Aesthetic Beliefs Research Articles

Realism on Stage: Reflections on Language in Theodor Fontane's Theatre Reviews

Theodor Fontane is known for devoting a large proportion of his novels to conversations between his characters. By giving his characters their own particular tone, Fontane uses language as a means of characterization and adds to the realism of the narration. Not only in Fontane’s novels, but also in his critical writing does language play a major role. In his theater reviews Fontane combines his criticism of dramatists, dramas, performances and actors with reflections on language which shed light on his aesthetic beliefs as a realist. Disapproving of artificial poetic language, Fontane favours simple language which optimally matches the situation. According to Fontane, the choice of language is vital for the effect of a play performed on stage. It is particularly the dramatist’s ability of finding the right tone which determines the success of creating a realistic representation of life in the dramatic art form, of putting realism on stage.

Art, Politics and Memory: a Conversation with Colm Tóibín

The participation to a literary festival in Florence gave the interviewer the occasion to meet one of the most prolific and best loved Irish writers of our days. In what immediately took the shape and flavour of an informal and multifarious conversation – more than a strictly academic interview – Colm Toibin, thus, shed an insightful light on his aesthetic beliefs and practice, but also on his political views, interest in current affairs and the impact of autobiography on his fiction. His relationship with John McGahern, one of the greatest twentieth-century Irish novelists, was also thoroughly addressed.

Aesthetic Testimony

AbstractIt is frequently claimed that we can learn very little, if anything, about the aesthetic character of an artwork (or other object of aesthetic appraisal) on the basis of testimony. Such disparaging assessments of the epistemic value of aesthetic testimony contrast markedly with our acceptance of testimony as an important (perhaps even basic) source of knowledge in many other areas. There have, however, been a number of challenges to this orthodoxy of late; from those who seek to deny that such a contrast exists (optimists) as well as attempts by those who accept the distinction (pessimists) to provide an explanation and defence of the contrast. InSection I, I outline a little of the nature and history of the debate over aesthetic testimony.Section II, focuses on the opposing positions on aesthetic testimony, optimism and pessimism, and takes steps to clarify what exactly is at issue between them. InSection III, I survey considerations which have been adduced in favour of pessimism ranging from brute appeal to intuition to complex argumentation before turning inSection IV, to look at motivations for optimism. Finally, inSection V, I consider some alternative views which claim that, for a variety of reasons, it is a mistake to construe the debate over aesthetic testimony as concerned (or at least as primarily concerned) with the epistemic standing of aesthetic beliefs formed on the basis of testimony.

NATION MISPLACED

Histories and aesthetics of space intersected in South Asian decolonization. The contest for space has continued to be reflected in South Asian cinema from the 1950s to the present. Spatial politics and the aestheticization of spaces both reflect current politics and urban policies and also glance back at colonial and postcolonial histories of national fragmentation and nation-formation. In this essay the relationship of art and politics – of questions of artistic and political truth – is examined by comparing the cinemas of Ritwik Ghatak and Guru Dutt, prominent ‘art’ and ‘commercial’ filmmakers of the 1950s. In their films, I argue, cinematic representations of contested spaces provide the key to deciphering their aesthetic and political beliefs about decolonization and refugee experience. While Ghatak is generally seen as the testier, more radical oppositional chronicler of postcolonial South Asian national fragmentation and individual displacement, a lens such as Guru Dutt's commercial cinema offers an alternative reading of the exigencies of respatialization of a torn and decolonizing nation.

