Aesthetic Beliefs Research Articles

Роман «Подросток» Ф.М. Достоевского в немецкоязычных странах

The article analyzes the reception of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent in German-speaking countries, covering the period from the first translations of the novel into German and the first reactions by writers, critics, and researchers to the present day. The material here analyzed (reviews, essays, prefaces to publications, and numerous reprints of The Adolescent throughout the 20th century, scientific articles, monographs) indicates a quite stable interest in this novel by German intellectuals. The available material shows that the recipients were somehow interested in all aspects of the novel, from its themes and main problems to the peculiarities of its poetics. The analysis and the evaluation of the novel are usually carried out in direct connection with the writer’s life, his worldview, religious and aesthetic beliefs, and consider the cultural context of his era. The article shows how the novel was differently received at different times, as well as the connections with ideological and individual peculiarities, due to the specific task that the recipient set himself. The common denominator can be found in the recognition of The Adolescent as one of the most famous novels of Dostoevsky (as it is always considered as one of the “five great novels”, or “Pentateuch”); however, it is also true that The Adolescent presents less value and popularity than Dostoevsky’s other novels, as it is proved by the smaller quantity of research about it. Nevertheless, The Adolescent receives well-deserved recognition to this day not only as a relevant work of the famous Russian author but also for the experimental, modernist nature of its artistic structure, thereby consolidating the canonical significance of the novel in the European literary process of the 21st century.

Роман «Подросток» Ф.М. Достоевского в немецкоязычных странах

The article analyzes the reception of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent in German-speaking countries, covering the period from the first translations of the novel into German and the first reactions by writers, critics, and researchers to the present day. The material here analyzed (reviews, essays, prefaces to publications, and numerous reprints of The Adolescent throughout the 20th century, scientific articles, monographs) indicates a quite stable interest in this novel by German intellectuals. The available material shows that the recipients were somehow interested in all aspects of the novel, from its themes and main problems to the peculiarities of its poetics. The analysis and the evaluation of the novel are usually carried out in direct connection with the writer’s life, his worldview, religious and aesthetic beliefs, and consider the cultural context of his era. The article shows how the novel was differently received at different times, as well as the connections with ideological and individual peculiarities, due to the specific task that the recipient set himself. The common denominator can be found in the recognition of The Adolescent as one of the most famous novels of Dostoevsky (as it is always considered as one of the “five great novels”, or “Pentateuch”); however, it is also true that The Adolescent presents less value and popularity than Dostoevsky’s other novels, as it is proved by the smaller quantity of research about it. Nevertheless, The Adolescent receives well-deserved recognition to this day not only as a relevant work of the famous Russian author but also for the experimental, modernist nature of its artistic structure, thereby consolidating the canonical significance of the novel in the European literary process of the 21st century.

Afanasy Fet’s essays “From the Village” and Pavel Medvedev’s article “Dreams and Reality”: to the history of polemics

This article meticulously analyzes the views of the representative of aesthetic school and school of democratic poetry of the Russian literature of the XIX century upon the designation of art and science. The essays “From the Village” by A. A. Fet, which depict the poet’s outlook upon the role and tasks of poetry, science, and art as a whole, serve as the materials for this research. Opinion of the opponents from democratic school is demonstrated on the example of the article “Dreams and Reality” by the author of the satirical magazine “Iskra” Pavel Medvedev. The article examines polemical dialogue between the two schools, analyzes and compares the arguments provided by its representatives. The article describes various mechanisms that allow using aesthetic beliefs as the foundation for creating a parodistically distorted personality and as a method for exposing the true views. The cycle by P. A. Medvedev “Dreams and Reality”, which combines the attributes of satirical parody and satire itself, was created as an instrument that is able to discredit publicizing of A. A. Fet in his essays “From the Village”, and thus unveil not only his aesthetic, but also sociopolitical position, ideology of the right-winger and advocate of serfdom. The parodist was trying to achieve such effect solely through interpretation and commenting of the statements of A. A. Fet himself.

