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AH 302: the Idea of the Aesthetic Syllabus Course Description Texts
Fall 2020 AH 302: The Idea of the Aesthetic Syllabus The schedule of classes/readings is subject to change. Registered students should consult the syllabus on Google Classrooms, which will be kept updated. Instructor: Katalin Makkai Course times: Monday and Wednesday 15:45-17:15 Email: [email protected] Office hours: TBA Office: P98 004 Course description “Aesthetics” and “aesthetic” are terms that are often taken for granted inside as well as outside academic discourse. We speak of aesthetic experiences and judgments and qualities, and we employ “aesthetics” to designate the study of such matters. Although their root is taken from the Greek, the now-familiar terms (in their now-familiar usages) are, however, comparatively new. They are commonly regarded as having been introduced into the philosophical lexicon in the eighteenth century—a few hundred years ago. This course studies some of the texts that were key to the discovery, or perhaps the invention, of the “aesthetic”. What work was the idea meant to do? How did its evolution retain or reconfigure its original senses and purposes? Is the idea of the aesthetic problematic, ideological, or chimerical? Do we need an idea of the aesthetic to think about art? Texts All readings will be provided during the semester electronically and are to be brought to class as printouts. Electronic devices Students may not use any electronic devices (laptop, tablet, mobile phone) in the classroom, unless an accommodation letter has been issued. Requirements ACADEMIC INTEGRITY Bard College Berlin maintains the staunchest regard for academic integrity and expects good academic practice from students in their studies. -
Art, Clive Bell
PHI 3240: Philosophy of Art Session 3 September 9th, 2015 Matisse, Henri. (1905) Luxe, Calme, et Volupte. Collingwood & Bell on the Ontology of Art 1 Today we officially begin a unit on the ontology of art, Ø the attempt to answer the question “What is art?” Ø This question is ambiguous. Is it asking: • What is the nature of artworks?, or • What is the nature of the practice of art? Ø We are going to read these authors as if they are answering the question as a claim about artworks. Before discussing Collingwood’s & Bell’s answers, let’s consider a theoretical predecessor. • The earliest views about art we have on record are mimetic, or representational theories: – these say that artworks mimic & depict images/events from the real world. • As Shakespeare’s Hamlet says about plays, artworks were understood to “hold as ‘twere the ‘play within a play’ the mirror up to nature” (Act 3, Scene 2) in Hamlet 2 Representational views were common among the ancient Greeks (e.g. Plato), • and popularized in 18th century Europe (especially by Charles Batteaux, in “The Fine Arts Reduced to a Common Principle” (trans. from French) Why have representational theories of art fallen out of favor? Greek sculpture, Fragonard, Jean-Honoré. nd Ø There are tons of counterexamples 2 -century B.C. (1772) The Reader. to the view, e.g.: – visual artworks which don’t clearly depict any recognizable objects or events (beginning in 1800s), – and purely instrumental music (e.g., symphonies) without lyrics or guiding narratives. • Mozart’s #40 in G Minor (1788): bit.ly/1O2GbSp Turner, Joseph Mallord William. -
The Significance and Insignificance of Clive Bell's Formalism I
Navorsingsartikels/Research articles The significance and insignificance of Clive Bell’s formalism i Johan Snyman Dept, of Philosophy Rand Afrikaans University JOHANNESBURG Abstract Clive Bell coined the phrase significant form. The way he initially defined the phrase and the way he implemented it were two different matters. In this article Bell's procedure is analysed as a characteristic of late moder nist aesthetics, i.e. an attempt to come to terms with the challenge o f the radically new in art. It is suggested that one should bear in mind that formalism in this sense is a theory of artistic material which explains how meaning is communicated and perceived through non-discursive qualities o f the artistic material. That is the relevance o f Susanne K. Longer's re- interpretation o f Bell's phrase. 1. Introduction Clive Bell’s aesthetics does not make for profound reading. Why bother then? The least one can say is that Bell contributed towards the modem aesthetic vocabulary by coining a phrase that has since become a cliché or hackneyed for that matter, viz. significant form. On the other hand, if one reflects from a distance on the Wirkungsgeschichte of Bell’s phrase as well as on the Wirkungs- geschichte of the problem he wanted to solve, significant form has an intriguing logic. Significant form as an aesthetic category has spawned quite a generation of related concepts, from Clive Bell to Susanne K. Langer’s unconsummated symbol, up to Nelson Goodman’s languages of art (Goodman, 1976), Peter A revised version of a paper read at a 2nd International Symposium on Formalism, organized by the Slovenian Society of Aesthetics in Ljubljana, 14-17 May 1992. -
Othering Poetic Form Through Translation