Aesthetic Concepts, Perceptual Learning, and Linguistic Enculturation: Considerations from Wittgenstein, Language, and Music

Aesthetic non-cognitivists deny that aesthetic statements express genuinely aesthetic beliefs and instead hold that they work primarily to express something non-cognitive, such as attitudes of approval or disapproval, or desire. Non-cognitivists deny that aesthetic statements express aesthetic beliefs because they deny that there are aesthetic features in the world for aesthetic beliefs to represent. Their assumption, shared by scientists and theorists of mind alike, was that language-users possess cognitive mechanisms with which to objectively grasp abstract rules fixed independently of human responses, and that cognizers are thereby capable of grasping rules for the correct application of aesthetic concepts without relying on evaluation or enculturation. However, in this article I use Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations to argue that psychological theories grounded upon this so-called objective model of rule-following fail to adequately account for concept acquisition and mastery. I argue that this is because linguistic enculturation, and the perceptual learning that's often involved, influences and enables the mastery of aesthetic concepts. I argue that part of what's involved in speaking aesthetically is to belong to a cultural practice of making sense of things aesthetically, and that it's within a socio-linguistic community, and that community's practices, that such aesthetic sense can be made intelligible.

Heinrich Heine and the Lied. By Susan Youens.

Writing about the German Lied can often seem a highly specialized affair, requiring the gift of aligning poetry and music to illuminate the detailed workings of a song. It demands a painstaking sifting of information to bring it to bear upon often tiny shifts of nuance, in which a world of meaning can reside for the sympathetic respondent. Writer and reader must conspire to treasure the uncovering of correspondences, and foster the belief that the experience of the lyric will be enhanced or renewed by finding new points of connection. Susan Youens is surely one of the most virtuosic of the Lieder specialists; her writing has transformed the listening habits of a generation of song enthusiasts through its ability to plot the ‘lightning bolts of realization’ within a song (p. 17). In this book the author's technique of distilling analytical insights, surveying the patterns of a composer's poetic response till she can home in on its key, is confirmed as second to none. The technique is often dazzling, but more crucial still perhaps is the aesthetic belief that underlies it. Youens makes it quite clear that, for her, much of the value of song lies in its hidden stories, the networks of associations that require an effort of the imagination to be drawn to the surface. ‘Effort’ is the key word here—at many points Youens describes her present book as an ‘endeavour’ that she has embarked upon. And one might characterize her exploration of composers’ responses to Heine's poetry as a battle royal with those who would underestimate the power of song to generate layers of meaning as worthy of this most complex of poets.

Clara Schumann's collection of playbills: A historiometric analysis of life-span development, mobility, and repertoire canonization

Clara Schumann's (1819–1896) important influence on concert life and piano performance throughout the 19th century can still be felt in our times. Virtually all concerts Clara gave between 1828 (at age 9) and 1891 (at age 71) are documented in a historically unique collection of over 1300 printed concert program leaflets (playbills). Combining an historiometric approach with musicological methods, we analyzed those data descriptively and theoretically from the perspective of repertoire canonization. The aim of this study was to document details of Clara's life-time career as a concert pianist, to study her repertoire development in the context of critical life events and personal aesthetic beliefs, and to establish some first comparisons with data from other performers of the time. This study complements existing research on programming and canonization by explaining the cumulative effects of an individual performer's programming decisions. First, the playbills were entered into a database and prepared for computer-assisted analysis. From the 20,000 program entries we extracted those 536 solo piano and chamber music pieces which Clara had performed. Analyses showed that the yearly frequency of concerts reflected her personal circumstances and critical life events. Although Clara performed works by almost 40 composers, the most frequently performed four composers (R. Schumann, Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Chopin) comprised 70% of all performances. Furthermore, although she performed in 160 cities, 50% of her concerts took place in only seven major cities which represented international (London, Leipzig, Vienna) and national (Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Frankfurt) music centers. Finally, her influential role in the canonization of classical piano music can be explained by biographical circumstances which resulted in particular choices of traditionalist repertoire after Robert Schumann's death (1856). This included decreasing program diversity after 1870 and the avoidance of contemporary composers, such as Liszt, Brahms, Grieg, Tchaikovsky or Saint-Saens.