“The best in this kind are but shadows”:

Aesthesia or the art of perception involves an awareness of human tendencies and the Greek origin of the word, aisthesis stands for “one who perceives.” As much as an author might or might not find it significant to observe their surroundings and then fictionalize them to be able to emulate a lived reality, seen and heard all too well – one cannot disagree that once the vision they try to communicate achieves a heightened focus and is given a shape of words – the writer finds themselves in a mode of paradoxical nonexistence, in other words, aesthetic alienation. This paper aims to identify the very process through which a writerly vision comes true as an author decidedly chooses creative sincerity over domestic comfort as seen in George Gissing’s 1891 novel, New Grub Street, and Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, a DC Vertigo comic series (1993). Closely examining the dramatis personae and their intimate imitation of the respective authors’ aesthetic beliefs, the article makes use of both primary and secondary data and discovers that the domain of creative genesis is always separated from the finished literary products, autonomous and distant.

Девочка на коленях. Из истории русского руссоизма

The concept of romantic love directed towards a young bride is an ideological construction in the history of European culture as manifested in works of Rousseau, Novalis, and Edgar Allan Poe. Any given author's modification of this form of love is an important indication of his religious, ethical, and aesthetic beliefs, which are in turn indicative of his cultural trend and which reflect the fears and ideals of the given author's contemporary society. Here, I will trace the transformation of this topic in the late work of Vasily Zhukovsky in its intersection with the Rousseauist topos of the last or "twilight" love. I will also analyze the transformation of the image of the girl-bride, previously canonized by the patriarch of Russian Romanticism, in the poetry of Pyotr Vyazemsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita - works which represent different literary-ideological programs which respond in different ways to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (1769, published 1782).

К проблеме звуковой семантики традиционных саамских музыкальных инструментов

The article explores the issue of the sonic semantics of traditional Saami musical instruments. The problem of studying the semantic aspects of Saami tradition lies in the fact of the absence of definite images and concepts, which may be explained to a large extent by the fading of archaic forms of sonic communication in the ethnicity's culture of intonation and acoustics. Meanwhile, the preservation of syncretic phenomena, which mark the interrelated and indivisible world of objects' spiritual values, makes it possible to determine the methods of studying the semantics of the traditional cultural objects in question. First and foremost, the specificity of the Saami aesthetic belief system is connected with the highly subtle perception of natural surroundings and is determined by old beliefs, which are based on the Saami animistic notion of objects of material nature. Integrating the complex of sonic perception of the surrounding space makes it possible to establish the coordinates of the Saami conception of the unity between world-view and sound, manifested through non-differentiation of the sound source – whether vocal, instrumental or kinetic. The author's approach, based on the equivalence of sound realizations, is equipped to determine the proposed conception from the viewpoint of ethnomusicological interpretation (catalyst) of the archaic phenomena of the Saami syncretic art of sound. The turn to the onomatopoeic vocabulary of the Saami language is conjugated with revealing the specificity of timbre and articulation in Saami instrumentalism. Such an interdisciplinary coordination between two branches of knowledge – linguistics and ethno-organology – enables the researcher to define the performing technique of playing traditional Saami instruments on the semantic basis of kinesiological and visual perception. Keywords: saami, semantics of sound, musical instruments, kinesiological and visual perception.

The Informational Culture of the Future Primary School Teacher as the Priority of the Quality Improvement of the Linguistic Disciplines

