Aesthetic Criticism Research Articles

أنساق المعارضة السياسية في مضمر شعر (بلند الحيدري): مقاربة بمنظور النقد الثقافي

The culture was able to pass its patterns embedded in many areas of everyday lifestyle, among which and especially its aesthetic aspects are best expressed through the poetic texts of the poet Bland al-Haidari. We found that culture became the second author in parallel with the dissected texts of the apparent author al-Haidari. We have found the effect of culture is so strong within the texts that at times the poet expresses things in his literary language and with the full awareness that appear differently from what the embedded subtext suggests. Our study, which came under the title: (THE PATTERNS OF THE POLITICAL OPPOSITION IN THE CONTEXT OF THE POETRY OF BLAND AL-HAIDARI: AN APPROACH TO CULTURAL CRITICISM) through which we were able to uncover a set of embedded political patterns, expressing the opposition sides, hiding under the aesthetic rhetorical façade of the text. For this reason, we have resorted to cultural criticism, because it is the competence of this criticism to cross the literary connotations and reach the third semantic dimension, which is the semantic dimension. This is the essence of the difference between literary and cultural criticism, as literary criticism does not go beyond critical aesthetics.

From the perspective of ecological aesthetics, Marx's critical thought and enlightenment of alienation ecological aesthetics

The aesthetic criticism of alienation ecology is Marx's aim in 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. In the Manuscript, Marx took alienated labor as the main line to highlight the beauty of the organic interaction between realistic human's sensibility and inorganic body, revealing that the distortion of the aesthetic relationship between human and nature lies in the accumulation of private property, and further pointing out that only through the return of free and conscious labor and the complete abandonment of private property can the natural body be liberated from the cage of irrational alienation. "Poetically inhabiting" in the communist aesthetic kingdom. Marx's critical thought of ecological aesthetics still inspires us how to become a better aesthetic "class subject": In the direction change of the body, we should change from "body slavery" to "body freedom"; In the transformation of world thought, we should change from "anthropocentrism" to "non-anthropocentrism". In the sublimation of ethical intuition, we should change from "hugging nature tightly" to "alienating nature appropriately". In the construction of survival paradigm, from the ecological "I think" to "the real existence".

Finding words: Aesthetic criticism and television

Those endorsing or opposing the development of television aesthetics scholarship have exhibited an admirable willingness to reflect upon the rationales and motivations for formulating value judgements. However, very little equivalent attention has been afforded to processes that occur within this area: how scholars conduct analysis and develop claims for achievement in television. In addressing this lack, the following article surveys some of the meanings that ‘criticism’ has encompassed in Television Studies, offering ‘aesthetic criticism’ as a useful term to describe the work of analysis and evaluation, before moving to a series of close readings of aesthetic criticism in practice.

Критика «технотронной цивилизации» у П.П. Гайденко в аспекте немецкой культуркритики

Piama Pavlovna Gaidenko is most often referred to as a brilliant historian of phi­losophy, the author of the original concept of the evolution of science, but her work clearly shows interest in ontological and “existentialist” topics, which sug­gests the existence of a certain coherent philosophical project that demonstrates elements of the Christian worldview. Dealing with the issues of the genesis of European rationality, Gaidenko as philosopher was always guided by the task of overcoming the “paradigm of thinking” that was born at the beginning of the Modernity and was associated with the figure of a knowing and creative “subject” who denies the complexity and multidimensionality of the world, who undertakes to rebuild in a revolutionary way. To put an end to the dominance of “deontologized subjectivism”, leading to anthropological, ecological and other crises, is possible only through the restoration of the damaged reputation of ra­tio, through a new understanding of the collision of knowledge and faith, which reflects the tragedy of Western European culture, which has forgotten about God and being. According to our hypothesis, behind the standard designations of such Soviet philosophical topics as “criticism of European rationalism”, “criticism of bourgeois aesthetics”, “criticism of non-Marxist concepts of dialectics”, etc. – a peculiar cultural-critical approach is traced, which, on the one hand, can be compared with the German Kulturkritik of the 20th century, and on the other hand, demonstrates the ontologism which is typical for the Russian philosophical tradition. We single out three elements of the philosophical project of P. Gaidenko: 1) criticism of mass society and the “tragedy of aestheticism”, 2) criticism of technocracy and “breakthrough to the transcendent”, 3) appeal to the ontologi­cal roots of reason and values. We propose to clarify them, outlining the ways of typological comparison with special discourses within the conservative criti­cism of modernity – in particular, criticism of massification, criticism of techno­logy, problems of value and worldview orientation.