Environmental Harm: Political not Biological

In their fine paper, Evans et al. (2009) discuss the proposition that invasive non-native species (INS) are harmful. The question to ask is, “Harmful to whom?” Pathogens that make people sick and pests that damage their property—crops, for example—cause harms of kinds long understood in common law and recognized by public agencies. The concept of “harm to the environment,” in contrast, has no standing in common law or legislation, no meaning for any empirical science, and no basis in a political consensus other than might be drawn from the Endangered Species Act. As a generalization, the proposition that INS cause “environmental harm”—since this concept is empty of legal, scientific, and political meaning—must rest on definition, diktat, or diatribe. As Evans et al. suggest, however, the idea of “harm to the environment” is not always and certainly need not be arbitrary; it might gather significance in the context of a particular place through a political process that weighs economic concerns with cultural, religious, aesthetic, and other relevant beliefs, practices, and commitments that people who care about that place present. It is not clear, however, that adaptive management, which Evens et al. propose, will provide that democratic political process.

The Civilization of Discontent

The following essay engages Freud's German title Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, translated in the psychoanalytic canon as Civilization and Its Discontents (1930 [1929]). We know that the pithy title was preceded by another title, and recent research reveals an earlier title whose meaning is the complete reverse of the present title. I argue here that Freud's ultimate decision to use the term Unbehagen reflects more than the intention to emphasize the painful disgruntlement of humankind as it struggles restlessly under the bridle of the superego, as the theme of this book is usually understood. Rather, the title, and the crisis that ensued when it was being translated, was a response to the nearing to consciousness of a cluster of psychological dimensions that fomented conflict throughout Freud's life: the illusory quality of religious belief anxieties surrounding femininity, motherhood, and death, and uncanny qualities of the realm of the aesthetic. I reinterpret the choice of the term Das Unbehagen as representing the unique depressive "gain" that is the byproduct of the symbolizing function basic to the process of civilization. Mature aesthetic and religious structures and beliefs require and contain the modicum of discontent that is inevitably produced during symbolization.

Woman with a Fan: Paul Gauguin's Heavenly Vairaumati—a Parable of Immortality

Woman with a Fan (1902) is the culmination of Gauguin's representations of the Tahitian goddess of regeneration. His depiction of Vairaumati frames his intertwined aesthetic and spiritual beliefs. Her fan signals her immortal status and, through its blue, white, and red ornament, Gauguin's revolutionary call to “the right to dare all.” This justifies his assimilation of multiple sources, which, through a process he called transposition, took on new life. Thus, the regeneration epitomized by Vairaumati is implemented in the pictorial dynamic through the mutation of the sources that constitute her identity, tying the permutations of art to the soul's immortality.

Hugo Wolf: Letters to Melanie Köchert. Ed. and trans. by Louise McClelland Urban. pp. xxxviii + 293. (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 2004, $24.95. ISBN 0-299-19444-2.)

Since Hugo Wolf’s death in 1903 at least ten volumes of his letters have been published in German, one a volume of Familienbriefe and nine collections of letters to friends and supporters of his art. The early editors, Michael Haberlandt, Edmund Hellmer, and Heinrich Werner, themselves close friends of Wolf, seemed aware of the importance of this outlet for a composer who never quite found a public identity. Wolf had huge gifts as a writer, as his early newspaper criticisms for the Wiener Salonblatt attest, but his refusal to temper his passionate dislike of Brahms turned him into a laughing stock in Vienna. His abusive criticisms raise eyebrows still. By completely blurring the boundaries between personal invective and reasoned aesthetic belief he seemed to forfeit, then as now, the right to represent public opinion. But as an advocate for the life of feeling, or a story-teller of personal experience in the mode of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Kapellmeister Kreisler, Wolf remains unequalled.