Within the article, the peculiarities of the improvement of the informational culture of the future teacher of the primary school as the process of knowledge and means which influence the actualization of the informational activity were determined. During this activity, the future teacher expresses his or her aesthetic tastes, requirements, interests, ideas, judgments, beliefs and intellectual abilities which begin to form within the student due to the leadership of the teacher. The goal of the article is the elucidation of modern methodical approaches to the improvement of the informational culture of the future teacher during the process of studying linguistic disciplines. The subject of the research is the pedagogical conditions of the increasing of the informational culture of the future specialist. The theoretical-methodological basis of the research is made up with: classical and modern attainments of the world and national pedagogics, modern research on problems of the education’s informatization, the activity theory of teaching and development of the personality. For the achievement of the determined goal and the solution of the determined tasks there was implemented the complex of research's methods: theoretical – analysis of the psychological, pedagogical, educational-methodical literature on the research's problem; synthesis and generalization, comparison; work with the experience of teachers of high educational institutions, determination of the conceptual apparatus of the research; empirical – observation and analysis of the pedagogical phenomena and processes, collective and individual conversations with the aim of the revealing of the main contradictions and disadvantages within the education, within methods and educational processes for the detection of the students' understanding of the informational means of teaching, oriented on the increasing of their informational culture. Within the article, there were also determined the criteria of the informational culture of the future primary school teacher: informational activity, informational consciousness, informational-communicative readiness, informational thinking, and informational readiness. It is proved that the increasing of the informational culture of the future specialist for the primary school is able to become such an instrument which would give the opportunity to improve simultaneously the quality of the education and to become the environment and to provide the environment within which the new culture of teaching would be able to develop in. The strategic goal of the development of a system of increasing the qualification of the pedagogical staff foresees the augmentation of the openness and accessibility of the educational services and orientation on the individual demands of each student.

FORMATION OF AESTHETIC COMPETENCE AS PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PEDAGOGICAL ISSUE

The paper considers psychological and pedagogical issues of formation of aesthetic competence of a future music teacher. Education plays a major role in the formation of a competent individual, and aesthetic competence is one of important components in training of a music teacher, since it is an ability of a person to aesthetic perception and comprehension of beauty, which presupposes knowledge of aesthetics, maturity of aesthetic beliefs, feelings, values, ideals, behavior in the field of music art. Keywords: aesthetic competence, general cultural competence, artistic and aesthetic values, personality, music teacher.

Literary Classics Reading and College Students’ Aesthetic Quality Education in the Context of Visual Culture

Visual culture in the postmodern context has posed a great impact on college students’ aesthetic value, resulting in vulgar taste, judgment deficiency and aesthetic concept dislocation. Literary classics is the reflection of culture, history, and aesthetic ideals of a nation, whose aesthetic characteristics provide the possibility to develop aesthetic quality education among college students. Carrying out aesthetic quality education among college students based on classical literature reading can cultivate their noble aesthetic ideal, build up firm aesthetic belief and correct aesthetic concept so that they can grow up to be high-quality talents with knowledge, skills and good aesthetic accomplishment, ready to make contributions to national development and social progress.

Group Exercise in Chinese Preschools in an Era of Child-Centered Pedagogy

Guangbo ticao (group exercise) is a daily routine in Chinese preschools characterized by collectivity, discipline, and conformity. In this article we explore the question of why guangbo ticao has survived in an era of progressive educational reform in contemporary China. We use interviews with Chinese preschool teachers and children to argue that guangbo ticao is an implicit embodied practice that carries traditional Chinese cultural, ethical, and aesthetic beliefs, produces distinct meanings and pleasures, and meets important social needs.

SYSTEMIC, PHASED APPROACH TO THE APPLICATION OF EDUCATIONAL INFLUENCES ON STUDENTS IN STUDYING BIOLOGY

Здійснено теоретичний аналіз психолого-педагогічної та методичної літератури, які розкривають застосування виховних впливів на учнів у процесі вивчення біології. Розкрито системне, поетапне, практичне застосування виховних впливів на уроках біології, спрямованих на активізацію пізнавальної діяльності учнів, що забезпечить підвищення інтересу до навколишнього середовища і цим самим бажання отримати глибші знання і сформувати певні переконання природоохоронної спрямованості. Адже одним із пріоритетів педагогічної діяльності вчителя є формування стійких переконань в учнів, зокрема: формування моральних, етичних, естетичних переконань; бажання до емпатії, нетерпимості до проявів вандалізму стосовно навколишнього середовища. Розглянуто доцільність поетапного застосування виховних впливів на учнів на різних етапах організації процесу вивчення біології, наведено методику поетапного формування морально-етичних норм, естетичних і екологічних переконань. Також проведено експериментальну перевірку ефективності послідовного, системного поетапного застосування виховного впливу на учнів у процесі вивчення біології у напрямі формування позитивного ставлення до природи та пізнавальної, творчої діяльності у соціальній та природоохоронній сферах.

