Aesthetic Stance Research Articles

Object, Space, and Fragility in Luigi Nono's "Das atmende Klarsein"

Object, Space, and Fragility in Luigi nono's Das atmende Klarsein Peter Ivan Edwards Luigi Noncs Das atmende Klarsein for bass flute, small choir, and live electronics isone of his lateworks, written from 1980-83.1 As is common inmany lateworks byNono, it is the result of an intense col laboration with a performer colleague, in this case Roberto Fabbriciani, at the Heinrich-Strobel-Stiftung Experimental Electronic Studio in Freiburg, Germany. Fabbriciani's article, "Walking with Gigi" describes his work with Nono. It offers an illuminating entry intoNono's world and a provoca tive starting point for this investigation. Fabbriciani describes the working relationship as one in which "[l]osing the fear of taking a wrong path allows error to become a further stimulus in the search for new horizons."2 Often, after days of research in the studio, theywould dismiss everything and start off in a new direction. Fabbriciani's article 226 PerspectivesofNew Music paints Nono's approach to composition as necessarily collaborative and continually dedicated to a freedom that saw possibility in uncertainty. Only this uncertainty can lead to discovery of possibility's every corner and the depths of a selected universe. This is a prominent and necessary quality ofNono's lateworks. The approach is embodied in amotto that Nono discovered in amonastery inToledo and used in various forms as tides for some of his laterworks?"No hay caminos, hay que caminar" (There are no roads, just go). To manifest his aesthetic stance of traveling for the purpose of discov ery in Das atmende Klarsein, I believe Nono establishes objects for musical investigation. Unlike themusical subject, which is generally lim ited to amelodic and/or rhythmic entity, themusical object has amuch broader scope. It can be formed from a chord, an interval, a timbre, a texture, or a relationship between these elements. These musical objects exist to provide an entity inwhich exploration is pursued via composi tional methods that expose itspossibilities. Nono uses musical object in a variety ofways, each suitable to the compositional situation he faces.3 Nono creates two distinct worlds of exploration and discovery inDas atmende Klarsein?one of choir and the other of bass flute.The compo sition is divided into eight sections, presented alternately. The choir begins thework and has four sections, separated by solo bass flute sec tions. The final section is an improvisation by the bass flutist along with pre-recorded excerpts from the previous bass flute sections. Although there are some overlaps created by held notes at the end of a section, the flute and the choir never perform together. The material and texture of the choir is very similar among its sections. The flute material differs profoundly between sections. Nono's employment of electronics rein forces his differing approaches to material and texture in the choir and flute sections. The choir engages with the live electronics in a consistent fashion in each section, largely using spatialized amplification of varying degrees of loudness, though one section includes the use of harmonizer to "thicken" the sound. The flute's engagement with the live electronics is unique in each section. In the firstflute section, Nono incorporates theHalaphon, a spatialization program designed by Hans Peter Haller of the Freiburg Experimental Studio. The second flute section employs two delays. In the final flute section, Nono uses two harmonizers, approximately one quarter tone above and below the performed pitch. Additionally, the depths of each of these respective worlds is explored via different means. The foundation of these differences stems from Nono's use of choir as a timbrally limited instrument and the flute as timbrally rich. Nono employs air-to-tone ratios, multiphonics, vibrato, and tremolo, among other techniques with the flute writing. Some of Object, Space, and Fragility 227 these techniques, which are easily transferable to voices?most obviously the use of air and vibrato?are not employed in the choir part. Instead, Nono limits the timbral palette to the four voice ranges and the timbral shadings that result from registral limitations.4 In both instances, how ever,Nono relies on the establishment ofmusical objects and the use of timbre among other elements as tools for exploration of both the object itselfand the respective...