History's Stamp: Wyndham Lewis's The Revenge for Love and the Heidegger Controversy

D ESPITE SUBSEQUENT SHIFTS in both his political and aesthetic beliefs, the literary reputation of Wyndham Lewis was irreparably damaged by a series of pro-Nazi pamphlets he wrote during the 1930s. More than other Anglo-American modernists-including Ezra Pound-Lewis is remembered for his reactionary political advocacies. Yet during this period he also produced the most lauded of his literary works, The Revenge for Love (1937). Although admirers of this novel have sought to read it against Lewis's fascism, arguing that the work transcends its political discourses or dismantles them from within, I believe that The Revenge for Love animates and parodies these critical positions; indeed, a careful reading of this text provides a means for reassessing fascism's centrality to the aesthetic dimension of modernism. By showing how the dismantling of totalizing narrative schemes can be compatible with the endorsement of totalitarian ideologies, this paper reconsiders the relations among narrative form, aesthetics, and ideology. In so doing, it highlights the links between fascism and modernity that have been central to recent debates concerning Martin Heidegger's engagement with National Socialism. I compare Lewis's narrative strategies to the early Heidegger's temporalization of ontology to demonstrate that the political meaning of The Revenge for Love lies in the mythic dimension of its temporal structure. In Time and Western Man (1927), Lewis launches an attack on theories of history, but the Nazi mythologization of national destiny leaves its mark upon his narrative work, registering modernism's failure or, if you like, history's stamp. My decision to read Lewis's novel in the context of the Heidegger controversy is not fortuitous. For a start, there are historical coincidences that link the careers of these thinkers. Both declared

D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology

Reviewed by: D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology Peter Balbert Anne Fernihough. D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology. Oxford, 1993. 211 pp. $38.00 cloth. Anne Fernihough’s D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, is a dense, penetrating, and intriguingly innovative study of major thematic motifs [End Page 888] and dialectical patterns in a relatively unexamined area of Lawrence’s accomplishment. She boldly argues that Lawrence’s well-advertised aversion to several “idealist” inclinations in art theory does not obviate the more resonant significance of his own complex aesthetics that he reiterates and refines throughout his career and within a variety of genres and art forms. In this regard, Fernihough’s finest criticism—on interrelated discussions of Lawrence’s crucial consideration of Cezanne and on the emblematic importance of “art themes” in Women in Love—variously demonstrates how and why Lawrence embodies his own aesthetic belief that “matter actually exists” and that the most illuminating art “stubbornly elude[s] the dematerializing effects of an aesthetics of transcendence.” Thus the book often fruitfully combines a concern for theories of art with epistemological emphases on knowledge, perception, and forms of belief; one of the major purposes of her study is to explain how and why Lawrencean aesthetics cannot be fully understood apart from the specifically German philosophical tradition in which he was immersed before and after he met Frieda. By intelligently focusing much of her book on a thorough and revisionist consideration of Lawrence’s relation to Bloomsbury attitudes and theories about art, culture, and transcendence, Fernihough reveals the striking paradox “that Lawrence, in so many ways a stridently masculinist thinker, attempts to restore those aspects of the aethestic (viscosity, bodiliness) traditionally regarded as ‘feminine.”‘ Indeed, even such an overheated use by Fernihough of that term “stridently” need not worry those watchdogs for signs of ideological dismissals of Lawrence in 1994; she generally offers a reasonably balanced and just treatment of Lawrence’s “palimpsestic” sexual politics as part of a modulated sub-theme in her study. An important aspect of Fernihough’s achievement is her persuasive revelation that Lawrence’s pluralistic aesthetics often contrast with his frequently authoritarian politics embodied in his fiction between 1920 and 1925. She shows how his achievements as a writer undercut the assumptions today amid reigning theoretical camps of an easy link between organicism and idealism; Fernihough cogently maintains that in Lawrence the “organic metaphors underlying more positive ideologies of green and ecological thinking” place Lawrence in surprising alignment with various thinkers on the deconstructionist and post-modernist side of contemporary criticism. It is unfortunate that in this context of underlying [End Page 889] meanings and sub-textual implication, perhaps Fernihough slides too easily (and frequently) from Lawrence’s fiction to his essays and back again; despite her denials of this danger in her methodology, Lawrence’s rhetorical patterns of organic images require in-depth discussion within the artistic imperatives of the individual genre that frames and (to some extent) stipulates his techniques. Still, such abruptly interweaving discussions by Fernihough remain a minor distraction in an otherwise superbly organized work. She also relates her emphasis on linguistic patternings to several analyses about the shifting contexts and concerns of the “natural” and the “constructed” aspects of Lawrence’s artistic theory and practice. Fernihough’s first chapter incisively refutes Bertrand Rusell’s charge against Lawrence that Lawrence’s views “led straight to Auschwitz”—as she describes Lawrence’s unfascistic connection to volkisch ideologies prevalent in Germany in the 1910s and 1920s. While Fernihough carefully absolves Lawrence of any direct blame for the doctrinal biases of the Germanic tyranny of the 1930s, she acknowledges how and why Lawrence’s characteristic imagery of disintegration and decomposition would later be appropriated in the services of Nazism. In her second chapter she analyzes Lawrence’s aesthetic critiques of mimetic language, and she remains convincingly up-to-date in her discussion about how Lawrence “foregrounds polyvalence in his work and undermines the idea of an essential link between signifier and signified.” Such an emphasis on voice and text permits Fernihough to move Lawrence into comfortable proximity to contemporary French feminist theory, and her study is especially invigorating in its integrated emphasis on Lacan, Kristeva...

