as pleasant positively influences episodic memory (EM) encoding. However, it is unclear whether this impact of pleasant music holds regardless of how arousing the music is, and what influence, if any, music-induced aesthetic emotions have. Furthermore, most music EM studies have used verbal or facial memory tasks limiting the generalisability of these findings to everyday EMs with spatiotemporal richness. The current study used an online what-where-when paradigm to assess music's influence on EM encoding in a rich spatiotemporal environment. 105 participants carried out the what-where-when task in the presence of either silence or one of four musical stimuli falling into the four corners of the 2-D circumplex emotion model. We observed an interaction effect between the pleasantness and arousingness of music stimuli, whereby for pleasant stimuli, the low arousing excerpt was associated with better recall performance compared to the high arousing excerpt. We also observed that, across all excerpts, experience of negative aesthetic emotions was associated with compromised recall performance. Together, our results confirm the deleterious influence arousing stimuli can have on memory and support the notion that aesthetic-emotional experience of music can influence how memories are encoded in everyday life.

Ecological contexts and youth civic and political engagement in Paris, France