Aesthetic Relevance Research Articles

Inseparable Insight: Reconciling Cognitivism and Formalism in Aesthetics

A thesis that is rarely stated but often assumed in art criticism and aesthetics concerns the inseparability of form and content in art. The thesis of inseparability states that (1) it is impossible have the same content in two different forms; and (2) it is impossible have the same form in two different contents.' Clearly, the thesis needs elucidation in terms of a plausible account of the distinction between form and content. It also needs be considered whether the inseparability of form and content motivates a theory of art or, less ambitiously, identifies an important criterion in an account of art.2 The inseparability thesis is traditionally associated with formalism, which, as a general theory of art, has been widely condemned. Nevertheless, formalism is currently making a comeback in particular philosophies of the arts-notably, philosophy of music and philosophy of film.3 Sophisticated formalism in relation both music and film allows for the aesthetic relevance of other features of the work besides form while recommending a structural focus for aesthetic appreciation. If the assumption that formalism is no longer relevant our understanding of the arts involves a major oversight, then the inseparability thesis cannot be ignored just because of its traditional association with formalism. But even if one persisted in this oversight, it does not warrant ignoring the importance of the inseparability thesis for the thesis bears no necessary relation any theory of art, including a formalist one. In what follows, I consider whether the inseparability thesis is compatible with aesthetic cognitivism, the view that art is valuable in part because it can give us nontrivial knowledge. Ultimately, I argue that the two are compatible because there are ways of learning from art that depend on the inseparability of form and content. Given the long and tangled history of the debate over the possibility and value of learning from art, it is supremely important recognize, finally, such compatibility. Against defenders of aesthetic cognitivism, skeptics and critics have regularly resorted brandishing the inseparability thesis, defiantly claiming that you cannot expect learn about the world from art if you cannot get to a work's content unaffected by style and medium. Here the assumption is that the kind of aesthetic transformation

One-Dimensional Fan

Drawing on Marcuse’s analysis of one-dimensional society, this article investigates the relationship between text and fan in its cultural micro and macro framing. The article explores the semiotic conditions through which texts function as objects of fandom and juxtaposes the reflective reading of fan texts based on their immediate concretization and normalization with the reflexive engagement demanded by the textual “blanks” in literary texts Iser described. The aesthetic relevance of fan texts, thus, lies not in any specific meanings but in their lack thereof as manifestation of a social and cultural status quo.

Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema (review)

Reviewed by: Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema Joel Black Ivone Margulies, ed. Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. x + 347 pp. Having been routinely dismissed as naive illusionism by materialist and neo-formalist critics alike, cinematic realism is long overdue for re-examination. This ambitious volume approaches realism from a new perspective—not as a mimetic problem involving art’s representation of reality, but as what Ivone Margulies calls a dynamic “aesthetic that effectively enacts cultural and social tensions” (14). Corporeality, contingency, and indexicality replace verisimilitude, referentiality, and iconicity as key categories for studying realist films and analyzing the way they record the sheer uniqueness and unpredictability of the “barely grasped instant” (11). Incidental occurrences that would otherwise escape notice become memorable and even unforgettable in the guise of infinitely repeatable images that retrospectively make chance events appear inevitable. Many of the volume’s essays hark back half a century to André Bazin’s seminal writings on realism. Reflecting on Bazin’s insight into viewers’ “investment” in filmed images of reality, Philip Rosen finds the “root of any true realism” to be largely a matter of “imagination, fantasy, [and] the illogical” (54). Indeed, one of the volume’s recurring themes is the relevance of subjectivity and aesthetics to realist film. When cinematic artifice is not concealed by reality effects but revealed and even celebrated as staged “rites,” it actually contributes to the filmmaker’s documentary project, deepening its social and cultural significance. Thus, Margulies suggests that “reenactment films” teach their lessons not by reproducing traumatic or turbulent events, but by exposing viewers’ unrealistic “back to the future” fantasies of returning to the past in order to change it. Brigitte Peucker considers another type of filmic reenactment—recreations of Vermeer’s hyper-realist paintings as animated tableaux vivants in Greenaway’s and Wenders’s films. James F. Lastra accounts for the absurdity of a goat’s obviously staged fatal “fall” in Buñuel’s Las Hurdes, claiming that it undercuts the film’s pretense of documentary realism. And Noa Steimatsky notes how Pasolini’s adaptation of Saint Matthew’s Gospel required counter-realist measures like shifting the location from the Holy Land to Italy, and adopting a medieval “aesthetic of frontality.” (The folly of a literalist rendering of the Gospels is evident in Mel Gibson’s latest project, The Passion.) Not surprisingly, analyses of filmmakers as different as Dreyer and Mike Leigh result in opposite conclusions. While Richard Porton shows Leigh’s well-known “naturalism” to be highly artificial and indebted as much to Beckett’s spare modernism as to Brecht’s didactic realism, James Schamus challenges the view of Dreyer as a modernist director of avant-garde “art” films, arguing that his [End Page 290] exhaustive researches into historical figures like Joan of Arc reveal him rather to be a practitioner of “textual realism.” The essays concerned with the realist sub-genre of ethnographic film offer particularly striking insights into the heightened reality of death rituals. Thus, Lastra describes the goat’s slaughter in Las Hurdes as a “ritual sacrifice” (186), and Catherine Russell discusses the significance of the “once-only events” of animal sacrifices in Maya Deren’s footage of Haitian possession rituals (283). The theme of death is already announced in the two new translations that open the volume: “Death Every Afternoon,” Bazin’s 1958 meditation on the solemn ritual of death in Pierre Braunberger’s documentary The Bullfight, and “The Screen of Fantasy,” Serge Daney’s Bazinian reflection on realist film’s reliance on the unedited frame to depict “the shared space” of a “real or simulated . . . ‘life and death struggle’” between animal and animal, animal and man, or man and man (36). Margulies is clearly onto something in suggesting that fatal human/animal confrontations—especially those involving risk (Braunberger’s dying bull) or sacrifice (Buñuel’s slain goat)—underscore “the centrality of images of death in discussions of realism and cinema” (15). Readers can supply their own examples, from the unexpected fatalities occurring in the filmed tiger hunt in Pirandello’s 1915 novel Si gira to the use of fake animals to simulate danger and death in pseudo...