Aesthetic Evaluation and First-Hand Experience

ABSTRACTEvaluative aesthetic discourse communicates that the speaker has had first-hand experience of what is talked about. If you call a book bewitching, it will be assumed that you have read the book. If you say that a building is beautiful, it will be assumed that you have had some visual experience with it. According to an influential view, this is because knowledge is a norm for assertion, and aesthetic knowledge requires first-hand experience. This paper criticizes this view and argues for an alternative view, according to which aesthetic discourse expresses affective states of mind, analogously to how assertions express beliefs. It is because these affective states require first-hand experience that aesthetic discourse communicates that such acquaintance is at hand. The paper furthermore argues that the lack of an experience requirement for aesthetic belief ascriptions constitutes a problem for the kind of expressivist who claims that evaluative belief states are covert non-cognitive states.

Ідейно-естетичний дискурс епістолярію Миколи Вороного.

The article focuses on revealing the ideological and aesthetic views of Mykola Voronyi in his epistolary, which is considered in the cultural space of society. The article uses archive materials in the department of handwritten funds of the Institute of Literature named after T. Shevchenko of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. It was established that Mykola Voronyi maintained close ties with many socio-political and cultural figures: M. Hrushevsky, M. Kotsubinsky, O. Biletsky, I. Shrag and others. At the same time, the poet modestly assessed his creative work both in quantitative and qualitative plans. It was discovered that the change in the socio-political views of the poet affected his ideological and aesthetic beliefs. It is revealed that the epistolary poet represents the social and cultural experience of the nation of the end of the XIX – early XX century. The historical precondition for the creation of memoir literature in the article is considered as a way to preserve historical memory, to demonstrate the possibility of personal and national self-expression. Ideological and artistic views of the poet are presented in letters confirming his attraction to modernism, but at the same time the author continued to write works that had distinct features of the populist tradition. Consequently, in the ideological and aesthetic views of Mykola Voronyi, they were both signs of modernism and populism.

Rahvarõivas talupojakultuuri ühe ilmingu ning mõttemaailma kajastajana. Interpretatsioon Vändra kihelkonna näitel / National Costumes as one of the Manifestations and Reflections of the Frame of Mind of Peasant Culture: Interpretation Based on the Example of Vändra Parish

The contemporary study, making and wearing of national costumes worn in 19th-century Estonian peasant culture requires both good knowledge of the objects and an awareness of the understandings, attitudes and world view related to peasant culture. This article sheds light on the values associated with the national costumes worn in the parish of Vändra. It concentrates on the rational way of thinking connected to national costumes and related aesthetic and moral beliefs. The term “rationality” here denotes, first and foremost, reasonable and purposeful behaviour arising from practical considerations. The study of meaningfulness sheds light on the background and objectives of the aesthetic choices underlying the design of national costumes, but also on the messages conveyed with the help of objects. In addition to literature concerning national costumes, the manuscripts found in the Estonian National Museum concerning the clothes worn in the parish of Vändra and neighbouring parishes and the observations made based on single objects are also used as sources.National costumes are used even today as a type of clothing that shows national belonging. 19th-century understandings and evaluations related to national costumes can today be studied indirectly. They manifest themselves in the way national costumes were made and worn and to a great extent were influenced by the environment in which the peasants lived.The obtaining of clothes meant a lot of work for peasants in the 19th century, starting with the growing and processing of the material and ending with the making and finishing of the clothes. Popular materials were easily accessible and could be processed at home, although they required a lot of work. As the obtaining of linen and woollen yarn and the weaving of cloth were labour-intensive processes, patterns for the sewing of clothes had to be as practical as possible. Great attention was paid to increasing the durability of clothes and to the easiest possible maintenance thereof. In the choice of material and the finishing of clothing, the climate, the ease of use and the context of use were taken into consideration. Both textiles and leather were used to the maximum. Woollen cloth was considered a more valuable material than linen textile, and this could be explained by the latter wearing out sooner.Besides practical aspects, the aesthetic result was also considered important – in addition to aspiring for beauty, many items of clothing represented the wearer’s social status, and people believed in the protective power of clothing. When wearing national costumes, one had to take into account the system of communal values. Unfortunately, very little material has been recorded about these understandings, and the field is difficult to access for researchers studying individual objects.National costumes reflect the way of life and beliefs of the people of the 19th century. In the study of national costumes – where alongside material sources little information has been recorded as regards respective understandings – this knowledge enables researchers to discover people’s frame of mind based on the end results.

