Aesthetic Movement Research Articles

Elaboration on the Nature of Woody Debris: An Ethical Snag in the Aesthetic Justification for Organized River Cleanup

Beauty is the symbol of morality, according to Immanuel Kant. We interpret this to imply that by achieving aesthetic pleasure, humankind can somehow replace the need for ethical satisfaction. We apply this idea to the project of constructing scenic waterways in urban areas, and ask “What purpose is served by organizing debris removal along the channels and banks of polluted urban waterways if they become aesthetically pleasing but remain nearly devoid of life?” A footnote to recent scientific research that measures the effect of woody debris on stream channel processes reveals that woody debris contributes to aquatic habitat. Adding woody debris to a stream can create protected zones and improve fish habitat by increasing pool types and sizes, sediment storage, and local scour. We discuss this current research and its implications in the changing contexts of American history and environmental ethics. The systematic removal of natural woody “snags” (for example the spectacular “Great Raft” on the Red River) that helped open the interior of the United States to commerce once fit the prevailing public morality of American Manifest Destiny. Today, Americans who can find little ethical satisfaction in the condition of their urban waterways yet strive to make them scenic. We explore the scenic and recreational potentials for “treating” urban streams with the addition of woody debris in order to contribute to aquatic habitat. We also indulge in semantic games and ask why the debris must be woody in order to contribute. This leads to a provocative discussion about wooden pallets, shopping carts, and automobile tires. Perhaps debris removal in urban waterways disrupts and diminishes aquatic habitat, yet results in an aesthetic pleasure that helps make our ethical dissatisfaction with polluted rivers and streams more palatable. If so, the social construction of scenic urban waterways is just an aesthetic movement driven by a political desire for utopia.

Mellan takt och rytm

One could say that Swedish gymnastics has developed as the curve of a bow in the matter of bringing out a feminine way of moving. P. H. Ling founded school gymnastics in the beginning of the 1800's. In addition to a store of movements that were correcting and strict to form, he also wanted to teach rhythmical, aesthetic movements that were not only beautiful but also useful. Above all he thought it important that people learned, through their bodies, to send each other true signals about their feelings. During the second half of the 19th century his son Hjalmar, in conjunction with the demands of the time, set the tone for the development of gymnastics as artificial. Gymnastics was to be performed in big groups which required simultaneity and a beat, and the mimetic and aesthetic elements disappeared. Below the surface, however, the struggle to re-establish the training of those movements needed in everyday life continued. Gymnastics was a male affair, but at the turn of the century two strong women developed a feminine alternative. With the addition of a light rhythm, pleasure and individualization, they infused fresh life into the old aesthetic gymnastics. In time, psychological and pedagogical child-centered features became at least as important as physiological aspects of the movements. By the 1950's school gymnastics had become a dialogue between the internal and external of the gymnast and a way of expressing oneself bodily, but also a communication between gymnast and spectator. More and more the rhythmical way of working also started to interest men.

Chinese modernism in the era of reforms: cultural fever, avant-garde fiction, and the new Chinese cinema

Blending history and theory, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms offers both a historical narrative and a critical analysis of the cultural visions and experiences of China's post-Mao era. In this volume, Xudong Zhang rethinks Chinese modernism as a historical genre that arose in response to the historical experience of Chinese modernity rather than as an autonomous aesthetic movement. He identifies the ideologies of literary and cultural styles in the New Era (1979-1989) through a critical reading of the various new waves of Chinese literature, film, and intellectual discourse. In examining the aesthetic and philosophical formulations of the New Era's intellectual elites, Zhang first analyses the intense cultural and intellectual debates, known as the Great Discussion or Cultural Fever that took place in Chinese urban centers in the mid - and late 1980s. Chinese literary modernism is then explored, specifically in relation to Deng Xiaoping's sweeping reforms and with a focus on the changing literary sensibility and avant-garde writers such as Yu Hua, Ge Fei, and Su Tong. Lastly, Zhang looks at the the making of New Chinese Cinema and films such as Yellow Earth, Horse Thief, and King of the Children - films through which Fifth Generation filmmakers first developed a style independent from socialist realism. By tracing the origins and contemporary elaboration of the idea of Chinese modernism, Zhang identifies the discourse of modernism as one of the decisive formal articulations of the social dynamism and cultural possibilities of post-Mao China. Capturing the historical experience and the cultural vision of China during a crucial decade in its emergence as a world power, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms will interest students and scholars of modernism, Chinese literature and history, film studies, and cultural studies.