Amanda French Conference -- Art Both Ways: Translation, Restoration, and Re-creation American Literary Translators Association Panel -- Making it Auld: Translation and Philology Saturday, October 30, 2004 The Othering of Poetic Form Through Translation: Jean Passerat's "J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle" (1574) As the first villanelle, Jean Passerat's "J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle" (1574) is historically important for a number of reasons, among them the fact that contemporary Anglophone poems from Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night" to Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" and beyond have adopted and explored its form. I have found seven English verse translations of the poem, the first in 1906, all of which indicate a vested interest in keeping the poem historically "othered" through the use of archaic language. Archaic language for archaic works was de rigueur in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, but since the modern fashion of translation is to render a work that seemed fresh and colloquial in its own day in language that seems fresh and colloquial to us, it is therefore interesting that translators of "J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle" resisted the trend of translation theory, continuing to render the poem in archaic language. I would argue that Passerat's poem has been othered in English translation so as to keep the idea of fixed poetic form strictly marginal in contemporary Anglophone poetry. Most of those involved with contemporary American poetry are aware that there has been a recent surge of interest in the villanelle. The timing of this revival suggests that it is partly due to Elizabeth Bishop's villanelle "One Art," which was first published 2 in the New Yorker in 1976 and also appeared that same year in her influential collection Geography III. -
E New Modernist Studies: What's Left of Political Formalism?
Max Brzezinski !e New Modernist Studies: What’s Left of Political Formalism? In their 2008 PMLA article “!e New Modernist Studies,” Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz simultaneously chart and promote the development of the New Modernist Studies (NMS), a critical movement of which they are the leading spokespeople and practi tion- ers. In the beginning of their piece, Mao and Walkowitz announce that “[w]ere one seeking a single word to sum up transformations in modern literary scholarship over the past decade or two, one could do worse than light on expansion” (737; emphasis in original). !ey then go on to specify the signi"cance of these transformations for the study of modernism and modernity, honing in on what they call the NMS’s “spatial” and “vertical” expansion. By spatial expansion, they mean NMS critics’ move away from national traditions toward conceptu- alizations of transnational ones; by vertical expansion, a parallel move away from modernist elitism toward a pluralistic opening up of crit- icism to popular culture, “works by marginalized social groups,” and a new focus on “matters of production, dissemination, and reception” (738). Given that these critics claim new interest in the way institu- tional and empirical economic contexts have shaped modernist works, the time is nigh to consider how and why the work of the NMS has emerged out of our contemporary economic, political, and institu- tional academic situation. By doing so below, I politicize and extend Jennifer Wicke’s prescient (2001) suggestion that “[a]s revivers of its brand [modernism], a brand we cannot seem to do without, we re- brand ourselves as critics and theorists just as we rebrand modernist others” (395). -
Refrain, Again: the Return of the Villanelle
Refrain, Again: The Return of the Villanelle Amanda Lowry French Charlottesville, VA B.A., University of Colorado at Boulder, 1992, cum laude M.A., Concentration in Women's Studies, University of Virginia, 1995 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Virginia August 2004 ___________________________________ ___________________________________ ___________________________________ ___________________________________ ABSTRACT Poets and scholars are all wrong about the villanelle. While most reference texts teach that the villanelle's nineteen-line alternating-refrain form was codified in the Renaissance, the scholar Julie Kane has conclusively shown that Jean Passerat's "Villanelle" ("J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle"), written in 1574 and first published in 1606, is the only Renaissance example of this form. My own research has discovered that the nineteenth-century "revival" of the villanelle stems from an 1844 treatise by a little- known French Romantic poet-critic named Wilhelm Ténint. My study traces the villanelle first from its highly mythologized origin in the humanism of Renaissance France to its deployment in French post-Romantic and English Parnassian and Decadent verse, then from its bare survival in the period of high modernism to its minor revival by mid-century modernists, concluding with its prominence in the polyvocal culture wars of Anglophone poetry ever since Elizabeth Bishop’s "One Art" (1976). The villanelle might justly be called the only fixed form of contemporary invention in English; contemporary poets may be attracted to the form because it connotes tradition without bearing the burden of tradition. Poets and scholars have neither wanted nor needed to know that the villanelle is not an archaic, foreign form. -
Are We Teaching High Art Or Low Art?