Tragedy, Tradition, and Theology in the Book of Lamentations

This article offers a tragic reading of Lamentations, and then uses this reading to get at what is distinctive in the biblical book's theology. The tragic dimension of Lamentations is explicated by showing, first, that the biblical book shares important features, such as historical context, trajectory of the organizing pattern, setting, treatment of the problem of evil, and centrality of the tragic hero, with other tragedies in world literature, and, second, that the poet's tragic vision takes up and manipulates ideas and imagery well known from the Israelite literary tradition. A concluding section treats four issues that are central to the theology of Lamentations: the valuation of human suffering, the authentication of human defiance, the desire for divine and human compassion, and the theological relevance of aesthetics.

The role of relational structures in indexing for the humanities

The paper is divided into three parts. The first develops a framework for evaluating the indexing needs of the humanities with reference to four sets of contrasts: user (need)-oriented vs. document-oriented indexing; subject indexing vs. attribute indexing; scientific writing vs. humanistic writing; and topical relevance vs. logical relevance vs. evidential relevance vs. aesthetic relevance. The indexing needs of the humanities range broadly across these contrasts. The second part establishes the centrality of relationships to the communication of indexable matter and examines the advantages and disadvantages of means used for their expression in both natural languages and index languages. The use of a relational structure, such as a frame, is shown to represent perhaps the best available option. The last part illustrates where the use of relational structures in humanities indexing would help meet some of the needs previously identified. Although not a panacea, the adoption of frame-based indexing in the humanities might substantially improve the retrieval of its literature.

Dialogues of the Word: The Bible as Literature According to Bakhtin (review)