Maximum Clarity and Other Writings on Music (review)

Maximum Clarity and Other Writings on Music. By Johnston. Edited by Bob Gilmore. (Music in American Life.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. [xxxviii. 275 p. ISBN-10: 0- 252-03098-2; ISBN-13: 978-025203-098- 7. $40.] Bibliographic references, discography, index. Early on in this magnificent collection of essays, editor Bob Gilmore quotes critic Mark Swed describing Johnston as probably our most subversive composer, a composer able to make both radical thinking and avant-garde techniques sound invariably gracious (p. xi) This view is supported time and again throughout the forty-two essays Maximum Clarity contains, as Johnston takes thorny theoretical issues and explains them as though you were sitting in his living room, relaxing on a hot summer day. The depth and originality of his thought and writing make me wonder why he has remained in the shadows of new music, known only to those with an interest in microtonality. Many of Johnston's most important works are unavailable on recording, including Knocking Piece, the Chamber Symphony, and the first, third, and fifth string quartets. His work is little represented among scholarly literature: there is only one monograph, Heidi Von Gunden's The Music of Johnston (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1986); a smattering of articles, most notably Randall Shinn's Ben Johnston's Fourth String Quartet (Perspectives of New Music 15, no. 2 [Spring- Summer 1977]: 145-73); and one fulllength interview (in William Duckworth, Talking Music: Conversations with John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Five Generations of American Experimental Composers [New York: Da Capo Press, 1999]). In some ways, Johnston remains a prophet in the wilderness, proclaiming a compelling aesthetic vision. Hopefully this collection will spark a reevaluation of his place in American musical history. Bob Gilmore, author of the compelling Harry Partch: Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), has returned to a unjustly neglected composer with his new book. His close association with Johnston is evident throughout the work as the essays it contains represent almost all of the composer's written output, from articles published in Perspectives of New Music to unpublished lectures and program annotations. Johnston clearly had input on the collection although Gilmore provided the final ordering and selection of writings. In light of this evidently good relationship between the two men, I found it striking that Maximum Clarity lacks a contemporary voice. Gilmore's few editorial comments are relegated to footnotes while Johnston's current views barely appear. The composer only wrote two new essays for this volume, Quintet for Groups : Reminiscence and A Notation System for Extended Just Intonation, and they represent the only two writings from the past ten years. As a result, Maximum Clarity exists as a voice from the past, not a vibrant commentary on the present state of music. I find this focus surprising since Johnston's aesthetic stance has long been toward a passionate engagement with contemporary culture. Adding to the lack of voice is the distance at which Gilmore keeps Johnston; we do not get to know the composer as a person. Gilmore supplies a short introduction articulating Johnston's theoretical and aesthetic framework and the influence of other composers on its development, but gives little in the way of biography, stating that Johnston did not want it, and he found it useful only as a framework in understanding the compositions. Instead, Gilmore constructed a fourteen-page chronology listing important moments and works in the composer's life. The chronology will certainly be a welcome beginning for future research, but left me wanting to know more about the man behind the ideas with which I was interacting. Still, this is a small complaint about a welcome addition to our knowledge of music since 1945. Gilmore divides the writings into four sections, the first being On Music Theory. …

Using Historical Nonfiction and Literature Circles to Develop Elementary Teachers’ Nature of Science Understandings

Explicit instruction of the nature of science (NOS) may be problematic if the NOS is portrayed as either a solely a cognitive or discursive endeavor, overlooking other aspects of epistemology, such as aesthetic ways of knowing. Here the aesthetic stance refers to individual’s responses during reading as they create links between the text and their own lives, prompting personal and emotional connections. From an aesthetic orientation, exploring historical nonfiction science texts via literature circles allows alternative possibilities for participants to create personal connections to the NOS. This article presents practical techniques and theoretical rationales for teaching the NOS using literature circles and concluding thoughts regarding narrative pedagogy and research possibilities associated with this instructional approach in elementary science teacher education.