CHAPTER 7 ARE WE TEACHING HIGH ART OR LOW ART? We are apt to call barbarous whatever departs widely from our own tatse and apprehension; but some find the epithet of reproach retorted on us. (Hume, 1965, p. 3) References to high-art notions span the globe. Centuries of continuous and changing conceptions of high art have involved, for example: ideas about the grand and the common, the technical study of its rhetoric concerns, its indifferent morality or lack of any firm moral basis to it, its notions of beauty, perfectionism, emotion, idealism, formalism, the sublime, taste, academic painting and correctness, can be found in the work of Homer, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Joshua Reynolds, David Hume and Clive Bell. So consequently, we are sometimes asked in art education whether the art we are teaching is: ‘high art’ rather than ‘low art’, ‘high culture rather than low culture’, ‘high art rather than popular art’, ‘high art rather than student-centered art’. What are all these different distinctions with ‘high’ and ‘low’ in them segregating? What are their contrasts? Can we segregate what we teach in art in these ways and ought we to do so? ‘High art’ is poor art if, as Marcel Proust satirically mocks, we confuse art with ‘high society’, ‘social ambition’ and ‘special friendships in the art world’ (Proust, 2001, p. 59–67). Proust was aware that in the history of art no continent, nation and single group of people have a monopoly over what is ‘high art’. The above terms with ‘high’ and ‘low’ in them certainly imply a clash of ideas about teaching in art, but if so, why should popular teenage music necessarily clash with classical instrumental music, since on the one hand classical music can perform in instrumental ways Beatles songs rather well, and popular music can have instrumental orchestral influences that can benefit its music interest. -
The Mosaic of Aesthetics: the Manifestation of Clive Bell's and Roger Fry's Theories in the Waves
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism Volume 13 Issue 1 Winter Article 8 4-2020 The Mosaic of Aesthetics: The Manifestation of Clive Bell's and Roger Fry's Theories in The Waves Nina Katarina Štular Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/criterion Part of the English Language and Literature Commons BYU ScholarsArchive Citation Štular, Nina Katarina (2020) "The Mosaic of Aesthetics: The Manifestation of Clive Bell's and Roger Fry's Theories in The Waves," Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism: Vol. 13 : Iss. 1 , Article 8. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/criterion/vol13/iss1/8 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. The Mosaic of Aesthetics The Manifestation of Clive Bell’s and Roger Fry’s Aesthetic Theories in The Waves Nina Katarina Štular In Roger Fry’s “An Essay in Aesthetics,” published in 1909, he explores the question of what art truly is. A year after the paper’s publication, Fry met Clive Bell on a train and they struck a conversation about aesthetics that marked the beginning of Fry’s life-long friendship with the Bloomsbury group—a group that gave home to many influential modernist thinkers and writers. The aesthetic theory that Fry explains in “An Essay in Aesthetics” influenced Bell’sArt , published in 1914, which in turn affected Fry’s Vision and Design, published in 1920, in which Fry fully elaborates his aesthetic theory. -
“Art” by Clive Bell Table of Contents Ideas of Interest from Art
“Art” by Clive Bell Table of Contents Ideas of Interest from Art..............................................................................2 The Reading Selection from Art...................................................................3 Related Ideas............................................................................................... 16 Topics Worth Investigating.......................................................................... 17 Index............................................................................................................ 22 Clive Bell, 1908, adapted from Henry Lamb About the author . Clive Bell (1881-1964) studied history at Trinity College, Cambridge where he and many other undergraduates were influenced by G.E. Moore’s method of analysis exemplified in Principia Ethica. Bell writes that the students who met as a “reading group” in his rooms at Cambridge, together with the artist Vanessa Stephen (later his wife) and her sister, the writer and future Vir- ginia Woolf, initiated the circle of friends known as the “Bloomsberries.” The Bloomsbury Group, as it came to be known, was a literary and cultural circle including, among others, the critic and historian Lytton Strachey, the novelist E. M. Forster, the artist Roger Fry, and the economist John May- nard Keynes. Bell’s shaping of a formalistic æsthetic theory along the lines of Moore’s analysis of good strongly influenced early twentieth century art criticism. Quentin Bell writes that his father’s Art, although “more quoted 1 “Art” by Clive Bell than read . is one of the seminal books of its time.”1 About the work . In Art,2 Bell outlines a formalist theory based on his definition of art as “significant form.” True art, he believes, exhibits combinations of lines and colors which engender intellectual recognition and æsthetic experience in persons of taste. The resultant æsthetic emotion, he believes, is unique, morally transcendent, and independent of other kinds of human emotion. -
