DOCSLIB.ORG

The Idea of Mimesis: Semblance, Play, and Critique in the Works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Idea of Mimesis: Semblance, Play, and Critique in the Works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W DePaul University Via Sapientiae College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences 8-2012 The idea of mimesis: Semblance, play, and critique in the works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno Joseph Weiss DePaul University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd Recommended Citation Weiss, Joseph, "The idea of mimesis: Semblance, play, and critique in the works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno" (2012). College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 125. https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd/125 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Via Sapientiae. It has been accepted for inclusion in College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Via Sapientiae. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Idea of Mimesis: Semblance, Play, and Critique in the Works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy October, 2011 By Joseph Weiss Department of Philosophy College of Liberal Arts and Sciences DePaul University Chicago, Illinois 2 ABSTRACT Joseph Weiss Title: The Idea of Mimesis: Semblance, Play and Critique in the Works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno Critical Theory demands that its forms of critique express resistance to the socially necessary illusions of a given historical period. Yet theorists have seldom discussed just how much it is the case that, for Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, the concepts and language it employs, as well as the aesthetic comportment it would champion for the sake of generating a critical distance from these illusions, require an understanding of the mimetic faculty. The point of departure for this work is thus an attempt to delineate both the essential and the historical features of this faculty, in the hope of understanding the conditions under which the force of critique can truly find language today. With this is in view, I illustrate the manner in which these features of mimesis, namely its semblance (Schein) and play (Spiel) character, are initially at work in our experiential relation to nature, but are ultimately subject to a violent taboo that wrenches us from nature and thereby wages a desperate battle against the attempt to give voice or call a halt to the unnecessary suffering of an antagonistic historical circumstance. This shows that there is a dialectic of enlightenment built into the comportment of mimesis itself, that latent within it is the simultaneous potential for progress and regression. More specifically, it shows that mimesis is, as it were, banished from an immediate absorption with nature, and, therefore, needs to migrate into the neutralized and sorrowful (traurig) sphere of art—the sole refuge within which the outermost consequences of mimetic development are granted full expression. Parallel to the Kantian category of philosophical ―ideas,‖ I, accordingly, argue that the recognition of this immanent struggle to end myth is synonymous with a mimesis awakened to a regulative striving after the idea of peace or reconciliation, i.e., a striving that, if realized, would at last assuage the hostility between rationality and mimesis, concept and intuition. Mimesis is thus, on the one hand, capable of sensing the material trace or hearing the musical echo stored up in the unreconciled state of language. But if, on the other hand, it becomes dislodged from the sensitivity that ―reads‖ with and against the tempo of its material circumstance, it could just as well disavow precisely the possibility of this peace and thus regress to a catastrophic form of instrumental rationality. By virtue of immersing itself in the most minute details of the present historical constellation, exposing the falsehoods involved in, for instance, the harmony of traditional beauty, or the triumphalism and sovereignty of the traditional sublime, I argue that mimesis not only marks an indispensable moment in the dynamic movement of critique, it also brings to the fore the pressing need for a materialist conception of aesthetics. 3 Contents List of Abbreviations Introduction: The Redemption of Nature 4 Part One: The Experiential Grounds of Mimesis 1 The Language of Mimesis 28 I. The Role of Mimesis in the Age of Technical Reproduction 31 II. The Implicit Mimesis of Benjamin‘s Trauerspiel 40 III. The Musical Character of Mimetic Trauerspiel 49 IV. Mimesis as the Rupture of History 60 V. Gesturing to the Critical Protest of Mimesis: Precursors to the Dialectic of Enlightenment 72 2 The Mimetic Struggle of the Dialectic of Enlightenment 83 I. The Materialism of Mimesis and the Possibility of its Sublation 86 II. On the Shudder and the Ensuing Mimetic Taboo 92 III. The Death Drive Built into Mimesis: With and Against Subjectivity 105 IV. Language in General and the Mimetic Language of Artworks 121 Part Two: The Banished Comportment of Mimesis in Art 3 The Dynamic of Semblance 132 I. Critique and Rescue of the Aura: The Task of Re-enchanting Reified Experience 133 II. Secularized Magic and the Life that does not Live: Resisting the Spell of the Beautiful 145 III. Concrete Developments of Semblance in Music: The Bond Between Semblance and Play 158 4 The Dynamic of Play 175 I. The Ambivalence of Play and the Critical Emergence of the Sublime in Artworks 176 II. The Downfall of Subjective Sovereignty: The Playful Metamorphosis of the Sublime Farce 193 Conclusion: Rescuing a Materialist Aesthetics 203 Bibliography 235 Abbreviations All works that are part of Benjamin‘s and Adorno‘s Gesammelte Schriften will be cited in parenthesis within the body of this text. In order to distinguish between them, references to Benjamin‘s work will be cited in the English edition first, followed by a slash and the appropriate GS number. References to Adorno‘s work will cite the GS number first and the English edition will follow the dash. AT T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). AP Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Cited with convolute letter and number in brackets. BE T.W. Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). CC T.W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). DOE Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). GS T.W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1-20 (Frankfurt a.m.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972). Cited as volume and part number with decimals. GS Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1-7 (Frankfurt a.m.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977). Cited as volume and part number with decimals. ML T.W. Adorno, ―Music and Language: A Fragment‖ in Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Verso, 1998), 1-6. MM T.W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Verso, 2002). NS1 T.W. Adorno, Beethoven: Philosophie der Musik. In Nachgelassenen Schriften. Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag, 1994. PNM T.W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). ND T.W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973) OTS Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1998) SW Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4 vols., ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Cited as volume number and part number with decimals. 3 These flourishes and cadenzas! Do you hear the conventions that are left in? Here – the language – is no longer – purified of the flourishes – but the flourishes – of the appearance [Schein] – of their subjective – domination – the appearance [Schein] – of art is thrown off – at last – art always throws off the appearance [Schein] of art. Dim-dada! —Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus 4 Introduction: The Redemption of Nature Nothing shocks anymore. Everyone knows that. Coming to any other aesthetic or philosophical conclusion would smack of modernist heroism today. This sentiment is likely part of the reason why, when faced with the choice, theorists interested in the various threads of cultural criticism more often than not side with Walter Benjamin‘s work over Theodor W. Adorno‘s. Whereas the former appears to be optimistic about the commodity form, particularly as it plays out in film, the latter, pessimistic elitist that he is, appears to only find a, so to speak, critical ferment in the antiquated and classist ―high‖ art of the Twentieth Century. At least this is the story we are told. Such a story, of course, presupposes that there is an irresolvable conflict between these two thinkers and that what is said of Benjamin and Adorno is true. For those familiar with Benjamin‘s corpus, however, his use of the concepts of shock, of historical rupture, of the moment of awakening, play such an important role that one is not only forced to consider the modernist tendencies in Benjamin‘s own thought, one is also forced to question just how close he might be to Adorno‘s thought. Who could deny, for example, how much these concepts resonate with Adorno‘s persistent concern over the shudder (Schauer) of experience and the manner in which it drives the famous concept of the dialectic of enlightenment? From the start, then, this demand to hear the shudder, to hear what might be termed the call of suffering, strikingly brings to the fore the similarities between Benjamin and Adorno.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Problems of Mimetic Characterization in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy
    Illusion and Instrument: Problems of Mimetic Characterization in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy By Chloe Susan Liebmann Kitzinger A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Slavic Languages and Literatures in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Irina Paperno, Chair Professor Eric Naiman Professor Dorothy J. Hale Spring 2016 Illusion and Instrument: Problems of Mimetic Characterization in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy © 2016 By Chloe Susan Liebmann Kitzinger Abstract Illusion and Instrument: Problems of Mimetic Characterization in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy by Chloe Susan Liebmann Kitzinger Doctor of Philosophy in Slavic Languages and Literatures University of California, Berkeley Professor Irina Paperno, Chair This dissertation focuses new critical attention on a problem central to the history and theory of the novel, but so far remarkably underexplored: the mimetic illusion that realist characters exist independently from the author’s control, and even from the constraints of form itself. How is this illusion of “life” produced? What conditions maintain it, and at what points does it start to falter? My study investigates the character-systems of three Russian realist novels with widely differing narrative structures — Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865–1869), and Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent (1875) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880) — that offer rich ground for exploring the sources and limits of mimetic illusion. I suggest, moreover, that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky themselves were preoccupied with this question. Their novels take shape around ambitious projects of characterization that carry them toward the edges of the realist tradition, where the novel begins to give way to other forms of art and thought.