Taking an Aesthetic Stance Toward Teaching and Assessment

Taking an Aesthetic Stance Toward Teaching and Assessment

Wallace Stevens and the apocalyptic mode

Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode focuses on Stevens's doubled stance toward the apocalyptic past: his simultaneous use of and resistance to apocalyptic language, two contradictory forces that have generated two dominant and incompatible interpretations of his work. book explores the often paradoxical roles of apocalyptic and antiapocalyptic rhetoric in modernist and postmodernist poetry and theory, particularly as these emerge in the poetry of Stevens and Jorie Graham. This study begins with an examination of the textual and generic issues surrounding apocalypse, culminating in the idea of apocalyptic language as a form of discursive mastery over the mayhem of events. Woodland provides an informative religious/historical discussion of apocalypse and, engaging with such critics as Parker, Derrida, and Fowler, sets forth the paradoxes and complexities that eventually challenge any clear dualities between apocalyptic and antiapocalyptic thinking. Woodland then examines some of Stevens's wartime essays and poems and describes Stevens's efforts to salvage a sense of self and poetic vitality in a time of war, as well as his resistance to the possibility of cultural collapse. Woodland discusses the major postwar poems Credences of Summer and The Auroras of Autumn in separate chapters, examining the interaction of (anti)apocalyptic modes with, respectively, pastoral and elegy. final chapter offers a perspective on Stevens's place in literary history by examining the work of a contemporary poet, Jorie Graham, whose poetry quotes from Stevens's oeuvre and shows other marks of his influence. Woodland focuses on Graham's 1997 collection Errancy and shows that her antiapocalyptic poetry involves a very different attitude toward the possibility of a radical break with a particular cultural or aesthetic stance. Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode, offering a new understanding of Stevens's position in literary history, will greatly interest literary scholars and students.

Jaromír Funke's Abstract Photo series of 1927–1929: History in the making

In a suite of approximately twenty abstract still lifes from the late 1920s, Czech photographer Jaromír Funke boldly took shadow and mat board as his primary compositional elements. Amateur and avant-garde aesthetic stances balance in these self-reflexive works in a way that is paradigmatic for the era of high modernism in central European photography. Funke emulated here formal devices explored in Cubism and the photogram, whereby phenomenal reality is converted into a fragmentary sign system. In good amateur fashion, however, he refused to abandon mastery, to accept ready-made elements as in cubist collage, or cultivate chance as Man Ray did in his camera-less images. Indeed, in an article on Man Ray published near the start of this series, Funke suggested by implication his greatest ambition with Photo: to shape a history of the photographic medium and to indicate where that history is headed.

The aesthetic turn: unravelling recent aesthetic approaches to human-computer interaction

With the rapid penetration of digital interfaces into all aspects of everyday life, the need for understanding the aesthetic aspects of interaction between humans and computers has come into focus. Various positions suggest that aesthetics offers IT design and research an enhanced analytical foundation going beyond the traditional use-oriented principles of HCI and usability. However, this new body ofliterature employs different notions of aesthetics, resultingin a blurred picture. This article reviews the contributions of aesthetics to IT design and research, which we refer to as the aesthetic turn. Based on a thorough literature review, we propose a division of the field into four overall approaches: the cultural, the functionalistic, the experience-based and the techno-futuristic. Finally we discuss the prospects and pitfalls of approaching research and design of digital interfaces from aesthetic stances.