Milestones in American Children's Theatre

Milestones in American Children's Theatre Anthony L. Manna (bio) Bedard, Roger L., and C. John Tolch , eds. Spotlight on the Child: Studies in the History of American Children's Theatre. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1989. It is no small task to paint a clear picture of the forces which first brought American children's theatre into being at the close of the nineteenth century, later salvaged it from the narrowly prescribed form and content which shaped its character in the early decades of the twentieth century, and, later still, prodded it into the more sophisticated and challenging structures, styles, and topics which, by fits and starts, began to emerge in the 1930s, and which now characterize the most notable plays in an increasingly mature repertoire. To trace the history of the children's theatre movement in America is to wade through a web of sporadic developments in artistic quality, conflicting attitudes about the very nature and function of theatre for young people, and, at times, poorly documented efforts and achievements in both play writing and play production. And what makes the task that much more formidable is the lack of a discrete definition as to what theatre for young audiences is or should be: Should the genre embrace only plays written and staged by professionals in legitimate theatres? What then of school-based drama, or the multitude of plays developed throughout this century by and with children and adolescents in cultural and social centers? Must a complete perspective on the genre therefore include plays conceived and performed by children themselves, plays they have had a hand in writing as well as ones written for them? Several recent publications have helped to bring some order to the plethora of types, changes, and trends in both form and content which have shaped American children's theatre since its modest beginning. In Theatre, Children and Youth (Anchorage, 1982), a hefty handbook for critics and practitioners alike, Jed Vavis and Mary Jane Evans provide, among other things, a historical context for contemporary theories and practices by acknowledging the influence of former philosophical and aesthetic beliefs on current attitudes toward the nature and development of child audiences. Roger Bedard's Dramatic Literature for Children: A Century in Review (Anchorage, 1984) describes the principal issues and developments which have informed the American children's theatre movement from the 1880s to the present. The volume contains thirteen representative scripts, chronologically arranged, which Bedard illuminates with astute commentary on the social, political and artistic sentiments and values in which the plays are rooted. Then came Six Plays for Young People from the Federal Theatre Project (1936-1939) (Greenwood, 1986), edited by Lowell Swortzell, which draws much-needed attention to a short-lived heyday for children's playwrights. Although sometimes forced into allegiance to restrictions imposed by President Roosevelt's New Deal politics, and too easily drawn to obvious moralizing and plot contrivance, the New Deal playwrights produced a remarkable number of plays in a variety of styles and forms which, however dated they may now seem, once attracted thousands of children and adolescents to the theatre. And to fill in some of the gaps left by the preceding titles, there is Nellie McCaslin's comprehensive Historical Guide to Children's Theatre in America (Greenwood, 1988), which offers brief overviews of both the accomplishments of more than 300 commercial, community, and educational theatre companies, and the contributions of America's most significant professional playwrights and most influential theatre organizations and associations.1 Now Bedard and Tolch have gathered together eleven carefully researched and richly documented essays which chart yet another Cook's tour of some major milestones in the evolution of a distinctly American brand of theatre for, by, and sometimes with young people. Far from covering new territory, however, the essays in Spotlight on the Child offer some fresh insights into, as well as critical analyses of, a variety of plays, playwrights, and theatre companies highlighted in other recent histories of American children's theatre. Here, the route begins in the late eighteenth century with the publication of Charles Stearns' Dramatic Dialogues for the Use of Schools, touted in Jonathan Levy's perceptive opening piece as "the first...

