Aesthetic Criticism Research Articles

American terror: the feeling of thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville

American terror: the feeling of thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville

‘Senseless speech’ and inaudibility in Conrad's ‘Amy Foster’: rethinking trauma and the unspeakable in fiction

ABSTRACTThis essay revisits the significance of the trope of the unspeakable in representations of trauma in order to put pressure on traditional readings of the unspeakable in literary trauma theory. Taking Joseph Conrad's short story, ‘Amy Foster’, as an illustrative example, I demonstrate how, in certain circumstances, trauma is not rendered unspeakable because reflection on it is impossible, but rather trauma is caused by the failure and/or frustration of speech itself. Furthermore, I draw upon Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, to parse out the implications of silence, language and the inaudible in texts, such as ‘Amy Foster’, that fail to conform to the usual expectations of the unspeakable in trauma literature. Narratives such as this challenge our standard paradigms in literary trauma theory. Building on Rancière's critique of sublime aesthetics, in The Future of the Image, I argue that we need to broaden the categories by which we read the relationship between trauma and the unspeakable in literature, and in doing so be prepared to find trauma in unexpected places.

Accidental, Assisted, Automated: An Emerging Repertoire of Infant Mobile Media Techniques

Accidental, Assisted, Automated: An Emerging Repertoire of Infant Mobile Media Techniques

Hunger, food and drink in Brazilian popular music: a brief overview.

The article reflects on how the themes of hunger, consumption of soft drinks and consumption of beans and rice are addressed in Brazilian popular music. We investigate the years of military dictatorship (1964-1985). The focus of the analysis is on the so-called protest song, a musical genre characterized by aesthetic, cultural, political, ideological and social criticism to military rule. The study of the ideology and philosophy of language of Mikhail Bakhtin is the theoretical reference; especially his concepts of "ideological sign" and "word." Analysis reveals that the protest song portrayed elements of the economic, political and social contexts and led to the diffusion of healthy or unhealthy eating habits or ideologies, contributing to the construction of the Brazilian dietary identity.

A Creating Spirit of Master Zhuang and An ‘Abnormality’ Aesthetic Criticism of Calligraphy in 『Eouyadam』

A Creating Spirit of Master Zhuang and An ‘Abnormality’ Aesthetic Criticism of Calligraphy in 『Eouyadam』

Curation on Campus: An Exhibition Curatorial Experiment for Creative Industries Students

Curation on Campus: An Exhibition Curatorial Experiment for Creative Industries Students

1970년대 한국 단색조 회화의 無爲自然 사상

Dansaekjo painting(literally, monotone painting), the Korean Monochrome painting, is one of the major achievements of contemporary Korean art of the 1970s. Its monotone canvas stripped of figurative forms has been regarded as a unique manifestation of ‘Korean Modernism’ which applied Korean identity to Western abstraction. In order to avoid repeating similar aesthetic criticism on Dansaekjo painting, this paper reviewed how this painting style was created and developed in relation with the social context of the 1970’s, rather than investigating the issues intrinsic to this style. Dansaekjo painting represented aesthetics of unworldliness, seeking a paradoxical “action of non-action (無爲)” in the midst of westernization of people’s lives. Korean Dansaekjo painting stayed aloof from the world, and thereby differentiated itself from Western abstract art which strived for the progress and innovation. Paradoxically, however, this feature appealed to the urban elite who reacted quickly to the changes in real life. Combining two contradicting values - modernization through westernization and preservation of Korean identity - Dansaekjo painting came out with a hybrid solution of ‘Korean Modernism,’ and had established itself as the artistic taste of the ruling class of the newly reorganized society. Diverse contradictory values coexist in the discourse on Dansaekjo painting, a unique cultural product of the time when Korean society was required to modernize by westernization while keeping Korean identity. This paper revealed that Dansaekjo painting movement and its aesthetic background did not merely seek pure abstract art, but also weaved a multi-layered hybrid structure where different interests clashed and contradicting values coexisted.