RE-WRITING HISTORY: BERNHARD LANG'SMONADOLOGIESERIES (2007–PRESENT)

AbstractThe oeuvre of Austrian composer Bernhard Lang (b. 1957) is based upon extreme musical repetition. In hisMonadologieseries (2007-present), short samples of pre-existing music form the starting point for a variety of automatically generated looping and transformation processes. The overwriting of pre-existing music results in the creation of meta-compositions that radically alter the listeners' understanding of the original piece.Sketching a general overview of the composer's aesthetic beliefs and the compositional strategies originating from them, this article focuses on Lang'sMonadologieseries. It aims to clarify the relationships between the individual pieces of the series, to analyse the musical techniques used to reinterpret pre-existing scores within a contemporary setting and, finally, to interpret the implications that arise from that procedure. The 2009Monadologie VII: …for Arnold…functions as a historico-analytical case study, from which a deeper insight into the series' hermeneutics can be gained.

The Glass is Half Empty: A New Argument for Pessimism about Aesthetic Testimony

Call the view that it is possible to acquire aesthetic knowledge via testimony, optimism, and its denial, pessimism. In this paper, I offer a novel argument for pessimism. It works by turning attention away from the basis of the relevant belief, namely, testimony, and toward what that belief in turn provides a basis for, namely, other attitudes. In short, I argue that an aesthetic belief acquired via testimony cannot provide a rational basis for further attitudes, such as admiration, and that the best explanation for this is that the relevant belief is not itself rational. If a belief is not rational, it is not knowledge. So, optimism is false. After addressing a number of objections to the argument, I consider briefly its bearing on the debate concerning thick evaluative concepts. While the aim to argue that pessimism holds, not to explain why it holds, I provide an indication in closing of what that explanation might be

Stravinsky and the Russian Period: Sound and Legacy of a Musical Idiom by John Van den Toorn, Pieter and McGinness (review)

REVIEWS 889 Naroditskaya deftly shifts the focus of attention to a new and unexpected field. Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage provokes as much as it illuminates; its confident and successful fusion of methodologies borrowed from literary criticism, musical analysis, historical reconstruction and gender studies means that it repays repeated rereading from a number of different perspectives and should be of considerable interest to scholars working in all of the above fields. Wadham College, University of Oxford Philip Ross Bullock Van den Toorn, Pieter and McGinness, John. Stravinsky and the Russian Period: Sound and Legacy of a Musical Idiom. Music since 1900. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2012. xi + 324 pp. Tables. Figures. Music examples. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. £60.00: $99.00. This is a useful book. It complements Pieter van den Toorn’s The Rite of Spring (Berkeley, CA, 1987) with two long chapters each on Les Noces and Renard, and one on Symphonies of Wind Instruments. There is a wealth of forensic detail about familiar van den Toornian topics like the octatonic scale or referential collection, in particular the interaction between octatonic and diatonic collections; rhythm and meter, in particular metric displacement; the construction of ‘conservative’ and ‘radical’ readings of listening (p. 20 n. 29); and the relationship between borrowed folk melodies and Stravinskii’s own ‘powers of fabrication’ (p. 120). The book is vintage van den Toorn: slow to read but rewarding if one perseveres and acclimatizes oneself to the style. One finishes it having survived ‘octatonic fever’ (p. 167), though there is an introduction to the topic in chapter two. There are perceptive insights into the structure of the infamous bassoon solo in The Rite of Spring (pp. 132–33); the interval patterning in Les Noces, which was loosely modelled on the bells of St Paul’s Cathedral as transcribed in a sketch (p. 69 n. 51, ex. 3.5); and the use of neo-Riemannian theory to produce Tonnetz graphs of pitch space in Les Noces and Renard (pp. 141–47, 216–20) — a brilliant idea deserving more work. As with van den Toorn’s earlier writings, the underlying ideology is that aesthetic ‘Immediacy and the world of reflection and analysis are complementary, of course, symbiotic as an ideal’ (p. 302). The ‘complexity of the invention’ (p. 172) remains a marker of value, and more complex musical textures attract more hyperbolic analytical writing. It is also unsurprising that, despite eclectic references to music psychology, listening is still configured as ‘reading’ (e.g. p. 278), and that van den Toorn and McGinness make extensive assumptions about what the listener sees in the score while listening. This is less a Freudian slip than an acknowledged axiom — theirs is a particular type SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 890 of listener. This said, while citing Dahlhaus is hardly empirical proof of the listening process (p. 133), the references to music psychology are welcome, for they open suggestive avenues for further inquiry (Stravinskii is rarely used in empirical studies, no doubt for the reasons discussed in chapter ten). One subject broached by van den Toorn and McGinness is that of upbeats. This runs throughout the book but is only properly thematized when mentioningKeller’scritiqueofStravinskii(pp.249,299–301).Inseveralrespects Stravinskii’s (re-)introduction of real upbeats into his music during the 1920s (the Serenade in A was the turning point) was his other ‘rejoicing discovery’ (p. 173), and a major factor in the development of his mature Neoclassicism. In the earlier music considered by van den Toorn and McGinness, the upbeat had a more radical function: ‘In a giant form of displacement, upbeat figures identified with development and forward movement were shifted to the downbeat’ (p. 249). The final two chapters are on ‘Issues of Performance Practice and Aesthetic Belief’ and ‘Stravinsky and His Critics’. The argument in chapter nine is in essence a simple reversal of the convention that Stravinskii’s formalist aesthetics and strictures about performance directed his musical language. Rather, say van den Toorn and McGinness, ‘Stravinsky’s formalism and performance directives have been viewed here as a logical outgrowth of those processes, above all of processes of displacement, juxtaposition, and...