1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance

1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance. By Thomas Harrison. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. [xii, 264 p. ISBN 0-520-20043-8. $30.00.] It is a delicate business, the history of ideas, and more delicate stilt to extract from its flow a moment of equilibrium between what was and what would be. Beginnings and endings are seldom tidy, and ideas are promiscuous, not crystalline and chaste. Nevertheless, it is tempting to reconstruct a sense of that mood of an era commonly known as its Zeitgeist. Around 1910 central European artists and intellectuals, poised between the languorous malaise of the tin de siecle and some dimly perceived catastrophe looming on the horizon, had reached a point of crisis. or about December. 1910, Virginia Woolf once observed, human character changed. In 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance Thomas Harrison attempts to explain how and why. Harrison's focus is narrow: central Europe, principally Germany, Italy, and the Hapsburg Empire, and those artists and thinkers who shared a sense that they were living on the cusp at a moment of near unbearable tension when both a death and a birth seemed to have taken too long in coming (p. 8). This is a diverse collection of minds--ranging from composers (Arnold Schoenberg) and artists (Vasili Kandinsky, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka) to poets (Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, Dino Campana) and philosophers and aestheticians (Giovanni Boine, Georg Lukacs, Martin Buber)--and for better or worse Harrison chooses expressionism as the aesthetic denominator for their commonly held insights. The central figure in Harrison's narrative is Carlo Michelstaedter, an Italian poet, painter, and philosopher, whose dissertation, Persuasion and Rhetoric, was completed in 1910 on the very day he took his own life at the age of twenty-three. If his death is symbolic of the impasse to which his ruminations had led him, the circumstances of his life are less emblematic of those tensions that set him and his contemporaries on their path. As an Italian Jew raised in the Adriatic port of Gorizia, where Italian, Slovene, and German cultures competed for dominance. Michelstaedter experienced firsthand the widening fissures of a multiethnic empire. As with so many thinkers of his time, Michelstaedter meditated upon the discrepancies between authenticity and language, poles that he represented as persuasion, the repose of being, and rhetoric, the continual agony of becoming. It is the recognition of the perpetual dissonance between the two that brought Michelstaedter and other expressionists of this study to the realization that dissonance itself lay at the core of being and of expressive necessity. In four chapters Harrison identifies the stages through which Michelstaedter and others passed on their way to this emancipation of dissonance. From a heightened awareness of a disrupted world of irreconcilable difference (The Emancipation of Dissonance) emerges a despair over those negative forces--chaos over order, death over vitality--that threaten disintegration (The Deficiency of Being). The paralysis of despair is overcome through inner resources of subjective insight (The Hole Called the Soul) that lead, finally, to a realization of the limits of language and rhetoric (An Ethics of Misunderstanding). In the end this recognition that no expression can be more than a form for pregnant but impregnable contents (p. 17) throws the project of self-realization back on the experience of self-loss from which it springs (p. 16). Common to all the figures Harrison treats is the feeling of disjuncture between the inner self and the outer world. Disgust with the materialism of the nineteenth century and a concomitant distaste for those related aesthetic movements of realism and naturalism was exacerbated in those regions where ethnic and cultural identities called into question the relevance of existing political and ideological institutions. …

The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy

In this major reinterpretation of the Victorian Aesthetic Movement, Linda Dowling argues that such classic works of Victorian art writing such as Ruskin's Stones of Venice of Morris's Lectures on Art or Wilde's Critic as Artist become wholly intelligible only within the larger ideological context of the Whig tradition. The Vulgarization of Art explores the tragic consequences for the Aesthetic Movement when a repressed and irresolvable conflict between Shaftesbury's assumption of aristocratic soul and the Victorian ideal of aesthetic democracy repeatedly shatters the hopes of such writers as Ruskin, Morris, Pater, and Wilde for social transformation through the sense.