The Energetics of Tarr: The Vortex-Machine Kreisler

The Energetics of Tarr:The Vortex-Machine Kreisler Michael Wutz (bio) "What, after all, does Kreisler mean? Satisfy my curiosity." -Tarr The formulation of an explicit aesthetics of the machine is constitutive of the turn-of-the-century European Zeitgeist and is generally encapsulated in the activities of Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, the galvanic maestro of the Italian Futurists. His manifestoes and his entourage announced the creed of speed and steel throughout Europe as early as 1910, and their triumphant celebration of airplanes and automobiles had a crucial impact on the artistic reception of technology, the way it was recuperated as an objet d'art. To attribute this love of machines to the sole influence of Italian Futurism, however, would be a misrepresentation of the historical situation. Rather, as Renato Poggioli and, more recently, Marjorie Perloff have argued, the voguish reception and reformulation of the Futurist program corresponded to a strong predisposition within the avant-garde to recognize the artistic potential of the machine. The barrage of Futurist pronouncements only awakened the dormant sensibilities of artistic circles that had been forming under the crust of dated aesthetic beliefs (Avant-Garde 68-74; Futurist Moment xvii-xxi). Wyndham Lewis, the founder of English Vorticism, contributed his share to this new aesthetic. While Lewis quickly recognized his affinities [End Page 845] with the Futurists, indeed formulated part of the Vorticist platform in the wake of Marinetti (such as the valorization of contemporary technology and motion and speed), he soon spelled out the differences between the Italian and the British version of this modernist sensibility. Chief among his dislikes was what he called the "Futurist gush over machines," a lack of intellectual detachment that did not allow the Italian Futurists to recognize the machine's form (Blast 1:41). In Lewis's view, the Futurists were not endowed with "a rational enthusiasm for the possibilities that lie in this new spectacle of machinery; of the technical uses to which it can be put in the arts." The Vorticists, by contrast, did recognize in the machine "a new pictorial resource" with suggestive formal possibilities and always "sought out machine-forms" (On Art 150, 340)1 This preoccupation with machine-generated form is apparent in Lewis's early paintings, but emerges with particular clarity in his first novel Tarr. Lewis in this novel translates the Vorticist fascination with machinery into the domain of narrative form and dynamic. The figure of Otto Kreisler, the novel's protagonist and the major character is conceived as a machine, and it is through him that Lewis signifies the momentum and the form of the narrative. Kreisler moves through the novel in a series of vortical gyrations that functions as his principal mode of engagement with others and that generates a force field surrounding him. By discharging the energy of his force field into the novelistic space and by drawing other characters into his orbit, Kreisler produces activity in the novel, and thus energizes the textual event. This event comes to a standstill the moment Kreisler, the rotating vortex-machine, can no longer charge himself, and he begins to run down. Equally significant, the vortex provided Lewis with a suggestive figure to encode the protofascist misogynism of his protagonist. Kreisler "naturally" gravitates toward voluptuous women that hold the promise of sexual (and financial) gratification, a form of attraction that points to the parasitic nature of his relationships. Beyond the momentary fulfillment of this physical desire, however, lies Kreisler's meta-physical desire: namely to dominate, and eventually to obliterate, the women of his involvement, and to derive strength from this very obliteration. For while Kreisler will always need women to induce his field of force-their presence helps him to generate the initial spark-he is always intent upon swallowing, that is, subsuming, these women into his widening energy field following its moment of female-male ignition. Kreisler's fantasy is one of male self-empowerment, the generation of his force field becomes his form of male self-generation; and the visual suggestiveness of the vortex, with its drilling motion and its conical protrusion, associates Kreisler with a self-sustaining phallus. Lewis thus encodes in Kreisler's vortical rotations the myth...

Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre by Dennis Kennedy

Reviews371 Dennis Kennedy. Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Pp. xiv + 231. $39.50. A welcome, reassuring, fastidious piece of old-fashioned historical scholarship, this work merits praise for the singularity of its purpose and the richness of its details. Peppered, littered, strewn (lavishly, fascinatingly , interestingly) with facts, dates, play titles, cast lists, rare and familiar illustrations and photographs, and rounded off with an exhaustive appendix cataloguing its subject's productions, here is theatre history at once revealing, informative, instructive, and documentative, or at least as much as theatre history can ever tell us about the elusive, enigmatic man known as Harley Granville Barker. What we have here also is the presentation of a dream, of what the theatre could and can be, a journey the end of which is now visible at the RSC and National Theatre of Great Britain. Here too is the sharply centered and psychologically sensitive picture of Barker and his artistic tenacity, professional commitment, aesthetic beliefs, and fierce drive for theatrical excellence, for something more than the dulling, mindless commercialism of a kind of theatre he began in and came to loathe. If this book is also a worthy tribute to its complex topic, it completes in its unique, indispensable way the "strange case" of Barker, a story begun three years ago with Eric Salmon's enthusiastic, overly speculative biography which supplanted irrevocably C. B. Purdom's sentimental journalism of 1955. Incidentally, to Salmon's restorative efforts must now happily be added his thoroughly edited collection of Barker's selected letters (Wayne State University Press, 1986) which provides many more sides to this peculiar man of many parts. To clarify, however: Professor Kennedy's book is not a biography, revisionist or otherwise; rather, it concentrates on Barker's ideas as presented in successive productions, fleshing out and finishing up with prescient particulars the course of Barker's practical stage work and his later magisterial writings. And the reader should also be aware that in a straightforward, plain, engaging style, the author leapfrogs through chronology in a most sophisticated fashion very much in control of his material. Thus the text has breaks in action, variety, flow, and pace while avoiding the narrow rigidity often common to more pedestrian narratives. In sum, then, Barker breathes, and we have not another show business story, but the many aspects of a man's career in the playhouse, an arena not for the faint of heart. If Salmon gave us hagiography, Kennedy offers instead the sight of a brilliant comet coursing through the heavens whose bursts of light and showers of sparks illuminate a myriad of astonishing activities from a multi-talented, multi-faceted personality, only to extinguish itself, deliberately and purposefully, at mid-career. Perhaps this remarkable versatility has been the worst enemy of Barker's reputation; but Kennedy's commentary does focus precisely on the most urgent matters which probably made Barker abandon the theatre at forty (to become, as Lewis Casson said, "a mere professor") : the absurd censorship and banning by the Lord Chamberlain of Barker's play Waste; and the failure to establish a national theatre; and probably most importantly, Barker's escape from these theatrical frustrations into 372Comparative Drama the security and luxury of a wealthy second marriage to an American millionairess. For some it was a flight from his closest, truest friends into the indolent, spoiled life of a country gentleman, something Shaw said was "a hopeless proposition." Kennedy, like Salmon, argues, however , that Barker did not "give up" the theatre as much as he simply moved on into other forms of theatrical expression. Whatever the truth, or versions thereof, Barker's success, the fulfillment of his dream of theatre , was posthumous, unreaUzed until the opening of the National Theatre in October 1976. On the other hand, his famous work as actor, director, playwright, and manager at the Royal Court (1904-07) and the illustrious Shakespearean presentations at the Savoy (1912-14), clearly and carefully reconstructed and described by Kennedy, show how Barker quite simply returned the theatre to itself: true repertory, a small ensemble of regular actors, no stars, no cuts or elaborate scenery. Here was focus...