    [Show full text]
  • Cancel Culture: Posthuman Hauntologies in Digital Rhetoric and the Latent Values of Virtual Community Networks
    CANCEL CULTURE: POSTHUMAN HAUNTOLOGIES IN DIGITAL RHETORIC AND THE LATENT VALUES OF VIRTUAL COMMUNITY NETWORKS By Austin Michael Hooks Heather Palmer Rik Hunter Associate Professor of English Associate Professor of English (Chair) (Committee Member) Matthew Guy Associate Professor of English (Committee Member) CANCEL CULTURE: POSTHUMAN HAUNTOLOGIES IN DIGITAL RHETORIC AND THE LATENT VALUES OF VIRTUAL COMMUNITY NETWORKS By Austin Michael Hooks A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree of Master of English The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Chattanooga, Tennessee August 2020 ii Copyright © 2020 By Austin Michael Hooks All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT This study explores how modern epideictic practices enact latent community values by analyzing modern call-out culture, a form of public shaming that aims to hold individuals responsible for perceived politically incorrect behavior via social media, and cancel culture, a boycott of such behavior and a variant of call-out culture. As a result, this thesis is mainly concerned with the capacity of words, iterated within the archive of social media, to haunt us— both culturally and informatically. Through hauntology, this study hopes to understand a modern discourse community that is bound by an epideictic framework that specializes in the deconstruction of the individual’s ethos via the constant demonization and incitement of past, current, and possible social media expressions. The primary goal of this study is to understand how these practices function within a capitalistic framework and mirror the performativity of capital by reducing affective human interactions to that of a transaction.
    [Show full text]
  • Translating Ironic Intertextual Allusions.” In: Martínez Sierra, Juan José & Patrick Zabalbeascoa Terran (Eds.) 2017
    Recibido / Received: 30/06/2016 Aceptado / Accepted: 16/11/2016 Para enlazar con este artículo / To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.6035/MonTI.2017.9.5 Para citar este artículo / To cite this article: LIEVOIS, Katrien. (2017) “Translating ironic intertextual allusions.” In: Martínez Sierra, Juan José & Patrick Zabalbeascoa Terran (eds.) 2017. The Translation of Humour / La traducción del humor. MonTI 9, pp. 1-24. TRANSLATING IRONIC INTERTEXTUAL ALLUSIONS Katrien Lievois [email protected] Université d’Anvers Translated from French by Trish Van Bolderen1 [email protected] University of Ottawa Abstract Based on a corpus consisting of Albert Camus’s La Chute, Hugo Claus’s Le chagrin des Belges, Fouad Laroui’s Une année chez les Français and their Dutch versions, this article examines the ways in which ironic intertextual allusions are translated. It begins with a presentation of the theoretical concepts underpinning the analysis and subsequently identifies, through a detailed study, the following nine strategies: standard translation; literal translation; translation using markers; non-translation; translation into a third language; glosses; omissions; substitutions using intertextuality from the target culture; and substitutions using architextuality. Resume A partir d’un corpus constitué de La Chute d’Albert Camus, du Chagrin des Belges de Hugo Claus et d’Une année chez les Français de Fouad Laroui, ainsi que leurs versions néerlandaises, cette contribution s’intéresse à la traduction de l’allusion intertextuelle ironique. Elle présente d’abord les concepts théoriques qui sous-tendent l’analyse, pour ensuite étudier plus en détail les 9 stratégies rencontrées : la traduction standard, la traduction littérale, la traduction avec marquage, la non-traduction, la traduction primera 1.
    [Show full text]
  • Inflationary and Deflationary Characterization in the Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah
    CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by International Institute for Science, Technology and Education (IISTE): E-Journals Research on Humanities and Social Sciences www.iiste.org ISSN 2222-1719 (Paper) ISSN 2222-2863 (Online) Vol.3, No.17, 2013 Inflationary and Deflationary Characterization in the Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah Peace Ibala Amala Ph.D. Department of English, Ignatius Ajuru University of Education, Rumuolumeni, Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria. Abstract It is a truism of course, that much of the pleasure of contemporary readers comes from the study of characters. For every literary work is an artistic response of the perception of man and his society. The purpose of this paper is to examine how Ayi Kwei Armah employs the Inflationary and deflationary technique of characterization which is shown to be his foremost stylistic method in his novels. Armah does so by revealing that his technique is a means of objective correlative, meaningful within the African society. Armah’s technique as this study reveals brings to the fore that characters who perpetrate corruption and the destructiveness inherent in the African continent are deflated. And morally upright characters are presented in the inflationary mode. Introduction It is common critical knowledge that the basis of fictional writingis character creation, perhaps nothing else. Characters not only add depth and complexity to the novels by giving readers perspectives of situations, but keep the readers engaged at all times. Armah is one of the African novelists that has continually captivated his readers for the experimental quality of his literary output (Wright 12, Obiechina 53, Folarin 117, Fraser ix ); the yardstick of experimentation in African fiction (Ogungbesan 68 ).