"It Is Surprising That There Are Any Happy Wives": The Art Interchange , 1878-1886

"It Is Surprising That There Are Any Happy Wives": The Art Interchange, 1878-1886 Mary W. Blanchard For historians of nineteenth century women's history, the relationship of women to artistic production is generally contained within the construct of a moral "separate sphere." Here, note these historians, women found aesthetic creativity and fulfillment in such nonprofit domestic projects as knitting, crocheting, and the making of quilts. The marketplace (and, with it, the discourse of art in the public realm) was aligned with male entrepreneurship and male visibility. Yet in the 1870s and 1880s, the emergence of a distinctly new art "craze," the Aesthetic Movement, complicated this dichotomy. For, at this time, the emergence of an independent (and visible) female aesthetic voice (drawing on earlier legacies of artistic production in home crafts) championed professionalism of the domestic arts in the public sphere, as it demanded a reformulation of domesticity itself. For the aesthetic practitioner of the 1870s and 1880s, art became, not domestic accommodation and separation, but gender politics and public discourse.1 Of course throughout the nineteenth century, gender politics entered the evolving reconstitution of domesticity. The demand for the women's vote was a renegotiation of male political spaces, and, by inference, a reformulation of women's proper sphere. The move for women's higher education opened the discourse on female intellectual limits and, as such, questioned traditional domestic categories. Even the women's club movement , which stressed self-culture, female community, and reform, can be seen as challenges to the pure domestic ideal. All these movements in some way attacked or reformulated middle-class domesticity. These groups were visible and articulate in their own time and are visible to historians today. But another set of challengers arose in the 1870s and 1880s as the Aesthetic Movement galvanized thousands of women to see artistic production as a move beyond self-culture. These aesthetic women attempted to use the domestic arts of painting, sewing, and handicrafts to move into the public sphere of commerce, subversively instigating a philosophy which aggrandized the individual female artist and celebrated her sensual (and amoral) nature. Aestheticism was a reform movement for both art and society which originated in England in the 1850s and 1860s as a © 1996 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. 3 (Fall) 1996 Mary W. Blanchard 37 reaction to Victorian urbanization and industrialization. Influenced by the philosophies of the Pre-Raphaelites, John Ruskin, and William Morris (and implemented by exhibits of English handicrafts at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial), the Aesthetic Movement was associated with the resurgence of the decorative arts in the middle-class home. More broadly, however, writers on aesthetic taste insisted that art and beauty were the goals of life and that people should live for art. Such a philosophy was a natural catalyst for women who questioned their domestic (and "separate") role in Victorian society.2 As a popular movement, Aestheticism was not an elite event, but rather it permeated popular culture through the elevation and execution of the secondary arts in the home. Art education for women, female workshops and studios, artistic salons run by women, and commercial ventures spearheaded by women aesthetes exemplified the importance of art for the middle-class American woman, both in the private and the public realm. This art "craze" resulted in the formation of many art clubs and schools all over the country. Professional status paralleled the amateur pursuit. The Rhode Island School of Design and the Art Students' League were only two of the burgeoning academic institutions committed to the legitimacy of art as both expression and profession. Concurrent was the formation of art journals. Such magazines as Art Age, American Art Review, and Art Amateur were typical enterprises. These publications, begun in the 1870s and 1880s, circulated throughout the country and reached many areas and classes beyond the circle of elite urban tastemakers. One such publication, the Art Interchange, was established in 1878 by Candace Wheeler (1827-1923), a successful textile designer and founder of the New York Society of Decorative Art. Wheeler was part of the urban upper middle-class, circulating with the artists of the Tenth Street Studio and launching her own professional interior decorating...

Deep Ecology as an Aesthetic Movement

Many deep ecologists call for a ‘new ecological ethic’. If this ethic is meant to be a moral ethic, then deep ecology fails. However if deep ecology is interpreted as an aesthetic movement, then it is both philosophically coherent and practically adequate.

Deep Ecology as an Aesthetic Movement

Many deep ecologists call for a ‘new ecological ethic’. If this ethic is meant to be a moral ethic, then deep ecology fails. However if deep ecology is interpreted as an aesthetic movement, then it is both philosophically coherent and practically adequate.