Bulwer-Lytton's Pelham : The Disciplinary Dandy and the Art of Government

The shifting strata of society following Napoleonic Wars heralded emergence of a literary genre which would effectively market social emulation. For reading public, silver-fork novels of 1820s seemed to advance what Pierre Bourdieu identifies as an of and were thus read as instruction or initiation manuals for rising above. With its painstaking attention to day-to-day details of fashionable living, silver-fork novel was a public source of knowledge for an ideology of social differentiation and distinction; it was required reading for nouveaux riches as well as a guidebook to exclusive society for aspiring social climbers. For Bourdieu, objectively and subjectively aesthetic stances adopted in matters like cosmetics, clothing, or home decoration are opportunities to experience or assert one's position in social space, as a rank to be upheld or a distance to be kept;1 that is, aesthetic taste is not so much a matter of individual preference as it is a form of cultural capital. Indeed, according to Bourdieu, taste is a knowledge of high culture; it is a material and institutional practice with definite social and cultural effects.2 The tendency, however, of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Pelham; or Adventures of a Gentleman (1828) silver-fork novel that would come to be considered the hornbook of dandyism was fundamentally opposed to these popular expectations.3 Bulwer recognized and took advantage of power of taste, but he mobilized this ideology to construct a new form of cultural capital. In Pelham, Bulwer assiduously disrupts and reconfigures moral and social authority by bodying forth an aristocratic hero whose very privilege challenges political hierarchy and social decorums he supposedly enforces. Thus, Pelham works not only to interpellate its dandy hero into a grid of liberal values, but also acts as a relay of social mechanisms of regulation, conscripting and disciplining readers to a new (Victorian) moral order. Though he was an advocate of political reform,4 Bulwer saw that England's post-Regency society was most in need of a fundamental reform

Disastrous Aesthetics: Irony, Ethics, and Gender in Barthelme’s Snow White

The observer ought to be an amorist. --Kierkegaard (47) From the opening of Donald Barthelme's Snow White, the reader is confronted with the question of the aesthetic and its seemingly ironic relation to gender. The text begins: SHE is a tall dark containing a great many spots: one above the breast, one above the belly, one above the knee, one above the ankle, one above the buttock, one on the back of the neck. All of these are on the left side, more or less in a row, as you go up and down: [dot] [dot] [dot] [dot] [dot] [dot] (3) Certainly it makes all the sense in the fairy-tale world that a like Snow White should have beauty spots, but within this seemingly self-evident opening passage are confronted with a series of difficult aesthetic, linguistic, and ideological questions. First, note a grammatical slippage in the word beauty--initially used as a noun, then as an adjective. However, this slippage, easy enough to deal with and explain linguistically, leads directly to higher-order questions. Is Snow White beautiful because of the spots--do the spots make her beautiful? Or are the spots seen as beautiful because they are attached to such a beauty--does she make them beautiful? Is the word spots even right here, or should it give way to the more postmodern marks? Or, conversely, is the whole question of here a merely tautological one--if she's a (whatever that may mean), then she's ipso facto got beauty spots. If do have a tautology, is it an enclosure out of which the novel cannot lift itself? Can aesthetics progress from this linguistic question? Can Barthelme's version of Snow White properly begin? Perhaps as compensation for the problems inherent in the word beauty, the reader is next invited to picture Snow White's through the marks that rest not so coincidentally near her fetishized erogenous zones: breast, belly, knee, ankle, buttock, neck. To assist the reader in attempting to conjure up an aesthetic image of Snow White's marks, there's a helpful representation provided in the text. However, this series of bullets on the left side of the page manages only to disrupt or frustrate the reader's representational desire and, in the process, links this frustrated desire to the failure of the word or category beauty--to the tautology that, let us say, opens the text or, perhaps, (fore)closes it as it attempts to begin. Unable to climb toward the light of the signified, remain exposed to the uncertainty of the signifier. This problem concerning meaning, which dogs all of Barthelme's Snow White, seems to rob textual or aesthetic production of its traditional privilege and put it on the same level as other cultural productions. This postmodern situation, in turn, troubles traditional aesthetic thinking on at least three registers: first, it robs aesthetics of its role as arbiter of taste and value; second, it collapses the aesthetic distance that is absolutely essential for a traditional notion of aesthetic judgment; (1) finally, and perhaps most cripplingly, such a leveling gesture robs aesthetics of its proper object--after Warhol, how to tell the difference between a disposable commodity and enduring art? But as Dan the dwarf puts it in Snow White's most famous passage, there may be a way for aesthetics to continue from the point where its founding distinctions are irremediably blurred, from the point where art cannot separate itself from trash: at such a point, you will agree, the question turns from a question of of this trash to a question of appreciating its qualities.... And there can no longer be any question of disposing of it, because it's all there is, and will simply have to learn how to dig it--that's slang, but particularly appropriate here. (97) Here have all the ingredients for a familiar reading of aesthetics in Snow White and Barthelme's project on the whole: Barthelme, it seems, asks us to consider an ironic aesthetic stance as compensation for the absence of a transcendental signified; whatever may think of trash, we will simply have to learn how to 'dig' it. …