ЧИТАТЕЛЬСКИЕ ЗАБОТЫ ЭСТЕТИЧЕСКОЙ КРИТИКИ

Contemporaries considered the main representatives of aesthetic criticism: V. P. Botkin, P. V. Annenkov and A. V. Druzhinin like-minded people. But they rarely referred to each other and did not assert their methodological unity. Druzhinin was a professional writer and wrote constantly, and Annenkov and Botkin were amateurs: living in literature, arts, they wrote occasionally. Therefore, Druzhinin’s aesthetic legacy looks confused and archaic, while Annenkov and Botkin’s aesthetic legacy looks solid and promising. However, Druzhinin’s aesthetic throwing is fraught with future discoveries, which gives them special weight and significance. Annenkov saw the “mirror” of society in literature and often wrote about social types, although his assessments were diametrically opposed to the democratic camp. Druzhinin has very few social type analyses, and Botkin has none.In the interpretation of the role of criticism in the literary process, the “priceless triumvirate” was more unanimous. All of them used the generally accepted terminology (“the purpose of poetry is poetry”, art is a school of feelings, pleasant and useful, “defeated difficulty”) and considered art the only means of moral education of a person, recognizing the educational value not in abstract thought, but in the beauty, “grace” of a work of art. Annenkov, Botkin and Druzhinin continue Pushkin’s interpretation of the “purpose of art” as “an ideal, not a moral teaching.” But their concepts foreshadow either the theory of L. Tolstoy’s infection, or the theory of art as the embodiment of Fet’s beauty. But Annenkov and Botkin believe that in the process of creativity and perception of a literary text, the reader only repeats the actions of the author and does not commit actions not programmed by the authors. Druzhinin recognizes the great independence of the reader.

Remembering Raymond Williams: His Theoretical Heritage to China’s World Literature and Culture Studies

Raymond Williams, the eminent British Marxist literary theorist, was introduced to China in the late 1980s, and his theories have since been increasingly attractive to China’s literary and cultural studies. He not only touched upon some of the fundamental issues of Marxist literary theory, such as ideology, culture, hegemony and aesthetics, but also developed it with his dynamic construction of a sort of cultural materialism, thus bridging between Marxist socio-historical and aesthetic criticism and cultural and linguistic factors. While literary and cultural theory is in decline in the West, Williams’s legacy is still appreciated in international circles, which ought to be cherished and inherited by us Chinese scholars in our studies of world literature and culture.

“Bound ... by their narrowing perceptions”: Sympathetic Bondage and Perverse Pity in Blake’s <i>The Book of Urizen</i>