    [Show full text]
  • Adorno, Art, Natural History
    Index of the Contemporary: Adorno, Art, Natural History Ryan Crawford 32 | Evental Aesthetics Index of the Contemporary: Adorno, Art, Natural History Abstract That contemporary art is fundamentally irreducible to modernist art and aesthetics has become a commonplace of contemporary art theory and criticism. In marking this distinction, reference is often made to the obsolescence of once-dominant aesthetic categories and the need for breaking with aesthetic theories traditionally allied with artistic modernism. For many in the field of philosophical aesthetics, this means going beyond the work of Theodor W. Adorno and creating a conceptual discourse more appropriate to the current state of contemporary art. The present paper reconstructs the stakes of this legitimation crisis and sets Adorno’s writings on art and aesthetics in relation to some of the most significant debates in recent art criticism. In the process, it demonstrates that many of the most pressing problems in contemporary art are integral to Adorno’s aesthetic theory and that it is precisely at those points where his thought is today regarded as most problematic that it is often most instructive. Through a sustained examination of art’s essential relation to what Adorno calls “natural-history,” the problems of contemporary art and aesthetics are then situated within the wider context of art’s relationship to a history of domination. Keywords Adorno Modernism Aesthetics Contemporary Art Natural History Volume 7 Number 2 (2018) | 33 Ryan Crawford “You create a new shudder” [Vous créez un frisson nouveau], Victor Hugo wrote Baudelaire upon receiving the poems the latter had recently dedicated to him.1 Though grateful for the gift, and appreciative of what he called Baudelaire’s “noble mind and generous heart,” Hugo could hardly countenance the “horrifying morality” Les Fleurs du mal grafted onto the older man’s art.2 For in those poems, the crowd, the very subject Hugo had first “opened ..
    [Show full text]
  • Literature (LIT) 1
    Literature (LIT) 1 LITERATURE (LIT) LIT 113 British Literature i (3 credits) LIT 114 British Literature II (3 credits) LIT 115 American Literature I (3 credits) LIT 116 Amercian Literature II (3 credits) LIT 132 Introduction to Literary Studies (3 credits) This course prepares students to understand literature and to articulate their understanding in essays supported by carefully analyzed evidence from assigned works. Major genres and the literary terms and conventions associated with each genre will be explored. Students will be introduced to literary criticism drawn from a variety of perspectives. Course Rotation: Fall. LIT 196 Topics in Literature (3 credits) LIT 196A Topic: Images of Nature in American Literature (3 credits) LIT 196B Topic: Gothic Fiction (3 credits) LIT 196C Topic: American Detective Fiction (3 credits) LIT 196D Topic: The Fairy Tale (3 credits) LIT 196H Topic: Literature of the Supernatural (4 credits) LIT 196N Topic: American Detective Fiction for Nactel Program (4 credits) LIT 200C Global Crossings: Challenge & Change in Modern World Literature - Nactel (4 credits) Students in the course will read literature from a range of international traditions and will reach an understanding and appreciation of the texts for the ways that they connect and diverge. The social and historical context of the works will be explored and students will take from the course some understanding of the environments that produced the texts. LIT 200G Topic: Pulitzer Prize Winning Novels-American Life (3 credits) LIT 200H Topic: Poe and Hawthorne (3 credits) LIT 201 English Drama 900-1642 (3 credits) LIT 202 History of Film (3 credits) The development of the film from the silent era to the present.