Learning Aesthetic Concepts and Justifying Aesthetic Judgments

There is no more important and perplexing issue in the philosophy of art than that of explaining whether we can ever be justified in our beliefs about aesthetic value. I shall argue here that an important connection exists between the problem of aesthetic justification and the problem of aesthetic concept-learning, and that a better understanding of the process by which we learn aesthetic concepts will provide us with a better understanding of how we can be justified in certain of our aesthetic beliefs.

The importance of perceived task and type of presentation in student response to instructional television

Thus far, research in the area of instructional television has yielded two conclusions. First, as indicated in the reviews of ITV literature by Chu and Schramm (1967) and MacLennan and Reid (1967), there is no significant difference in learning between instructional television and conventional classroom instruction. Both Anderson (1972) and Moldstad (1974) have indicated that this conclusion has positive value for school administrators who can thus justify use of ITV to solve problems in the areas of personnel, scheduling and, to some degree, finance. Second, despite the intuitive, aesthetic beliefs of many ITV producers, there is no conclusive evidence to indicate that dynamic production techniques (animation, color, special effects, etc.) increase the amount of information gained by students. In fact, learning theorists such as Severin (1968) and McIntyre (1965) have argued that use of visualization should be restricted to instances in which relevant, nonredundant cues can be presented. For various methodological, theoretical, and aesthetic reasons, each of these conclusions has been challenged and

The Limits of Whitman's Symbolism

Whitman has often been thought of in the context of modern Symbolism. His conception of poetry as an indefinite art, his general tendency to treat the world of objects in terms of his subjective vision, and the extensive use he made of poetic symbols to present that vision are the aspects that have readily invited comparison with the aesthetics of Symbolism. In his sensibility, of course, Whitman is quite unlike the French Symbolists or their successors in the twentieth century who have taken over some of their characteristic attitudes. But the resemblances, too, in terms of aesthetic belief and method have been mentioned so frequently that an impression prevails among scholars that Whitman, like Poe, was in some ways a forerunner of the Symbolists. Thus, in Symbolism and American Literature, Charles Feidelson attempts to connect Whitman with modern Symbolism. He speaks of ‘the thoroughgoing symbolism of [Whitman's] poetic attitude’ (p. 21) and studies him as part of a dominant Symbolist tradition in American literature, in which Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe and Melville are the other great names. Following a suggestion by Edmund Wilson in his Axel's Castle, Feidelson maintains that, in their typical preoccupations, these writers were closer to ‘the symbolistic aesthetic that produced modern literature’ than to Romanticism (p. 4). But ‘Symbolism’, whether the term is understood in the French sense or in the somewhat wider sense defined by Feidelson, hardly seems to fit Whitman because of certain fundamental differences in his conception of poetry as well as his vision of reality.

Theodore Dreiser's "Nigger Jeff": The Development of an Aesthetic

T HANKS TO THE WORK of Robert H. Elias and W. A. Swanberg, we are beginning to have an adequate sense of Dreiser's life. But many aspects of Dreiser the artist remain relatively obscure or unexplored-in particular his aesthetic beliefs and fictional techniques at various stages of his career. An excellent opportunity to study Dreiser's developing aesthetic lies in the existence of versions of his short story Nigger Jeff. The extant versions of this story reveal with considerable clarity and force Dreiser's changing beliefs concerning the nature of fiction. Dreiser's first attempt to write story about the lynching of Missouri Negro is preserved in an unpublished University of Virginia manuscript called A Victim of Justice.' Although A Victim of Justice is clearly work of the I890's, it is difficult to date its composition precisely. The narrator of the story begins by noting that he has recently spent a day in one of Missouri's pleasant villages. While visiting Potter's Field, he recalls rural Missouri lynching that he had witnessed several years since. This opening situation is the product of number of events of the mid-i89o's. Dreiser was reporter on the St. Louis Republic in the fall of I893, and it was during this period that he observed the lynching on which the story is based.2 In addition, on July 23, I894, Dreiser