The Book of Urizen as a rewriting, or reinterpretation, of the Genesis myth has long been important to Blake studies in terms of understanding the very crux of Blakean mythology and the nature of what has come to be known as Blake’s bible. By essentially reading the act of “genesis” (what one might normally associate with an establishment of order and origin) as a kind of reverse creation myth, Blake suggests in Urizen that the birth of humanity emerges at the moment of its fall. Hence, what was once a story of creation out of chaos becomes for Blake a visionary apocalypse. I use the term “visionary” here not simply because Urizen acts as Blake’s artistic vision of man’s genesis, but because, for Blake, the nature of our origins as apocalypse is dependent upon the fall of our perceptions, on a collapse of both human and divine vision. If the Blakean fall predates an exile of humanity from paradise, then it becomes divine in origin, stemming from acts of godly creation. Blake’s radical mythology essentially can be read as a critique of aesthetics and of our standards of both divine and artistic creation. We know from the original Genesis myth that divine creation arises out of God’s command “Let there be light.” However, Blake’s anti-Genesis begins and ends in obscurity, in a world devoid of light that remains in darkness throughout all of Urizen’s acts of creation. Therefore, we can read The Book of Urizen as a story of blindness, or of the relationship that emerges between man and God as both lose their ability to perceive fully.

Illuminating the Antebellum Literary Marketplace: The Artfulness of Literary Labor in George Foster’s New York by Gas-Light

Abstract George Foster’s New York by Gas-Light (1850) has been understood as a characteristic text of urban sensationalism, a body of writing more often studied for its response to modernity than literary artfulness. Yet, while Foster seems eager to spectacularize the hidden corners of urban life, he also creates metaliterary moments around scenes of literary business and labor, especially the nighttime labor that the technology of gaslight enabled. Reading these self-referential moments in the context of dramatic changes in publishing facilitated by gaslight opens a theoretical intersection between materialist and aesthetic criticism concerning the relationship between work and art. I argue that Foster presents New York by Gas-Light as at once a product of his industrialized labor and an artifact of self-conscious literary crafting by cultivating attention to the material conditions of his aesthetic creation. As I show, Foster’s reflexive materialist aesthetics disrupts longstanding premises of literary history: it counters largely linguistic accounts of literary style by connecting literary artistry to the work of commercial publication, resists an autonomous ideal that abstracts literature from the material labor of authors, and reclaims the artistic possibilities of what might otherwise be regarded as mass cultural forms.

Not going 'pop': the aesthetic criticism of early British Maoism

If people think about Maoist/anti-revisionist groups in countries such as Britain, they are often seduced by an impression of exoticism and the incompatibility of such groups with a more humdrum native left-wing culture. What is also significant about such groups is the depth of their ideological inheritance from the Soviet-inspired world communist movement. This is particularly clear in relation to such groups' cultural criticism. Cultural products such as folk or pop music tended to be reduced to simplistic class designations (i.e.bourgeois art) and were often ruthlessly dismissed, sometimes for an apparent propensity to lead to fascism. Maoists called for a more political, communist art as an alternative, focused on serving the struggle for proletarian revolution. It's important to grasp that such criticism wasn't set apart from previous inner-CPGB debates on cultural issues, where the oppositional left that had been apparent in the party since the Second World War had retained the thrust of the Zhdanov doctrine emphasised by the party majority in the immediate post-war years. This article explores the aesthetic responses of a number of groups that developed during the first wave of international Maoism in the 1960s and measures them against inner-CPGB differences on art and culture.

STOP WARS

STOP WARS

Towards a Pragmatist Aesthetics

Abstract In this paper, I make the case that the tradition of pragmatism may usefully inform aesthetic criticism. To that end, I contrast the anti-essentialist outlook and the ethico-political concerns of neo-pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty with the epistemological underpinnings of analytic aesthetics. The aim is to outline an alternative meta-theoretical perspective that ‘overwrites’ long-standing concerns with exactitude and objectivity. Drawing on examples from my own area of expertise, film, and television studies, I seek to explicitly set up aesthetic criticism, especially evaluation, as a means of social progress and human flourishing within the framework of liberal democracy.

Revolt of the body in stillness

ABSTRACT The project choreographs revolt as performed in Butoh willful stillness. Stillness is a political intervention, which in its slow and sustained study reveals the functioning of in/visible economies of violence. Indeed, Butoh aesthetic of stillness, demands self-reflexivity that troubles voyeuristic passivity to create space for ethically facing the other in moments of violent cultural annihilations and suffering. Beyond underscoring the role of performance art in confronting the apathy of observing and consuming violence, the essay exemplifies Butoh as a choreographic method that performs the discomfort of seeing, thus, cuts across academic and aesthetic critiques of witnessing.