A Novel Study Through Drama

In this article, Rosenblatt's transactional theory of reading is used to build a rationale for using drama to promote an aesthetic stance to novel study. One teacher's experience with implementing a variety of drama strategies within the study of the text Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen, is explored. The focus of the exploration is on the types of drama strategies the teacher used to enhance her students' personal involvement during the novel study. Through drama, the students were provided with the opportunity to savor the images, sounds, smells, actions, and feelings that the words of the text evoked. The students were encouraged to adopt a range of stances on the aesthetic‐efferent continuum through a variety of sound and serviceable drama strategies. An in‐depth analysis of the student responses is provided.

Proust's Cup of Tea: Homoeroticism and Victorian Culture by Emily Eells (review)

MLRy 98.4, 2003 999 divine privilege, substituting a false image of the world for the 'face cachee-face visible' of Christian tradition. Allegorizing the writing process (Charles Grivel), the photographic metaphor also informs Le Revelateur du globe, a work on Columbus overdue for scholarly attention, while Livio Belloi's observation that the 'grand ab? sent' from the technophobic charge sheet was cinematography (p. 81) emerges from Bloy's unpublished account of the catastrophic fireat the Bazar de la Charite in May 1897: by amalgamating the Papal Nuncio's opening benedictionand the fatal carelessness of the Russian projectionist, Bloy gave uniquely 'incendiary' expression to his pathological anti-modernism and the eschatological exasperation ('charite de bazar') which found 'la plus douce consolation' in the sinking of the Titanic (p. 154). Bloy half-expected and half-dreaded a Cossack invasion, and lived almost long enough to see the Bolshevik Revolution. Since his death in 1917, the communications media have been transformed beyond recognition and 'modernism' has receded, leaving him an undeconstructable, anachronistic presence, a powerful ifdistorting mirror ofthe 'Belle epoque' whose dark undercurrents he both relished and reviled. University of Stirling William Kidd Proust's Cup of Tea: Homoeroticism and Victorian Culture. By Emily Eells. (Studies in European Cultural Transition, 15) Aldershot: Ashgate. 2002. xii + 248 pp.; 16 pp. plates. ?45. ISBN 0-7546-0518-3. Emily Eells's study formulates and explores a sexual and aesthetic identity which she terms 'Anglosexuality'. The 'Anglosexual' is Proust's third or 'intersex', as repre? sented through British cultural (and scientific) intertexts. British culture, in Eells's reading of the novel, becomes a protective, mediating site which enabled Proust to portray a taboo subject and to construct an aesthetics of homosexuality. Anglosex? uality is thus more than a sexual orientation; drawing on Foucault's definition of inversion, Eells sees it also as an artistic sensitivity, an aesthetic stance, and a new mode of perception. Eells is meticulous in documenting both contemporary Parisian Anglophilia and Proust's exposure to British art and culture. Her scholarship and erudition in the British context are impressively wide-ranging, and while the study is written with a non-French-specialist readership in mind, it is equally illuminating to Proust schol? ars. Proust's debt to the Victorians, especially to Ruskin, is already familiar, but it is the microscopic dimension of Eells's work which sets it apart, uncovering as it does fine details of both well- and lesser-known British intertexts. Through close textual readings and painstaking detective work, Eells brings to light precise sources and ref? erences forkey facets of Proust's construction of homosexuality: androgyny in H. G Wells's The Time Machine, hermaphroditism in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure; a homosocial and homoerotic universe in Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure stories, as well, of course, as a vision of inversion and duality (both of identity and narrative voice) injekyll and Hyde. The reader may occasionally feel that a coincidence of ideas is being posited as an influence of ideas, but the discussion is always informative and highly readable. Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde feature prominently as sources for Proust's (inter )aesthetic theories. From a suggestive reading which links floral hermaphroditism to literary creation via Darwin in Chapter 4, the book progresses to an analysis of sexual ambiguity in pre-Raphaelite art (Chapter 5), and to a new reading, drawing in such visual apparatus as mirrors and photography, of the well-established links between inversion, voyeurism, and artistic creation (Chapter 6). It concludes with a perceptive discussion of the importance of the interaesthetic nature of Proust's iooo Reviews work in the construction of Anglosexuality: the masculine 'word' is combined with the 'feminine' image to create an 'androgynous imagetext' (p. 172), and thus a new language in which to express homosexual desire. Unfortunately, the study contains a number of typographical errors, especially in quotations. Some surprising misreadings also intrude, as when Eells claims that 'the only sexual act Proust's narrator admits to indulging in is "le plaisir solitaire"' (p. 29). Occasionally, too, one detects a loss of tautness in the argument: the relevance ofa par? ticular intertext to the formation of an Anglosexuality is, at...