158Philosophy and Literature contrast to his careful, detailed readings of Ashbery, Bishop, and Merrill. Of course, it is difficult to consider entire groups of poets in detail in a single chapter, but no group can be adequately reduced to a single, short poem—and not even its best one at that. His readings of individual contemporary poems outside the boundaries of poetic schools are far more insightful. Ultimately, Shedey's overall diesis is a provocative one, and difficult to fault in general. Poets can embody, or attempt to challenge, the historical consciousness of their age in their work; but they cannot escape it if they are to produce genuine art. A major part of the consciousness of our age is indeed skepticism, and the major poets of our time will be those who manage to confront it direcdy. Shetley's optimism that poetry can appeal to intellectual readers is gratifying, and his book is a useful contribution to the debate about poetry's relation to a general intellectual readership. University of CincinnatiKevin Walzer Dialagues of the Word: The Bible as Literature According to Bakhtin, by Walter L. Reed; xii & 223 pp. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1993, $39.95. In one regard, a book of this sort seems to have been almost inevitable, as its subject represents a convergence of two prominent vogues ofrecent decades in Anglo-American literary criticism and theory: interpretation of the Bible "as literature," over the past thirty years, and appropriation of the critical concepts and methods of the Soviet theorist M. M. Bakhtin, from the early 1980s on. However, whether intended or not as a pun upon the labels of the Gospels (kata Matthaion, kata Markon, etc.), die closing phrase in the book's subtitle is somewhat misleading. As the author concedes, references to biblical texts are scarce in Bakhtin's writings; so, strictly speaking, it would be impossible to give anything but the sketchiest account of the Bible "according to Bakhtin" himself. And when Bakhtin does mention the Bible, he "tends to treat it as official, single-voiced discourse, stressing its public, institutional role in dominandy Christian cultures and periods" (p. 14), a tendency that might seem to discourage adapting Bakhtin as a guide for biblical study. (A notable exception to this tendency is Bakhtin's comparison of early Christian writings to GrecoRoman novels as works that represent, in his own words, a "carnivalization of genres widiin the realm of the serio-comical" [quoted p. 77].) Nonetheless, in perceiving—as Bakhtin apparendy did not—"the striking relevance of Bakhtin's philosophy and aesthetics of dialogue to the peculiarly Reviews159 polyform nature of the Bible," Walter L. Reed finds predecessors in Stephen Prickett, Harold Fisch, and Robert Polzin (p. 14; cf. p. 175 n28). More elaborately than they, Reed tries to demonsttate several advantages to approaching the Bible from the vantage of Bakhtin's "dialogics," as opposed to critical strategies obsessed with "narrative": first, that Bakhtin's theory highlights the bearing of authority upon linguistic usage; second, that it fosters an appreciation of the multifariousness of generic structuring and significant forming of the canonical text; third, that it draws together the scriptures' most distinctive formal trait and their central theme, the persistent dialogue between God and his people. What Reed ultimately argues for is a distillation from Bakhtin of a "poetics of responsibility" (as distinct from the oft-practiced "hermeneutics of suspicion") : "an approach to the written word in which form is recognized as a reliable revelation rather than a deceptive disguise" (p. 171). On the whole, Reed admirably fulfills his considerable task, combining a broad overview of the dialogical poetics of the three main "genres" preserved in the Hebrew canon (law, prophecy, wisdom) with an insightful assessment of the "conversation" between the New Testament and the Hebrew scriptures, as well as with a pair of more in-depth Bakhtinian analyses of the Book ofJob as a dialogic "critique of the Hebrew Bible as a whole" (p. 120) and of the Book of Revelation—that "distinctive, intertestamental finale" (p. 143) of the Christian canon—as "a prime example of unifying discourse and the centralizing force in language" (p. 141). Assuming on the model of Bakhtin's historical...

WHERE'S THE SPEAR? THE QUESTION OF AESTHETIC RELEVANCE

Journal Article WHERE'S THE SPEAR? THE QUESTION OF AESTHETIC RELEVANCE Get access Marcia Muelder Eaton Marcia Muelder Eaton Department of Philosophy, University of MinnesotaTwin Cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, U.S.A. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 32, Issue 1, January 1992, Pages 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/32.1.1 Published: 01 January 1992

A system approach to music

Abstract This paper furnishes a system approach to the structure of musical works. First the musical composition is identified as a system both in the sense of the General System Theory and some more sophisticated system theories. Several mechanisms underlying the history of musical genres and forms are discussed in the second part. Next, the musical work is understood as an open system, based on the distinction between structurally stable musics and morphogenetic musics. A classification of music against the background of a cusp‐catastrophe model is given in section four. Finally, the aesthetic relevance of the system approach to music is emphasized.

Myth in Africa: A Study of Its Aesthetic and Cultural Relevance

Preface 1. Africa and the oral narrative theory: a critical survey 2. What is myth? 3. Mythmaking in Africa 4. Myth and social reality: the poetic imperative 5. Myth and contemporary African literature 6. Myth, mind and culture: a review of prejudices 7. Conclusion Appendix Notes Bibliography Index.

From Aesthetic Criticism to Humanistic Understanding: A Practical Illustration

The relevance of aesthetics, art history, and art criticism to art education can be explained in a conventional essay or in a curriculum unit designed to illustrate it. The following unit, although...