Framing Dalit: A Study of Satyajit Ray's Sadgati

Through reference to Sadgati (Deliverance), I will delineate Ray's formal and enunciatory cinematic usages and their applications in Sadgati, along with the critique of Premchand's progressive realism and aesthetics. I address the aporia of the aesthetic to caste issues by exploring and reconfiguring caste in terms of the delineation of Dalit life-worlds in Ray's and Premchand's narratives through modalities of the aesthetic-ethical framework. Engaging recent research on trauma and media concerned primarily with visual evidence—testimony as well as commemoration, precarity and grievability of lives—I attempt to bridge the gap between postcolonial and cinema studies for cross- fertilization of ideas and productive interface between them. By studying one medium's translation, transmission, transformation and appropriation of the other, I wish to enhance not only our understanding of both media but also hope to contribute to studies of comparative poetics and cross-media cultural translation.

Critical Aesthetics and Compositional Informatics

The author discusses his compositional practice, which relies on the application of information-processing technologies to problematize conventions of musical meaning.

Latin Literature

This time last year my review concluded with the observation that the future for the study of Latin literature is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and that we should proceed in close dialogue with social historians and art historians. In the intervening period, two books from a new generation of scholars have been published which remind us of the existence of an alternative tide that is pushing back against such culturally embedded criticism, and urging us to turn anew towards the aesthetic. The very titles of these works, with their references to ‘The Sublime’ and ‘Poetic Autonomy’ are redolent of an earlier age in their grandeur and abstraction, and in their confident trans-historicism. Both monographs, in different ways, are seeking to find a new means of grounding literary criticism in reaction to the disempowerment and relativism which is perceived to be the legacy of postmodernism. In their introductions, both bring back to centre stage theoretical controversies that were a prominent feature of scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s (their dynamics acutely observed by Don Fowler in his ownGreece & Romesubject reviews of the period) but which have largely faded into the background; the new generation of Latinists tend to have absorbed insights of New Historicism and postmodernism without feeling the need either to defend their importance or to reflect upon their limitations. Henry Day, in his study of the sublime in Lucan'sBellum civile, explicitly responds to the challenges issued by Charles Martindale, who has, of course, continued (in his own words) to wage ‘war against the determination of classicists to ground their discipline in “history”’. Day answers Martindale's call for the development of some new form of aesthetic criticism, where hermeneutics and the search for meaning are replaced with (or, better, complemented by) experiential analysis; his way forward is to modify Martindale's pure aesthetics, since he expresses doubt that beauty can be wholly free of ideology, or that aesthetics can be entirely liberated from history, context, and politics. Reassuringly (for the novices among us), Day begins by admitting that the question ‘What is the sublime?’ is a ‘perplexing’ one, and he starts with the definition of it as ‘a particular kind of subjective experience…in which we encounter an object that exceeds our everyday categories of comprehension’ (30). What do they have in common, then, the versions of the sublime, ancient and modern, outlined in Chapter 1: the revelatory knowledge afforded to Lucretius through his grasp of atomism, the transcendent power of great literature for Longinus, and the powerful emotion engendered in the Romantics by the sight of impressive natural phenomena such as a mountain range or a thunderstorm? One of the key ideas to emerge from this discussion – crucial to the rest of the book – is that the sublime is fundamentally about power, and especially the transference of power from the object of contemplation to its subject. The sublime is associated with violence, trauma, and subjugation, as it rips away from us the ground on which we thought we stood; yet it does not need to be complicit with the forces of oppression but can also work for resistance and retaliation. This dynamic of competing sublimes of subjugation and liberation will then help us, throughout the following chapters, to transcend the nihilism/engagement dichotomy that has polarized scholarship on Lucan in recent decades. In turn, Lucan's deployment of the sublime uses it to collapse the opposition between liberation and oppression, and thus theBellum civilemakes its own contribution to the history of the sublime. This is an impressive monograph, much more productively engaged with the details of Lucan's poem than this summary is able to convey; it brought me to a new appreciation of the concept of the sublime, and a new sense of excitement about Lucan's epic poem and its place in the Western tradition.