MESSIAEN'S CHORD TABLES: ORDERING THE DISORDERED

When Heinrich Ströbel commissioned Olivier Messiaen to write a new piece for the Donaueschingen Festival, he took care to specify that the piano and the ondes martenot were to be strictly forbidden. (‘Attention, Messiaen! Cette-fois-ci, pas d'onde, pas de piano!’) Such a specification is liable to be read as a measure taken to guard against any possible revival of the sound-world of Turangalîla-symphonie (1946–8). In an effort to surpass the achievements of Turangalîla, however, Messiaen had moved rapidly and decisively in the intervening years. Brief periods of teaching at Darmstadt and Tanglewood led to an obvious surge of experimental works, followed by Réveil d'oiseaux (1953), Oiseaux exotiques (1955–6) and Catalogue d'oiseaux (1956–8), his first attempts at composing primarily with bird songs. With the completion of Chronochromie (1959–60), the aesthetic stance of most of the ensuing works was firmly in place.

Ethics and Aesthetics

The central concepts in ethical discourse are held to be responsibility (regarding ourselves and others), justice, and mercy (or charity), whereas in the discourse of aesthetics a similarly important position is attributed to the concepts of perception (or sensibility), experience (of the particularity and alterity of the phenomenal), and art (in terms of objects, processes or events that motivate this kind of experience). What makes for a persistent difference or even sometimes an incommensurability of the ethical and aesthetic stance is the claim to absolute autonomy and unrestricted validity that is made by both. In some postmodern versions of ethical discourse we can observe an approximation to aesthetics that can side-step the area of possible conflict. What is more important, however, is that both in the Levinas type of ethics and in postmodern aesthetics the focus is on alterity ; moreover, the aesthetic stance, in its emphasis on the specificity of the particular and on the imagination as the faculty of the possible, may well be indispensable for any ‘right’ way to act.

The role of context in preschoolers’ judgments of emotion in art

Preschool aged children (3 and 5 years) were asked to judge the emotion expressed in museum art under two situations; one where they observed an adult conspicuously make judgments of the emotion portrayed in paintings and a second where they were not exposed to adult judgments. In the experimental condition, children were presented with five paintings (four portraying a target emotion and one an alternate emotion) and watched as an adult chose three paintings that expressed one of four target emotions (happy, sad, excited or calm). Children were asked to pick the fourth from the remaining pair of paintings. In the control condition, children were asked to choose the painting portraying the target emotion from the pair without watching an adult make choices. All stimuli had been previously rated by artists to be good exemplars of each of the emotion categories. The results indicated that 3‐year‐olds were at chance in the control condition, but matched art to emotion in a manner that was consistent with artists’ norms in the experimental condition. Five‐year‐olds showed better than chance performance in the control condition, and even higher levels of performance in the experimental condition. These findings suggest that children's judgments of expressiveness in art may be facilitated by social interaction with others who take an aesthetic stance toward paintings.