    [Show full text]
  • RE-ANIMATING GHOSTS MATERIALITY and MEMORY in HAUNTOLOGICAL APPROPRIATION Abstract
    INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF FILM AND MEDIA ARTS (2019) Vol. 4, Nº. 2 pp. 24-37 © 2019 BY-NC-ND ijfma.ulusofona.pt DOI: 10.24140/ijfma.v4.n2.02 RE-ANIMATING GHOSTS MATERIALITY AND MEMORY IN HAUNTOLOGICAL APPROPRIATION Abstract This research examines the spectrality of an- MICHAEL PETER SCHOFIELD imation and other media based on the photo- graphic trace. Using diverse examples from pop- ular culture and the author’s own investigative practice in media art, this paper looks at how ar- chival media is re-used and can be brought back to life in new moving image works, in a gesture we might call hauntological appropriation. While sampling and re-using old materials is nothing new, over the last 15 years we have seen an ongoing tendency to foreground the ghostly qualities of vintage recordings and found foot- age, and a recurrent fetishisation and simula- tion of obsolete technologies. Here we examine the philosophies and productions behind this hauntological turn and why the materiality of still and moving image media has become such a focus. We ask how that materiality effects the machines that remember for us, and how we re- use these analogue memories in digital cultures. Due to the multimodal nature of the author’s creative practice, photography, video art, doc- umentary film and animation, are interrogated here theoretically. Re-animating the ghosts of old media can reveal ontological differences between these forms, and a ghostly synergy be- tween the animated and the photographic. Keywords: hauntology, animation, memory, media * University of Leeds, United Kingdom archaeology, appropriation, ontology, animated [email protected] documentary 24 RE-ANIMATING GHOSTS MICHAEL PETER SCHOFIELD Every culture has its phantoms and the spectral- how we can foreground their specific materiality, and the ity that is conditioned by its technology (Derrida, haunting associations with personal and cultural memory Amelunxen, Wetzel, Richter, & Fort, 2010, p.
    [Show full text]
  • Art As a Form of Negative Dialectics: 'Theory' in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory Author(S): WILLIAM D
    Art as a Form of Negative Dialectics: 'Theory' in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory Author(s): WILLIAM D. MELANEY Reviewed work(s): Source: The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Vol. 11, No. 1 (1997), pp. 40-52 Published by: Penn State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25670205 . Accessed: 10/12/2011 23:11 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Penn State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. http://www.jstor.org WILLIAM D. MELANEY Art as a Form ofNegative Dialectics: Theory' inAdorno's Aesthetic Theory Adorno's dialectical approach to aesthetics is inseparable from his concep as a tion of art socially and historically consequential source of truth.None theless, his dialectical approach to aesthetics is perhaps understood better in terms of his monumental work, Aesthetic Theory (1984), which attempts to relate the speculative tradition in philosophical aesthetics to the situation of art in twentieth-century society, than in terms of purely theoretical claims. In an effort to clarify his aesthetic position, I hope to demonstrate both that Adorno embraces theKantian thesis concerning art's autonomy and that he criticizes transcendental philosophy.
    [Show full text]
  • Intersubjectivity Before Language: Three Windows on Preverbal Sharing
    JB[v.20020404] Prn:13/02/2007; 14:08 F: AICR6809.tex / p.1 (48-124) Meltzoff, A. N., & Brooks, R. (2007). Intersubjectivity before language: Three windows on preverbal sharing. In S. Bråten (Ed.), On being moved: From mirror neurons to empathy (pp. 149-174). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. chapter Intersubjectivity before language Three windows on preverbal sharing Andrew N. Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks University of Washington There has been a revolution in our understanding of intersubjectivity. This rev- olution has many roots. Three findings of special interest are represented in the present volume: (a) the landmark work on preverbal intersubjectivity by Trevarthen (1979), Trevarthen and Hubley (1978), Stern (1985), and Bråten (1998a, 2003); (b) the findings of neonatal imitation, which demonstrates a social connected- ness that is literally present at birth (e.g., Heimann 2002; Kugiumutzakis 1998; Meltzoff 2006; Meltzoff & Moore 1983, 1997); and (c) advances in neuroscience, particularly the report of a mirror neuron system (e.g., Gallese 2003, 2005; Ia- coboni, Woods, Brass, Bekkering, Mazziotta, & Rizzolatti 1999; Jackson, Meltzoff, & Decety 2006; Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Fogassi, & Gallese 2002; Rizzolatti 2005). All three suggest a close coupling between self and other with profound implications for shared emotions (e.g., Hobson 2002; Hobson & Meyer 2005; Meltzoff 2007; Rochat & Striano 1999; Tomasello 1999). The revolution did not occur at the dead of night, but was well discussed. For example, there has been (a) a discussion of the
    [Show full text]
  • The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies
    H E S S E / T H E P L A C E O F C R EA T I V E W R I T I NG Douglas Hesse The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies For different reasons, composition studies and creative writing have resisted one another. Despite a historically thin discourse about creative writing within College Composition and Communication, the relationship now merits attention. The two fields’ common interest should link them in a richer, more coherent view of writing for each other, for students, and for policymakers. As digital tools and media expand the nature and circula- tion of texts, composition studies should pay more attention to craft and to composing texts not created in response to rhetorical situations or for scholars. In recent springs I’ve attended two professional conferences that view writ- ing through lenses so different it’s hard to perceive a common object at their focal points. The sessions at the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) consist overwhelmingly of talks on craft and technique and readings by authors, with occasional panels on teaching or on matters of administration, genre, and the status of creative writing in the academy or publishing. The sessions at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) reverse this ratio, foregrounding teaching, curricular, and administrative concerns, featur- ing historical, interpretive, and empirical research, every spectral band from qualitative to quantitative. CCCC sponsors relatively few presentations on craft or technique, in the sense of telling session goers “how to write.” Readings by authors as performers, in the AWP sense, are scant to absent.