The critical aesthetics of performing objects – Kris Verdonck

On a small theatre stage, an L-shaped iron bar that is attached to and powered by a grinding wheel's engine begins spinning around. The engine starts to overheat and eventually burns out. Applause....

Atmospheres of Liberty: Ruskin in the Clouds

John Ruskin’s cloud aesthetics develop a coherent, if figurative, inquiry into the nature of human liberty. His changing accounts of cloud formations across Modern Painters gradually place more emphasis on liberty within a framework of restraint and self-government. Attending to the shifting and equivocal senses of liberty in Ruskin’s aesthetic writings clarifies his scattered, often incompatible assertions in a range of later social and political tracts. Bridging aesthetic criticism with political writings uneasily poised between liberalism, republicanism, and authoritarian conservatism, this article discovers Ruskin as the theorist of a dynamic, aesthetic model of liberty and just social arrangements.

Swinburne reads Keats: Prostitution, pornography and the decadence of aesthetic critique

AbstractKeats and Swinburne loom large as purveyors of the “aesthetic” in its early and late nineteenth-century forms—that is, as a discourse of subject-formation through the exercise of tasteful distinction and as a self-referential discourse of art for art’s sake, respectively. In this essay, I analyse how Swinburne constructs a “Keats” that will allow him to master a “manliness in crisis” that affected both writers. If this “crisis” is historicized by the body as a social matter that Victorian legislators were policing in the forms of prostitution and pornography, it is, I argue, this materiality that Keats and Swinburne insist of enjoying rather than sublimating. The ultimate question I pose is this: can aesthetics become the critical discourse that recent revisionary readings have postulated if both a Romantic and a Decadent aesthetic insist on enjoying the body, materiality, gender instability and other topoi communicated by prostitution, pornography and poetry.

Book Review: International Relations: International Politics and Performance: Critical Aesthetics and Creative Practice

Book Review: International Relations: International Politics and Performance: Critical Aesthetics and Creative Practice

Review

Reviewed by: The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation: From Snow White to WALL-Eby David Whitley Jack Zipes (bio) The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation: From Snow White to WALL-E. By David Whitley. 2nded. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012. 187 pp. David Whitley originally published the first edition of The Idea of Nature in Disney Animationin 2008, and in 2012 he republished it with a revised introduction, an additional chapter, and a conclusion to the updated edition. Among the futile twenty-first-century endeavors to salvage the Disney industry’s reputation from continual sharp ideological and aesthetic critiques—I am thinking here of such simplistic apologetic studies as Mark Pinsky’s The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust(2004), Douglas Brode’s Multiculturalism and the Mouse: Race and Sex in Disney Entertainment(2005), and Amy Davis’s Good Girls and Wicked Witches: Women in Disney’s Feature Animation(2006)—Whitley’s study, which is sympathetic to the Disney Company, is to be taken more seriously because it is a judicious and sophisticated study of the ecological aspects of the Disney animated feature films from 1937 to the present. Whitley’s book is divided into four parts: “Fairy Tale Adaptations,” “The North American Wilderness,” “Tropical Environments,” and “New Developments.” And the films that he examines in close readings are Snow [End Page 368] White, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Bambi, Pocahontas, Brother Bear, The Jungle Book, Tarzan, The Lion King, Finding Nemo, and WALL-E. The chapters are organized chronologically in phases: the first is the period in which Walt Disney presided over the films (1937–1966); the second is 1984–2005, when Michael Eisner played a major role in determining the Disney Company’s themes in animated feature productions; and the third, 2006 to the present, is when the Disney Company bought Pixar and John Lasseter assumed responsibility for the major feature animations of the Disney/Pixar corporation. Whitley asserts that “it is clear that both Walt Disney and Michael Eisner saw themselves as having a sustained and strong commitment to wild nature and the environment, whatever line one takes on gaps between professed ideals and corporate practices” (13). Given the positive depiction of nature and animals in most of the Disney animated films, Whitley selects some of the prominent animated films based on well-known fairy tales, animal tales, and adventure books to explore carefully how the Disney artists created enchanted archetypes that reveal the tensions between humans and the environment. Whitley states: My central proposition is that there exists, within the whole oeuvre of Disney and Disney-Pixar animated features, a rich tradition of films that are engaged with the question of how we relate to and understand the natural world of which we are ourselves a part. Implicit within this proposition is the view that we have been insufficiently aware of the strengths of this tradition hitherto, and that it should be seen as an emotional and aesthetic resource that may help draw the young towards the kinds of connection, understanding and debate that are vital if we are to come through our current environmental crisis and to learn from it. (161) This proposition underlies Whitley’s approach to all the films that he studies in his book and leads him to bring out some vital features of the films that, indeed, reveal a sensitive and somewhat sentimental and idealistic portrayal of nature, animals, and even manufactured objects. This is all well and good, and many of Whitley’s observations about the ecological aspects of Disney’s animated films are insightful and just. Yet it is Whitley’s emphatic focus on how the positive portrayal of nature and animals compensates for the other failings in the Disney animated films that diminishes many of his general observations about the importance of enchantment and wonder in influencing viewers of the films—and not just children but adults as well. For instance, in his discussion of Snow White, he remarks that “Snow White, like Thoreau, undertakes a journey of self-discovery into the wilderness, learning to become more self reliant” (12). Aside from the fact that the [End Page 369...