The Aesthetic Imperative, Relevance and Responsibility in Arts Education, Curriculum Issues in Art Education, Vol. 2

The Aesthetic Imperative, Relevance and Responsibility in Arts Education, Curriculum Issues in Art Education, Vol. 2

The Aesthetic Relevance of Authors' and Painters Intentions

The Aesthetic Relevance of Authors' and Painters Intentions

The Aesthetic Relevance of Authors' and Painters' Intentions

interest provides a paradigm an interest in an object for itself' and any consideration which leads one away from the contemplation of the work of art might be deemed nonaesthetic. Any concern with the author's intentions, rather than with that which was achieved in the work, would lead one away from the work of art. Yet how can we regard an author's intentions as irrelevant to our appreciation and understanding of his work? Notwithstanding this debate, the relevance of a painter's intentions with regard to his representational paintings has received comparatively little attention. In this paper I will consider the importance to be attached to the painter's intentions with regard to the aesthetic appreciation and understanding of representational art. I will approach this topic by first suggesting a view on the aesthetic relevance of an author's intentions and will then consider

The Aesthetic Relevance of the Organization of Film Production

This may be an unusual gap in knowledge; I suspect that it is not. Those contemporary textbooks that deal with production organization at all often do so in passing before moving on to the really important matters. My experience at conventions and reading the journals only reinforce Orson Welles' observation that people not involved with the commercial world of film making always want to talk about art, whereas he was a businessman. Welles told of a panel discussion in which he, Jean Cocteau, and Rene Clair were regarded as being cynical because we refused to talk about anything but what films cost.l I take the point of Welles' story to be that film study fails to consider that even recognized film artists are enmeshed in an industrial matrix. In our rush to establish the credentials of film as an art in the academic

Imagination in the Experience of Art

In this paper I shall not be concerned with the imagination as insight, but only with certain aspects of ‘magical’ imagination, that division of the concept which centres upon the notion of an image. In the Philosophical Investigations (II xi) Wittgenstein makes the extremely interesting remark that when a printed triangle is seen, for instance, as a mountain, it is as if an image came into contact, and for a time remained in contact, with the visual impression (i.e. with the object as seen by me). He goes on to say that in a picture a triangular figure may have some such aspect permanently — in the pictorial context we would read the figure at once as a mountain — but that we can make a distinction between ‘regarding’ and ‘seeing’ the figure as the thing meant. I take him to be contrasting those common experiences in which we see a figure in a picture as depicting a person, or as a ‘picture-person’, with those rarer experiences, referred to by art-critics when they talk of ‘presence’, in which it seems as if the person depicted in the picture is there before us ‘in the flesh’, and I assume that, like Sartre, Wittgenstein would suppose that imagination plays a part in experiences of this latter kind. In this paper I shall be concerned not with this sense of the presence of the object depicted, but chiefly with types of imaginal experience in which the image which seems to come into contact with what is perceived is an image of something which is not depicted or described in the work, but which nevertheless achieves a certain strength of presence. I shall consider, also, some types of imaginal experience which we would not naturally describe as an image's coming into contact with what is perceived. Though I shall relate some of the examples I discuss to my starting-point in Wittgenstein, I do not claim to be elaborating Wittgenstein's remark in a manner which would have been acceptable to him. My aims are to give some indication of the nature and scope of the imaginal experience of art, to defend the aesthetic relevance of this type of experience, and to suggest why the imaginal experience of art has been, and still is, valued.

Imagination in the Experience of Art

In this paper I shall not be concerned with the imagination as insight, but only with certain aspects of ‘magical’ imagination, that division of the concept which centres upon the notion of an image. In the Philosophical Investigations (II xi) Wittgenstein makes the extremely interesting remark that when a printed triangle is seen, for instance, as a mountain, it is as if an image came into contact, and for a time remained in contact, with the visual impression (i.e. with the object as seen by me). He goes on to say that in a picture a triangular figure may have some such aspect permanently — in the pictorial context we would read the figure at once as a mountain — but that we can make a distinction between ‘regarding’ and ‘seeing’ the figure as the thing meant. I take him to be contrasting those common experiences in which we see a figure in a picture as depicting a person, or as a ‘picture-person’, with those rarer experiences, referred to by art-critics when they talk of ‘presence’, in which it seems as if the person depicted in the picture is there before us ‘in the flesh’, and I assume that, like Sartre, Wittgenstein would suppose that imagination plays a part in experiences of this latter kind. In this paper I shall be concerned not with this sense of the presence of the object depicted, but chiefly with types of imaginal experience in which the image which seems to come into contact with what is perceived is an image of something which is not depicted or described in the work, but which nevertheless achieves a certain strength of presence. I shall consider, also, some types of imaginal experience which we would not naturally describe as an image's coming into contact with what is perceived. Though I shall relate some of the examples I discuss to my starting-point in Wittgenstein, I do not claim to be elaborating Wittgenstein's remark in a manner which would have been acceptable to him. My aims are to give some indication of the nature and scope of the imaginal experience of art, to defend the aesthetic relevance of this type of experience, and to suggest why the imaginal experience of art has been, and still is, valued.

The Aesthetic Relevance of Artists' Intentions

The Aesthetic Relevance of Artists' Intentions