The Soldier and the Aesthete: Homosexuality and Popular Culture in Gilded Age America

The aftermath of civil strife, note some historians, can change perceptions of gender. Particularly for males, the effect of exhaustive internal wars and the ensuing collapse of the warrior ideal relegates the soldier/hero to a marginal iconological status. Linda L. Carroll has persuasively argued, for instance, that, following the Italian wars, one finds the “damaged” images of males in Renaissance art: bowed heads, display of stomach, presentation of buttocks. In fact, male weakness and “effeminacy” can, notes Linda Dowling, follow on the military collapse of any collective state. Arthur N. Gilbert argues, in contrast, that historically in wartime, male weakness in the form of “sodomites” was rigorously persecuted. From 1749 until 1792, for instance, there was only one execution for sodomy in France, while, during the Napoleonic Wars, the period of 1803–14, seven men were executed. Such analysis suggests that, in the aftermath of civil wars, cultural attitudes toward effeminate or homosexual men shifted from suppression or persecution during martial crisis to one of latitude and perhaps tolerance in periods following the breakdown of the military collective.The aftermath of America's Civil War, the decades of the 1870s and 1880s, provides a testing ground to examine attitudes toward the soldier/hero and toward the effeminate male in a time of social and cultural disarray. At this time, an art “craze,” the Aesthetic Movement, captured popular culture. Aestheticism, seen in the eighteenth century as a “sensibility,” had, by the nineteenth century, an institutional base and a social reform ideology.

Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism

Arguing that the contemporary commitment to the importance of cultural identity has renovated rather than replaced an earlier commitment to racial identity, Walter Benn Michaels asserts that the idea of culture, far from constituting a challenge to racism, is actually a form of racism. Our America offers both a provocative reinterpretation of the role of identity in modernism and a sustained critique of the role of identity in postmodernism. “We have a great desire to be supremely American,” Calvin Coolidge wrote in 1924. That desire, Michaels tells us, is at the very heart of American modernism, giving form and substance to a cultural movement that would in turn redefine America’s cultural and collective identity—ultimately along racial lines. A provocative reinterpretation of American modernism, Our America also offers a new way of understanding current debates over the meaning of race, identity, multiculturalism, and pluralism. Michaels contends that the aesthetic movement of modernism and the social movement of nativism came together in the 1920s in their commitment to resolve the meaning of identity—linguistic, national, cultural, and racial. Just as the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded aliens, and the Indian Citizenship Act of the same year, which honored the truly native, reconceptualized national identity, so the major texts of American writers such as Cather, Faulkner, Hurston, and Williams reinvented identity as an object of pathos—something that can be lost or found, defended or betrayed. Our America is both a history and a critique of this invention, tracing its development from the white supremacism of the Progressive period through the cultural pluralism of the Twenties. Michaels’s sustained rereading of the texts of the period—the canonical, the popular, and the less familiar—exposes recurring concerns such as the reconception of the image of the Indian as a symbol of racial purity and national origins, the relation between World War I and race, contradictory appeals to the family as a model for the nation, and anxieties about reproduction that subliminally tie whiteness and national identity to incest, sterility, and impotence.

An American century of photography: from dry-plate to digital

Significantly revised and enlarged, with almost 200 new images and work by 120 new photographers, this second edition presents a perspective on the history of American photography from the mid-1880s to the present. It emphasizes the relationship between individuals and aesthetic movements and the intellectual and cultural climate in which artists work. The book reproduces photographs drawn from the Hallmark Photographic Collection.