Critical Issues: Limits of Identification: The Personal, Pleasurable, and Critical in Reader Response

In this article, I argue that the most common use of reader-response theory in the classroom is misguided in its emphasis on personal response and identification. After reconsidering the meaning of the “aesthetic stance” as defined in the work of Louise Rosenblatt, I discuss the social and political nature of readers, texts, and contexts. I include two examples of teachers talking about a work of children's literature to illustrate that when a text is about characters whose cultures and life worlds are very different from the reader's, disrupting the reader's inclination to identify with the text can heighten the reader's self consciousness and text consciousness. This stance should not be viewed as less aesthetic than a more direct or immediate relationship between reader and text. Finally, I argue for a broader view of what aesthetic reading can mean, one that addresses the social and political dimensions of texts and invites students to take pleasure in both the personal and the critical.

Knowledge-seeking and self-schema: A case for the motivational dimensions of exposition

Based on the work of Rosenblatt, a reader's response to text has been conceptualized as lying on a continuum from an efferent to an aesthetic stance. Those assuming an efficient stance are described as detached and passive, with a focus on taking information away from the reading event. In the aesthetic stance, by contrast, readers are focused on the experience of the moment and on losing themselves in the pleasure and beauty of the story. Within the reading literature, motivation more often is associated with an aesthetic stance and with narrative text, whereas knowledge-seeking via exposition is linked to the more passive and uninspiring efferent stance. It is my contention that knowledge-seeking through exposition is indeed motivating because it contributes positively to readers' self-schemata. To support this argument, I offer a more expanded view of motivation than typically is considered in the literary research. This view is based on the writings in goal orientation, interest, and agency. Further, I provide an example from the literacy research that illustrates how these dimensions work in classrooms to enhance students' motivations.

Imagination and Transfiguration

Michael C. Jordan Imagination and Transfiguration The logos may lead, but die imagination is always the crux. Eva T. H. Brann There are many good reasons TO believe that there are serious hindrances to the intellectuaUy and spirituaUy fruitful exercise of the imagination in contemporary Ufe. Madeleine L'Engle draws out this observation by noting that a major and startling moment presented by the Gospels, theTransfiguration, is largely ignored by contemporary Christians, probably, she speculates,"because we are afraid": We are afraid of theTransfiguration for much the same reason that people are afraid that theatre is a "lie," diat a story isn't "true," diat art is somehow immoral, carnal and not spiritual.1 Such fear, surely, derives from our basic distrust of the imagination 's ability to convey something other than projections of our own desires. We distrust and so fail to recognize the mediating Logos 1:1 1997 146 Logos function of the imagination as it extends our perceptual and responsive powers beyond the limited range required for successful functioning in our practical activities. The depiction oftheTransfiguration in the gospels ofMatthew, Mark, and Luke, serves well as an exemplar of the indispensability ofthe imagination in our effort to encounter the mystery ofthe divinity of Jesus Christ, and serves also as a model of the nature and importance of the power of the imagination itself. The term "transfiguration" (metemorphôthê, "he was transfigured") in Matthew and Mark (but not in Luke) points to the central action ofimagination, the action ofgrasping one subject in two essentially different states simultaneously, in this case by witnessing the metamorphosis from one state to another, in a manner that illuminates our understanding ofthe subject.The theophanic moment of the transfiguration takes place when the divinity of Jesus radiates from and through his human form, so that we encounter a visible manifestation of the glory of the Lord, a concept developed profoundly as the basis of the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar.2 It would be fair to say also that the transfiguration carries us to the roots ofmetaphor in imagination, and can be conveyed only through figurative language: "and his face shone like the sun, and his garments became white as light,"in Matthew's gospel. The gospel accounts of the transfiguration demand of us a great and integral exercise ofthe imagination, and ifthese texts have lost their resonance in much contemporary Christian experience, as L'Engle suggests they have, one cause is arguably the inadequacy of our attenuated power ofimagination. The opinion that we suffer from some general attenuation of the power of imagination probably does not go far enough to capture the particular difficulty of the contemporary situation in this regard. A bolder argument can be made that the contemporary intellectual condition in general terms suffers from an overt hostility toward the imagination, that we in fact suffer from a rejec- Imagination and Transfiguration tion ofthe category ofthe aesthetic in which contemplative vision empowered by the imagination sets before us a horizon within which our full capacity as human persons can unfold. This rejection has been studied insightfully from several surprisingly different directions in recent years, so that we can glance briefly at the problem as it shows itselfin a theological context, in a philosophical context, and in the anti-metaphysical context of postmodernist thought. In Seeing the Form, von Balthasar devotes a long introduction to tracing what he calls the "elimination ofaesthetics from theology" in both a Protestant and Catholic version ofthat elimination. "The word 'aesthetic' automatically flows from the pens of both Protestant and Catholic writers when they want to describe an attitude which, in the last analysis, they find to be frivolous, merely curious and self-indulgent,"von Balthasar observes, while he goes on to note also that writers who advocate an "aesthetic world-view" regard that which is Christian as destructive of a true aesthetic stance toward life.3 Von Balthasar identifies as the fundamental deficiency of a Protestant aesthetics a deeply flawed concept ofbeauty: "The assumption throughout is that the world of the beautiful belongs originally to man, and that it is he who determines its content and boundaries."4 Beauty, according to this view...