The Dark Side of the Miracle: Spectacular and Precarious Accumulation in an Urban Village under Siege (A Photo Essay)

Abstract In spite of their informal and substandard nature, Chinese urban villages are actually part of the infrastructure that institutionalizes and normalizes China's uneven development by providing cheap dormitory-style accommodations to the country's vast army of unskilled rural migrants who flock to cities as precarious laborers. This extended photo essay uses an urban village renewal project in the southern city Guangzhou to analyze the politics of eviction, demolition, resistance, and gentrification in light of the region's shift from low-value to high-tech industries. When urban villagers appropriated ideas of tradition, lineage, and socialist collectivism to fight against the government and the developer, their purpose was to acquire greater compensation and even symbolic capital in order to secure an urban middle-class future for themselves. In the process, however, they have further foreclosed the futures of many rural migrants whose survival in the city rely on cheap accommodation in these slum-like enclaves, even though survival in this context often implies dull and dead-end jobs with little prospect of social mobility. Drawing on the author's visual project called Where There Is No Room for Fiction, the selected photographs here provide a visual ethnographic account of the contested landscape of an urban village under siege. As well, these images explore the possibility of a critical aesthetics in order to engage the official vision of urban modernity that is saturated with spectacle and speculation.

Forhandlinger af grænsens rum


 
 
 
 This article explores how, and in which ways, the poems “Home” by poet Warsan Shire and “Brev till Europa” by poet Athena Farrokhzad performs an aesthetic critique of contemporary borders by establishing the figures “the home” and “Europe” as imaginary utopian borderscape formations. Through an analysis of the function of the two figures, the article concludes that the poems offer ways to re-imagine bordered spaces as spaces of solidarity.
 Utopi, Dystopi, Borderscape, Grænseforestillinger, Grænseæstetik
 
 
 

The Research Dynamics and Trends of Aesthetics, Based on Scientific Knowledge Mapping: An Analysis of the Papers Published in the British Journal of Aesthetics (2001-2022) and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (2011-2022)

This paper is based on the papers published in recent 10 years (2001-2022) from The British Journal of Aesthetics and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, both of which enjoy high reputation in the aesthetic field. This paper uses scientific knowledge mapping and draws the knowledge mapping by using CiteSpace. Guided by visualization of conclusions, it outlines some development trends of aesthetics discipline and presents the research hot spots and changes of international aesthetics from a new perspective. Then this paper discusses the characteristics of aesthetics itself.

BEARDSLEY VE ISENBERG’İN ELEŞTİREL KURAMLARINDA ESTETİK YARGILARIN SAVUNULABİLİRLİĞİ ÜZERİNE

In the 20th century one of the most controversial questions in aesthetics for American philosophers is the question of the defensibility of aesthetic judgments. The main reason is that its answer determines whether aesthetic criticism can be a well-founded intellectual enterprise or not. Monroe C. Beardsley is one of the American philosophers who believe that aesthetic evaluations are defensible and he proposes a rationalist theory of objective criticism. According to him, there are normative principles governing aesthetic evaluations and critics can justify their critical verdicts on the artworks by inferring their evaluations from these principles. With regard to this proposal, the questions are as follows: Can such a rationalist theory maintain the essential feature of the aesthetic judgment which demands an internal response, a particular feeling, in addition to its cognitive aspect? If not, can there be an alternative theory for the defensibility of aesthetic evolutions which saves its essential emotive ingredient? In this paper, these questions will be responded to by examining Beardsley’s theory and its critical rejection by Arnold Isenberg. As a result, it will be demonstrated that Isenberg formulates the alternative theory which gives equal weight in aesthetic criticism both to the internal emotive aspect and to the validity of an aesthetic judgment.