Kant's Critique of Baumgarten's Aesthetics in advance

Kant's Critique of Baumgarten's Aesthetics in advance

Media sociology: a reappraisal

Contents Introduction: Reappraising Media Sociology Silvio Waisbord Part I Media, Institutions, and Politics 1 Strategy Follows Structure: A Media Sociology Manifesto Rodney Benson 2 Linking Media Sociology to Political Development in Trans-Legislative Democracies Michael Schudson 3 Back to the Future? The Sociology of News and Journalism from Black and White to the Digital Age Howard Tumber Part II Media Industries and Audiences 4 Agency, Social Interaction, and Audience Studies Richard Butsch 5 Media Industry Sociology: Mainstream, Critical, and Cultural Perspectives Timothy Havens 6 The Political Economy of Media Work and Watching Toby Miller Part III Media representations 7 When Media Representation Met Sociology Shani Orgad 8 Too Little But Not Too Late: Sociological Contributions to Feminist Media Studies Laura Grindstaff and Andrea Press 9 Media Sociology and the Study of Race Ronald N. Jacobs Part IV Digital Technologies, Self, and Society 10 Digital Media Technology and the Spirit of the New Capitalism: What Future for Aesthetic Critique ? Graeme Kirkpatrick 11 Mobile Communication and Mediated Interpersonal Communication Rich Ling 12 Sociology and the Socially Mediated Self Jeff Pooley

From a self-made to an already-made man

Several scholars argue that self-expression has become a salient feature in the conception of the self at the expense of a more utilitarian perception of the individual. This article argues that this transition agrees with an evolution in how the relation between work and the self was perceived during the 20th century. A historical content analysis of advice literature on professional success shows how capitalism adapted itself to the aesthetic critique of alienation by revitalising the spirit of capitalism. The old spirit of capitalism that relied on self-control and discipline was replaced by a new spirit that emphasised well-being and self-expression as a way to motivate employees and to close the gap between work and private life. Likewise, the ideal of the self-made man who adapts himself to a job was turned into a more essentialist view of an already-made man who looks for a job that fits his personality.