Heterographies: Postmodernism and the Crisis of the Sacred in Maghreb Literature

HETEROGRAPHIES : POSTMODERNISM AND THE CRISIS OF THE SACRED IN MAGHREB LITERATURE Lucv Stone McNeece The Maghreb is but one of several regions of the developing world struggUng to chart an itinerary between tradition and modernity. Yetin this area the issues ofconflict are particularly inflammatory because the crisisinvolvesradicaUycontradictorywaysofUfe competingforhegemony: anincreasinglyindustriaUzed, technocratic, postmodernculture imported from Europe, an arrogant andcorrupt nationaUsm, and a fundamentaUst theocracy propelled by Arab imperialism. Behind the alarm caused by recent highjackings and the kiUing of inteUectuals and foreigners in Algeria and Egypt, the specter ofIslam revives dark atavistic fantasies, reminding Europe and the West of the limits ofits global policies: Iran, Libya, Lebanon, and Iraq still haunt the coUective imagination. In the increasingly precarious and polarized atmosphere of North Africa, the countries of Morocco and Tunisia are considered oases in a barren land; formerly French protectorates rather than settlement colonies like Algeria, they seem to have been spared the bloody legacy of decolonization and to have negotiated successful poUtical and economic relations with France and Europe. Moroccan and Tunisian writers are widely pubUshed and acclaimed abroad. Many of these writers divide their time between the Maghreb and universities in France, Canada or the United States—so much so that they are frequently accused ofhaving abandoned political realities at home. In addition, the writing of the generation that came ofage in the 1960s, some ofwhose writers wrote for the Moroccan review, Souffles, is considered difficult to read, provoking such epithets as "neo-baroque" and "hermetic." The works of writers such as Abdelkebir Khatibi of Morocco and Abdelwahab Meddeb ofTunisia are examples of a "new" type ofwriting emanating from the Maghreb that has brought about both criticism and acclaim, and which raises difficult questions about the role of the postcolonial writer. Unlike writers of the preceding generations who celebrated their traditions or openly miUtated for independence, writers like Khatibi and Meddeb seem to be involved in a wholly different enterprise that bears Uttle relation to urgent poUtical reaUties. ParadoxicaUy, their writing has been caUed "postmodern" and "avant-garde" because it shares such features as intertextuaUty, metafiction, collage, polyvalence, and self-conscious linguistic play with other contemporary Uteratures of Europe and the Americas. Whatis the relationofthese travelUngfrancophone Maghreb writers to their history and cultures of origin? From where do they speak? For whom do theywrite? Whatdo they write about, and why? In the following pages, I hope toshowthatmanyofthe so-caUed"Western" characteristics ofthese writers' work are distinctive features that connect them to their own popular and sacred traditions. Ifthese effects are recontextuaUzed, theywill appear as symptoms ofa different notionofUterature (a different conception of the sign and of representation)—in turn grounded in a differentepistemology—than thatwhich has often prevailed in the West. Vol. 19 (1995): 60 THE COMPAKATIST Their apparent "betrayal" may be seen then as an attemptto reintegrate their fragmented cultural Imaginary and to dismantle the Manichean rhetoricofvictimizationandvengeance in order to resituate the Maghreb subject as an agentin the necessary process ofmodernization. The question ofpoUtical relevance is frequently raised with respect to postcolonial Uterature, but the diversity ofinterpretation requires that we reexamine what is meant by the term "poUtical." In contrast to the apparent separation ofUterature from poUtics that characterized European High Modernist culture, Uterary and aesthetic movements of the postcolonial period have been more expUcitly associated with poUtical agendas. While it is perhaps simpler to define the term "poUtical" in its narrow, or most obvious, sense, the notion of"poUtical" referring to direct poUtical action in animmediate context is only one manifestation ofa far more extensive realm. Itis now generaUy agreed that there is a "poUtical" dimensionto culturalproductions that may be less expUcit, though no less radical or far-reachingthan direct poUticalintervention. This dimension includes the variety ofemotional investments and interests, originating in areas outside ofpoUtical action, which nonetheless motivate poUtical behavior and events. The term "poUtical" can reasonably be appUed to aU activity that takes into account the organization and functioning ofpower structures. Despite its status as "fiction," Uterature, like other forms of representation, is among the primary vehicles for the transmission of values andideology in any culture.5 The question, perhaps, oughtnotto be whether or not a Uterary work is in some important sense "poUtical," but rather...

‘A Taste for Country Life’: the policy and practice of bias in English rural education, 1918–1939

Abstract This paper examines the common assumptions that a Local Education Authority's failure to reorganise rural schools in the 1920s and 1930s necessarily meant it was negligent, parsimonious and without conviction or direction, and that schools themselves ridiculously outmoded in buildings, curriculum and teaching methods. It uses Hertfordshire as a case study and in challenging the assumptions identifies this LEA's not‐so‐hidden agenda – the more than tacit alliance of education and agriculture to ensure the former supported the latter at a time of falling prices and rural depopulation. It argues that, as a result, largely traditional attitudes and highly vocational policies were paramount after 1918, but camouflaged by the promotion of modern teaching methods and by the fashionable aesthetic movement dedicated to the study, enjoyment and regeneration of the countryside. Absolute economy in public expenditure was not the LEA's main priority, but rather the preservation of village schools, the promoti...