    [Show full text]
  • The New Role of Theory in Aesthetics
    RECOGNITION AND RECONCILIATION: THE NEW ROLE OF THEORY IN AESTHETICS by Kristin Amber Hrehor A thesis submitted to the Department of Philosophy In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (September, 2007) Copyright © Kristin Amber Hrehor, 2007 Abstract George Dickie’s institutional theory of art has been subject to extensive debate over the past 30 years. It has been both revered and deplored, garnering such attention for the seemingly controversial way in which Dickie answers the question, “What is art?” In Dickie’s view, an object derives its existence as a work of art in the context of the informal institution of the “artworld,” a concept which was borrowed from Arthur Danto’s earlier work on the theoretical context surrounding works of art. Whether one finds the idea appealing or appalling, it is one that quite simply cannot be ignored, since the empirical validity of the institutional structure of art and the sorts of problems it can cause, especially in our particular time, are so remarkably clear. Another significant feature of Dickie’s institutional theory is that it provides a definition of art, a problem that philosophers of art have attempted to solve for the past few centuries. Dickie’s theory inclines one to dismiss other candidates for definitions as implausible, such as those put forth by R.G. Collingwood and Leo Tolstoy, since, as Dickie insists, an acceptable definition of art must be able to account for the many different kinds of practices that are all referred to as “art.” Both Collingwood and Tolstoy advance restricted conceptions of art that are meant to confine the use of the term “art” to a specific kind of creative activity.
    [Show full text]
  • C:\Users\Lenovo Owner\Documents\Husserls Deconstruction Of
    Husserl’s Deconstruction of Merleau-Ponty’s Corporeal Intersubjectivity Abstract: In this paper, I show how Husserl, via the method of the epoche, dissolves Merleau-Ponty’s starting point in the gestalt structuralism of primary corporeal intersubjectivity, revealing a more radically temporal foundation that has nothing of gestalt form in it. Whereas for Merleau-Ponty, the dependency of the parts belonging to a whole is a presupposed unity, for Husserl, a whole instantiates a temporal story unfolding each of its parts out of the others associatively-synthetically as the furthering of a continuous progression or enrichment of sense. As a consequence of the deconstruction of the gestalt, Husserl’s notion of the foreign must be understood in different terms than that of corporeal otherness. He offers an otherness to self that manifests itself as a thematic belonging to self whose self-similarity presupposes and is built from this irreducible foreignness. This is not a privileging of the same over the different , but rather a situating of the binary in a more insubstantial and therefore more intimate space of relationship than that of corporeal embodiment. In recent years, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty have become valuable sources of inspiration for philosophers and psychologists embracing embodied approaches to consciousness. A common tendency within this scholarly community is to judge the success of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology by how closely it aligns with Merleau-Ponty’s project. Some believe that Merleau-Ponty nudged phenomenology further along in the direction that Husserl was aiming toward in his later years, the implication being that Merleau-Ponty’s project is a more radical one than Husserl’s and that Husserl was not able to overcome a tendency to fall back into transcendental solipsism, subjectivism, Kantian idealism.
    [Show full text]