Dismantled Monumentality: Capturing Postsocialist Erasures in Berlin

Berlin-based photographer Gerrit Engel was the last to shoot the Palast der Republik, GDR government seat and cultural center, during the final phases of its state-ordered dismantlement (2006–2008). The resulting photographs contrast sharply with his photobook Berlin (2009), shot simultaneously and published twenty years after German unification. Whereas Engel's photobook is stylistically indebted to the New Objectivity of Weimar industrial photography and its successors, his subjective approach to the Palast elegizes its erasure. Although many accounts of GDR legacies turn on Ostalgie, Engel's Palast photos demonstrate the futurity of erasure through an aesthetic critique of monumentality as such.

Buddhist exoticism in the works of Eduard Limonov: philosophical and aesthetic criticism

The article analyses the specifics of the perception of Buddhism by Eduard Limonov. The reception of Buddhism is determined in his work by a system of double coding – he is a writer, but also a politician and publicist. Artistic and political narrative in his works are inextricably linked. Eduard Limonov is a critic of Buddhism, but the consistency of his views is not absolute. For the writer, Buddhism is an unoriginal religion, in the national versions of which there are too much exotic and irrational elements. In addition, Buddhism is a religion with philosophical assumptions of which, Eduard Limonov disagrees. The vision of reality as full of suffering and the desire to escape from it contradicts the active life position of the writer. At the same time, in the work of Eduard Limonov, the tendency towards the Russification of Buddhism, characteristic for the modern Russian literature, manifests itself. The writer also explores the mystical side of this religion in its Tibeto-Mongolian version, perceiving and actualising its superhuman component.

Gender inversion in the ‘critique of a critic’. Zinaida Gippius on Korney Chukovsky

Examined in the article is an obscure feuilleton called ‘An immature critic’ [‘Nevzrosliy kritik’] (1914), penned by Anton Krayniy (Z. Gippius) with Korney Chukovsky in mind. The article sets out to identify the role of gender inversion in the feuilleton’s intended purpose and unique genre characteristics. Having analysed the semantics of two variants of the title and subtitle (‘A study in inverted commas’ [‘Etyud v kavychkakh’]), critical techniques and quotation strategies, the scholar finds that Gippius’ metacritical piece is a spoof. A female critic (in a male disguise) expounds on the ‘feminine soul’ of a male critic, employing his own techniques and making a witty use of a female stereotype according to Weininger (‘a prostitute’). It appears that the feuilleton’s initial title implied not just an individual characteristic of Chukovsky’s, but ‘journalistic prostitution’ in general and critical feuilletons in particular — a genre practised by Gippius as well. The final choice of the title stresses the distinction of Krayniy’s journalistic (‘masculine’) criticism from the aesthetic (‘feminine,’ ‘immature’) criticism espoused by Chukovsky.

Criticism of Muhammad Hassan Askari and Oriental Aesthetics

Askari was a seminal figure in modern Urdu literature and arguably the most important literary critic of his day. From the arch modernist and avid Westophile who swore by Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarme and imbibed the influence of Joyce, he went on to espouse the cause of Pakistani adab, reading into it great cultural possibilities, almost a new renaissance, and later on, as if losing hope, he single-handedly diagnosed a condition of “stagnation” (jamood) and subsequently, of “death of literature,” turning a full circle to become an avowed disciple of the Islamic rivayat. Bitterly attacked by many, most notably by the Progressives, and highly controversial, Askari remained relevant, and above all, illuminating in so many ways that hardly any other critic in Urdu can hold a candle to him. He continues to remain a challenging and enigmatic figure. Yet, one can hardly discuss contemporary Urdu literature without taking his life and work into consideration. No doubt, Muhammad Hassan Askari is considered one of the architects of Urdu criticism and is status as a critic is unique.