Medieval versus Victorian versus Modern: Rossetti's Art of Images

Medieval versus Victorian versus Modern: Rossetti’s Art of Images Jerome J. McGann (bio) Ever since modernists such as T. S. Eliot misrepresented (or perhaps miscomprehended) the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the intellectual structure of his art—both painting and poetry—has been seriously obscured. The problem is sharply focussed in Rossetti’s connection to Dante and his circle. For Eliot and those who took up his way of thinking, Rossetti had a weak understanding of stilnovista poetry and almost no understanding of Dante: his mind was too sentimental, his emotions too fleshly, his language too loose and Victorian. Yet the judgment that Rossetti lacks intellectual rigor, now widespread, runs against earlier views. Indeed, the argument was mounted specifically to counter certain received ideas, to challenge the programmatic quality of Rossetti’s art, and to contradict Rossetti’s famous commitment to “fundamental brainwork.” 1 As everyone has always known, however, Rossetti’s is—spectacularly—an art of the body. Before 1920 or so people were able to negotiate that basic paradox in Rossetti’s work. Afterwards not. I’d like to carry us back across the divide opened by Eliot—back to the cultural moment when Rossetti’s work centered the movement that ushered in modernism proper. This reconsideration will ultimately allow us to make a critical return to the subject of modernism. The differentials that separate Rossetti from his immediate inheritors can usefully be seen not as deficiencies in Rossetti or his work, but as forecasts of the critique that postmodernism would eventually raise against the modernist project. [End Page 97] My argument will extrapolate that foundational concept of Rossetti (and through him, of the Aesthetic Movement in general): “fundamental brainwork.” Drawn from his concern with artistic technique, the word “brainwork” subtly undermines the distinction between idea and act, or theory and method. The “brainwork” of a disciplined artisanal practice organizes the artist’s intuitive and emotional insights. As we shall see when we examine Rossetti’s crucial connection to Dante, the famous declaration in “The House of Life”—“Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor/ Thee from myself, neither our love from God” 2 —expresses exactly what Rossetti has in mind. In this case the terms are—as so often with Rossetti—erotic. 3 Rossetti’s purposes are expressed very clearly in his famous pair of sonnets “Mary’s Girlhood,” written to accompany his first Pre-Raphaelite picture The Girlhood of Mary Virgin. We should recall that the painting was itself a manifesto about art, as one sees in the heated controversy that followed its exhibition in 1849. When it was shown at the Free Exhibition, the painting’s implicit argument was underscored by the presence of a slip of goldfaced paper he attached to the frame. Two sonnets were written on the golden slip, as follows: This is that blessed Mary, pre-elect God’s Virgin. Gone is a great while, and she Was young in Nazareth of Galilee. Her kin she cherished with devout respect: Her gifts were simpleness of intellect And supreme patience. From her mother’s knee Faithful and hopeful; wise in charity; Strong in grave peace; in duty circumspect. So held she through her girlhood; as it were An angel-watered lily, that near God Grows, and is quiet. Till one dawn, at home She woke in her white bed, and had no fear At all,—yet wept till sunshine, and felt awed; Because the fullness of the time was come. These are the symbols. On that cloth of red I’ the centre is the Tripoint: perfect each Except the second of its points, to teach That Christ is not yet born. The books—whose head Is golden Charity, as Paul hath said— Those virtues are wherein the soul is rich: Therefore on them the lily standeth, which Is Innocence, being interpreted. The seven-thorn’d briar and the palm seven-leaved Are her great sorrow and her great reward. Until the end be full, the Holy One Abides without. She soon shall have achieved [End Page 98] Her perfect purity: yea, God the Lord Shall soon vouchsafe His Son to be her Son. 4 Formally these texts come as...