Melville and Aesthetics ed. by Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn (review)

Reviewed by: Melville and Aesthetics ed. by Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn Dennis Berthold SAMUEL OTTER AND GEOFFREY SANBORN, EDS. Melville and Aesthetics New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. viii + 263 pp. In a searching and provocative introduction, Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn articulate the grand motive behind this important collection of twelve essays—”to move beyond the false choices that have bedeviled the profession: form or history, practical criticism or theory, aesthetics or politics” (6). “Literature is,” they continue, “neither a strictly political nor a strictly aesthetic affair. Instead (to rework a passage from chapter 93 of Mardi), literature poses questions that are more final than any answers” (6). The stylistic richness of Melville’s writing; his constant reinvention of narrative, point of view, and structure; his daring use of allusion, metaphor, image, and symbol; his experiments in meter, rhyme, and assonance—in short, his “acute sensitivity to the writtenness of all writing—make him a richly suggestive figure” (5) for re-emphasizing aesthetics as a major preoccupation of literary study that can “stand alongside—not displace—the ideological approach” (3). Clearly, Otter and Sanborn are after a big fish, and see Melville as the pilot who will guide them to it. The craft they ride on is both vehicle and tenor of their quest, and the varied critical methodologies in each essay give them plenty of sea-room to pursue it. Deliberately emphasizing diverse perspectives not only on Melville but also on the definition of aesthetic criticism itself, the editors seek to foster a “multiplicitous particularity” (3) of views to illuminate the aesthetic richness and ideational complexity of Melville’s writing. The editors fashion an ensemble of twelve scholars whose voices mix the cadences of historical, linguistic, poststructuralist, transnational, biographical, and queer criticism with the demands of formalist analysis and close reading. Although the book has no titled subdivisions, the introduction points out that the first three essays discuss “The Matter of Style,” while the next nine function as “Case Studies” of particular works: three on Moby-Dick; a cluster of four on Pierre, “Bartleby,” Israel Potter, and The Confidence-Man; and two on Battle-Pieces and Clarel. Alex Calder opens the collection with a metacritical overview of the charge that Melville is a bad writer, an objection familiar to anyone who has read the [End Page 75] contemporary reviews of Mardi, Moby-Dick, or Pierre. Rather than mounting a defense against such critique, Calder recognizes “that Melville had a genius for striking a wrong note” (30) as in “The Bell Tower” (one must forgive Calder the pun), yet such ostensible missteps often gave him the artistic freedom to vitalize and deepen his texts. Calder describes how New Critic R. P. Blackmur, in his 1938 essay on “The Craft of Herman Melville,” codified Melville’s bad writing under the rubric of “putative form,” an artificial, stagy, non-dramatic method of writing that undermines the sincerity of Melville’s philosophical skepticism and that drove generations of Melville critics to focus on theme and ideology rather than style. Warner Berthoff, in The Example of Melville (1962), countered Blackmur’s attack by approaching Melville through organicism, the romantic aesthetic that valorizes excess, disorder, invention, subjectivity, plurality, and creative liberty. These schools of thought, Calder argues, polarize Melville’s narratives at the extremes of Chekhovian drama for Blackmur and gothic romance for Berthoff, ignoring the tradition of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Sterne—or what Calder calls “modal discontinuity” (27), a term drawn from the behaviorist aesthetics of Morse Peckham, who considered Clarel Melville’s finest work save Moby-Dick. Still, for Calder, no single aesthetic label can capture the dialogic richness and generic variety of Melville’s textual practice, and if his writing is sometimes “bad,” it nonetheless provided him a “psychic insulation” (31) from literary norms and liberated his stylistic genius. Theo Davis reinforces Calder’s critique of New Critical aesthetics by praising Melville’s ornamental metaphors: the excessive, “errant, possibly irrelevant” comparisons and elaborations that give pleasure even as they digress from a perceptible narrative trajectory (34). Davis explains that such departures from formal unity troubled W. K. Wimsatt, as they had the eighteenth-century rhetorician Hugh Blair, and both Friedrich von...

Critical Aesthetics and Compositional Informatics

Critical Aesthetics and Compositional Informatics