Re-Reading Poppea: Some Thoughts on Music and Meaning in Monteverdi's Last Opera

There is a convenient fiction maintained by all but the most fervent postmodernist concerning the interpretation of opera: that the music somehow reveals how a particular drama should be played out on the stage. Whether a reading (or a production) is supposedly authentic, traditional or modernist in intent and delivery, support is invoked for it within the musical score by assuming a clarity in the semiotic play of signifier and signified that in turn validates our various responses to opera as drama. We know an aria signifying ‘love’, ‘triumph’, ‘rage’ or ‘lament’ when we hear one, and we respond accordingly, indeed conventionally to the extent that we often focus less on what is being sung about than on how it is being sung. And whether or not one agrees with Joseph Kerman's battle-cry ‘In opera, the dramatist is the composer’, the notion of the composer as musician-orator, persuading and moving at will, is a powerful one, reinforcing deep-seated beliefs concerning the transcendental truths about the human condition conveyed by the canon of operatic masterpieces. It is also a trope adopted early in the history of opera. When the unknown librettist of Claudio Monteverdi's Le nozze d'Enea in Lavinia (1641; now lost) praised its composer for he was not only invoking a topos drawn from classical antiquity; he was also affirming an aesthetic stance that retains its fascination even today.

"It's stories still": Reflexiveness in Samuel Beckett's Narratives

This paper explores the use of reflexive and metafictional narrative structures in The Unnamable and other texts by Samuel Beckett. Reflexivity is shown to be the structural basis at all textual levels, from the articulation of character and plot development, through the use of narrative voice and modality, to the implied authorial level and the aesthetic stance of the text. Narratology and deconstruction are used as analytical tools to explore the peculiar semiotic productivity of the Beckettian text and draw the aesthetic and philosophical implications of Beckett's use of narrative form.

STANCE TOWARDS A LITERARY WORK: APPLYING THE TRANSACTIONAL THEORY TO CHILDREN'S RESPONSES

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to examine childrens’ responses to a literary work from a reader response perspective, specifically the concepts of stance and personal meaningfulness drawn from Rosenblatt's (1978) transactional theory. Data were the free, written responses of 38 fifth‐grade children to nine works of realistic literature and film. Classification systems were developed to characterize stance on an efferent to aesthetic continuum, and level of personal understanding reached. Results revealed 1) between‐text differences for stance and understanding, 2) book and film differences for stance, but not for understanding, 3) the majority of responses were written from an aesthetic stance, and also went beyond the simplest literal level of understanding, and 4) the use of an aesthetic stance ‐ when responders focused on the lived‐through experience of the work ‐ was associated with significantly higher levels of understanding, clearly providing empirical support for the theories of Rosenblatt...