Willa Cather and aestheticism: from Romanticism to Modernism

In this collection of essays, contributors investigate the various connections between Willa Cather's fiction and her aesthetic beliefs and practices. Including multiple perspectives and critical approaches-derived from the Aesthetic Movement, the visual arts, modernism, and the relationship between art and religion-this collection will increase our understanding of Cather's aesthetic and lead to a better comprehension of her work and her life.

Aesthetic Testimony and the Norms of Belief Formation

Unusability pessimism has recently emerged as an appealing new option for pessimists about aesthetic testimony—those who deny the legitimacy of forming aesthetic beliefs on the basis of testimony. Unusability pessimists argue that we should reject the traditional pessimistic stance that knowledge of aesthetic matters is unavailable via testimony in favour of the view that while such knowledge is available to us, it is unusable. This unusability stems from the fact that accepting such testimony would violate an important non-epistemic norm of belief formation. In this article I present an objection to unusability pessimism and argue that Robert Hopkins, the view's most prominent defender, fails to motivate adequately the claim that there are such non-epistemic belief norms. The cases which putatively legitimize usability norms can be explained by appeal to more familiar norm types: epistemic norms of belief formation, and non-epistemic norms which govern action other than belief formation. The intent of this article is not primarily negative, however, and I will also argue that understanding why the unusability position fails helps us to identify a promising new direction for the pessimist's opponents who wish to defend the legitimacy of forming aesthetic beliefs on the basis of testimony.

Stravinsky and the Russian period: sound and legacy of a musical idiom

Van den Toorn and McGinness take a fresh look at the dynamics of Stravinsky's musical style from a variety of analytical, critical and aesthetic angles. Starting with processes of juxtaposition and stratification, the book offers an in-depth analysis of works such as The Rite of Spring, Les Noces and Renard. Characteristic features of style, melody and harmony are traced to rhythmic forces, including those of metrical displacement. Along with Stravinsky's formalist aesthetics, the strict performing style he favoured is also traced to rhythmic factors, thus reversing the direction of the traditional causal relationship. Here, aesthetic belief and performance practice are seen as flowing directly from the musical invention. The book provides a counter-argument to the criticism and aesthetics of T. W. Adorno and Richard Taruskin, and will appeal to composers, critics and performers as well as scholars of Stravinsky's music.