Cranbrook: The Invisible Landscape

As a study of the landscape of the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, this essay has three objectives: to make visible a previously unacknowledged landscape, to define its relationship to the image of Cranbrook as a whole, and to begin an exploration of the ways in which a landscape draws us into a bond of affection with it. This study is the first to identify landscape designers at Cranbrook and to explore the importance of their design to the institution that was the most successful and long-lived of Arts and Crafts manifestations in America. It thus gives particular attention to the landscape ideas of the Arts and Crafts movement, as this was the last major aesthetic movement to value the art of landscape. Influenced by the principles of this movement, publisher George C. Booth founded Cranbrook in 1925, envisioning a combination school, studio, and art colony, where artists together could develop an integrated design practice. Under the influence of Arts and Crafts, landscape had a very early, critical role at Cranbrook and was part of the vision for the institution. But the later history of Cranbrook shows the decline of landscape as an art, a loss of scope and vision, especially as the Arts and Crafts aesthetic waned and that of the modern movement emerged. The study gives attention to this decline; the observation of how this happened at Cranbrook provides some clues as to the overall diminution of landscape in the twentieth century, a decline heretofore noted, but not explained. The essay begins with the recollection of a personal experience that is critical to the author's interest in the Cranbrook site and to an understanding of the exploration of our connections to landscape. Visits to the site and the use of the resources of the Cranbrook Archives (the papers of George Booth, designs, plans, photographs, and writings by the Cranbrook landscape practitioners) have made it possible to give visibility to the Cranbrook landscape and to allow an assessment of the landscape's relationship to the larger institution.

Business Ethics as a Postmodern Phenomenon

This paper contends that work in business ethics participates in two key aspects of the broad philosophical and aesthetic movement known as postmodernism. First, like postmodernists generally, business ethicists reject the “grand narratives” of historical and conceptual justification, especially the narratives embodied in Marxism and Milton Friedman’s vision of unfettered capitalism. Second, both in the methods and content of their work, business ethicists share postmodernism’s “de-centering” of perspective and discovery of “otherness,” “difference” and marginality as valid modes of approach to experience and moral decision.

Business Ethics as a Postmodern Phenomenon

This paper contends that work in business ethics participates in two key aspects of the broad philosophical and aesthetic movement known as postmodernism. First, like postmodernists generally, business ethicists reject the “grand narratives” of historical and conceptual justification, especially the narratives embodied in Marxism and Milton Friedman’s vision of unfettered capitalism. Second, both in the methods and content of their work, business ethicists share postmodernism’s “de-centering” of perspective and discovery of “otherness,” “difference” and marginality as valid modes of approach to experience and moral decision.

SCHUBERT AND THE BIEDERMEIER: THE AESTHETICS OF JOHANN MAYRHOFER'S ‘HELIOPOLIS’

PART OF the rich legacy left by Carl Dahlhaus to historians of nineteenth-century music is the most extensive recent discussion of the concept of the Biedermeier as it applies to music.' By calling attention to the pervasive influence of middle-class culture and institutions both on musical activity and on contemporary perceptions of that activity, Dahlhaus encouraged a significant broadening of our understanding of musical life during the so-called Restoration period following the upheavals of the Napoleonic wars. Yet his conception of the Biedermeier becomes problematic in the case of Schubert, whose music Dahlhaus excluded from consideration under that term. The issue is clearest when Dahlhaus juxtaposes Schubert's immediate context with his music: 'As institutions, even the Schubertiaden were phenomena of the Biedermeier, despite the Romantic nature of the works around which the circle of initiates gathered'.2 Thus he distinguishes between the Biedermeier as a convivial, functional, institutionally-based phenomenon and Romanticism as an intellectual and aesthetic movement concerned with autonomous art. But so rigid a distinction between a composer's works and the environment in which they first thrived is disquieting. Are we right to isolate Schubert so completely from the friends with whom he socialized and for whom he wrote much of his music, particularly songs? This question hinges on two assumptions: first, that Schubert's friends were more than just a circle of passive admirers; and second, that his music can profitably be approached from a perspective that acknowledges the influence of ideas outside the Classic-Romantic mainstream. To accept the first demands consideration of the second, for the ideas current among Schubert's friends simply do not fit tidily into that mainstream. An investigation of a little-known collection of poems by one of those friends, Johann Mayrhofer's Heliopolis, offers insights into both these issues: it is a fascinating example of Schubert's creative interaction with his friends and reveals a variety of aesthetic issues with which they were concerned. The results further suggest that concepts associated with the Biedermeier can indeed enrich our understanding not only of musical institutions and of composers such as Spohr,

Why Indiana Jones is smarter than the Post‐Processualists∗

Post‐Processualism's influence is waning in Britain, linked to the decline of its parent Post‐Modernism. Both lost credibility through attempting to dominate discourse, and their negative implications for human rights. Modernism and its offspring Processualism had reflected the scientism and socio‐economic centralism that dominated the 20th century up until the 1970s. Jameson and Harvey have exposed their Post‐Modernism as a superficial aesthetic movement spawned by Post‐Fordist economics. Perceived from the History of Ideas this temporal succession is the recurrent opposition between Positivist and Idealist philosophies. Wittgenstein's philosophy shows a ‘third way’ where objective and subjective approaches are complementary tools for scholarship. In Cognitive Processual archaeology a pragmatic merger arises from these formerly competing traditions.