A Network Analysis of Postwar American Poetry in the Age of Digital Audio Archives Ankit Basnet and James Jaehoon Lee
Journal of April 20, 2021 Cultural Analytics A Network Analysis of Postwar American Poetry in the Age of Digital Audio Archives Ankit Basnet and James Jaehoon Lee Ankit Basnet, University of Cincinnati James Lee, University of Cincinnati Peer-Reviewer: Stephen Voyce Data Repository: 10.7910/DVN/NK7Z2H A B S T R A C T From the New American Poetry to New Formalism, publishing networks such as literary magazines and social scenes such as poetry reading series have served as a capacious model for understanding the varied poetic formations in the postwar period. As audio archives of poetry readings have been digitized in large volumes, Charles Bernstein has suggested that open access to digital archives allows readers of American poetry to create mixtapes in different configurations. Digital archives of poetry readings “offer an intriguing and powerful alternative” to organizing practices such as networks and scenes. Placing Bernstein’s definition of the digital audio archive into contact with more conventional understandings of poetic community gives us a composite vision of organizing principles in postwar American poetry. To accomplish this, we compared poetry reading venues as well as audio archives — alongside more familiar print networks constituted by poetry anthologies and magazines — as important and distinct sites of reception for American poetry. We used network analysis to visualize the relationships of individual poets to venues where they have read, archives where their readings are stored, and text anthologies where their poetry has been printed. Examining several types of poetic archives offers us a new perspective in how we perceive the relationships between poets and their “networks and scenes,” understood both in terms of print and audio culture, as well as trends and changes in the formation of these poetic communities and affiliations. -
Old and New in Modernist Art
Chapter 2: Old and New in Modernist Art Mr. Thomas T. Baxter presents what appears to be a figure of Christ teaching a dickey-bird to chew worms. This work is labelled "St. Francis" (D‟Asise). I cannot concede his background but the face is remarkable; it is painted with very great skill, and the frenetic modernist who rushes by the picture merely because of the demoded subject-matter will miss one of the best pieces of detail in the exhibition. (Ezra pound, writing as B. H. Dias, in The New Age for January 17, 1918--22.12.235, emphasis added) Among the many kinds of artists, it may be that there are some who are hybrid. Some, that is to say, bore deeper and deeper into the stuff of their own art; others are always making raids into the lands of others. Sickert, it may be, is among the hybrids, the raiders. But . he is probably the best painter now living in England. (Virginia Woolf, writing in 1933, The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays, 201-202, emphasis added) In 1918, we find Ezra Pound worrying about "the frenetic modernist" who will miss something of great beauty because its subject matter, which Pound himself has mocked, is "demoded." And, as late as 1933, we find Virginia Woolf, reporting on a conversation in "Bloomsbury" about Walter Sickert, in which a consensus is reached that this derivative painter, whose work is often naturalistic in its content, and might well have been associated by Woolf with her despised Edwardians, is the best that England has to offer. -
Journal of Arts & Humanities
Journal of Arts & Humanities Ezra Pound’s Subject Matter and the Poetic Avant-Garde C.M. Foltz1 ABSTRACT This paper explores Ezra Pound’s poetics in light of certain American avant-garde poetic schools who claim literary inheritance from him. Specifically, critics in the 1970s to 1990s attempted to redefine Pound’s ars poetica strictly in political terms without acknowledging numerous essays in which he remained apolitical with respect to poetry. In addition to this, Pound’s conception of poetic meter and other theoretical bases are explored. Some of these include Pound’s belief that subject matter is the source of poetic form, and that authorial intention is intimately related to how cultures promote values and a literary tradition. Though Pound is named as a predecessor of American avant-garde-ism, this paper explores how these connections are more tenuous than previously accepted by the academy. Keywords: Avant-Garde, Ezra pound, language poetry, modern poetry, poetics. Available Online: 27th October, 2015. This is an open access article under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, 2015. Recounting the day he met Ezra Pound, Hugh Kenner said in an interview with Harvey Blume (1998) that “I suddenly knew that I was in the presence of the center of Modernism,” and William Carlos Williams (1978) states in I Wanted to Write a Poem that “[b]efore meeting Ezra Pound is like B.C. and A.D.” (p. 5). Now, several decades after Pound’s death, his influence over the proverbial landscape of American poetry is undeniable, and proponents of the poetic avant-garde in the late 1970s to 1990s posited that Pound’s influence over American poetic form is dominant because of its subversive, political nature.