Aestheticism: The Religion of Art in Post-Romantic Literature (review)

Book Reviews 111 in the apprehension of truth: "In the Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, MuIy Theale and Maggie Verver bodi use the powers of imagination spiritually to intuit a better world. ... In both novels, die reality of experience is temporarily suspended—not denied—until the experiment of a spiritualized conception of trudi... has die opportunity to redeem die corrupt world and make it 'true.'" By comparison, in The Bostonians, James "cannot see beyond die helplessness of a spiritually conceived notion of truth to transform the corrupt world." To compensate for tiiis presumed fadure, James, in the later novels, "confers an authorial dispensation to suspend temporarily this world" so mat die trudi can be brought about in it by die "faitii" of women with "good heads" and "sound hearts." Would that die impUed example of Huckleberry Finn (in itself more problematic than Gabler-Hover is wtiling to acknowledge) could be appUed so directly. But the more important point lies in Gabler-Hover's understanding of James's fadure in The Bostonians, an understanding mat is based upon die entry of die novel into the "poUtical world" and die consequent "failed interaction between tiiat world and die transformative power of virtuous rhetoric." As a result, she claims, James changes the "battleground" in die later works by "retreating from the world of the public into the personal" so that "the trudi is not tied to any ancillary poUtical ideology." I find these assertions astonishing—not only as, again, one-sided readings of die texts but, more urgently, as so lenient toward die always troublesome matter of textual suppressions on behalf of both fiction in general and James in particular (the James who, in the old but important distinction, invariably "shows" rather than "teUs" a story). It is surely not accidental tiiat die ease with which Gabler-Hover wields die terms "pubUc" and "personal" is precisely on behalf of a dichotomy tiiat is so strongly questioned by The Bostonians itself as a major component within James's analysis of contemporary consumerism. Truth in American Fiction is to be welcomed for its punctilious reminder of a rhetorical tradition that has been neglected of late by die commentaries. But we must regret its absoluteness of argument If The Scarlet Letter is about selflessness, an etiiical self-regulation "through our emotional apprehension of the common bond of humanity," then such selflessness has to be considered widiin the complex of law and authority in the novel. If The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is about the ethos of honesty, then that etiios is most usefuUy recognized within those forms of artifice that provide its structure. If MiUy Theale and Maggie Verver mark James's reconstruction of "the virtuous American girl as a rhetorical argument in herself," they mark also the dangers wimin the transcendental apprehension of morality. And if Gabler-Hover, rightly, finds a potent source for her equation between rhetoric and trudi in Emerson's lecture of 1867 on "Eloquence," she might also remember his earlier concern about the complexities of the social world (in the lecture on "Politics" of 1840 and die essay on "Experience" of 1844, for example) which profoundly problematizes the directness of that equation. Ian F. A. BeU University of Keele Leon Chai. Aestheticism: The Religion of Art in Post-Romantic Literature. New York: Columbia U P, 1990. 269 + xiv pp. $32.50. The Aesthetic Movement of die late nineteentii century is still too often associated widi showy props and languid postures, with sunflowers and peacock feadiers and all die stained glass attitudes of die haggard and lank young man that Gilbert mocked in Patience. But nodiing so facetious enters Leon Chai's Aestheticism, which presents a serious philosophy of art as a sober quest for meaning and value, a substitute in effect for 112 The Henry James Review a declining or rejected religious orthodoxy. Chai attempts no broad inteUectual history tracing ideas or assumptions to their Romantic or neo-classical origins. He offers instead a concentrated analysis, often phrase by phrase, of short passages selected to typify diverse aspects of the aesthetic sensibiUty. Although his focus is narrow and sharp, he assembles a considerable range of exhibits drawn from...