With the development of society, the rapidly developing social environment has played a significant role in the particular group of college students. College students will inevitably suffer setbacks and psychological obstacles in their studies and daily life. This work aims to ameliorate college students’ various mental illnesses caused by anxiety and confusion during the critical period of status transformation. Educational psychology theory, aesthetic theory, and poetry appreciation are applied to the mental health education of college students to obtain a (...) satisfying psychological healing effect. First, this work summarizes the connotation and characteristics of college student’s mental health and defines educational psychology. Secondly, the long tradition of Chinese poetry teaching is introduced. Besides, the theoretical basis of poetry therapy and aesthetic psychology is expounded, and foreign poetry is discussed. In addition, poetry appreciation is used to promote personality shaping and psychological healing of college students based on the theory of educational psychology and poetry appreciation psychotherapy. In addition, mental health education for college students is studied from the perspectives of psychological health, mental health education, college students’ mental health education, and appreciation of ancient poetry. In addition, the principle and significance of college students’ mental health education are discussed from the perspective of poetry appreciation. Finally, an experimental study is conducted on college students and patients in a specific hospital department by issuing questionnaires to verify the practical application effect of this method in psychotherapy. The survey results indicate that the scores of college students who have completed a one-semester poetry appreciation course in different dimensions of mental disorders are lower than those of those who have not completed the course. At the same time, in the scores of 16 personality traits, the positive trait scores of the experimental group are higher than those of the control group. Comparing scores before and after class also reflects the positive effect of poetry appreciation intervention on college students’ personality shaping. It can be concluded that poetry appreciation has a strong effect on promoting college students’ mental health and personality shaping and improving college students’ psychological problems. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Guided Rapid Unconscious Reconfiguration in Poetry and ArtRoger SeamonThe idea that literary works are designed to give pleasure does not get much exercise these days. So I would like to take it out for a walk. We’ll see where it takes us, how much ground it covers, and what friends it makes along the way. Perhaps if we take it off the leash of theory, it will roam (...) far enough afield.... By this time you are bored with my metaphor, and thus have made a judgment about the use of a trope that is often said to be at the heart of poetry. 1 What I want to do is give an account of the principle that led to that judgment, for it is the same principle, I shall argue, that governs judgments about the aesthetic dimension of literary works.I first encountered the idea in F. W. Bateson’s English Poetry: An Introduction, where he labels it the “The Principle of the Semantic Gap.” Poetry, Bateson says, does not consist of the transference of feeling from poet to reader (the Romantic and expressive view which he opposes), but of “the successful collocation of contrasted or conflicting ‘meanings,’” 2 and he traces the theory back to Coleridge’s idea that poetry consists in the “balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities” (Biographia Literaria, chap. xiv). Contrasted meanings defeat normal expectations, so the reader is forced to bridge (apparent) gaps in order to make sense of the words, and it is that collaboration between author and reader that constitutes poetic activity. The theory is, though Bateson does not present it as such, a reworking of the ancient notion that in a successful work of art we perceive unity in variety. This essay is an effort to extend and defend that theory in its modern form, particularly as it relates to literary works.The modern theory came into being because of a change in the [End Page 412] object of aesthetic analysis from the work and what it imitated to the psychology of the audience:Up to the eighteenth century the theory of art in the Western world was dominated by ancient philosophy. It was most of all Plato’s metaphysics which, in a number of variations and even distortions, attributed to the artist the capacity of perceiving the divine ideals of beauty beyond the world of the senses and embodying them in his creations. The rejection of this mystical view of art in the course of the eighteenth century... was bound to make theorists turn to psychology. 3It is within this psychological tradition that the modern version of unity and variety has been developed.Re-castings of the ancient formula for aesthetic value have been done by (at least) five recent theorists. Given that one can probably trace the twentieth-century revival back to Gestalt psychology, it is not surprising that the earliest of the four is Rudolph Arnheim. In an essay on “Order and Complexity in Landscape Design” he defines order as “the degree and kind of lawfulness governing the relations among the parts of an entity,” and complexity as “the multiplicity of the relationships among the parts of an entity.” 4 Arnheim then psychologizes (rather than “cosmologizes”) these concepts by grounding them in the propensity to be perceptually satisfied by a balance between the two: “Complexity without order produces confusion; order without complexity produces boredom” (p. 124). Similarly, in The Act of Reading Wolfgang Iser says:The reader’s enjoyment begins when he himself becomes productive, i.e., when the text allows him to bring his own faculties into play. There are, of course, limits to the reader’s willingness to participate, and these will be exceeded if the text makes things too clear or, on the other hand, too obscure: boredom and overstrain represent the two poles of tolerance, and in either case the reader is likely to opt out of the game. 5In the same vein, Francis Sparshott asserts in The Theory of the Arts that “Beauty occupies the ground between cliché and chaos,” with variety protecting against the former, unity protecting against the latter, 6 and in The Sense of... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Poetry (Briefly) The Aesthetics of Fiction (Again) A Non‐Aesthetic Art? Fiction as Non‐Aesthetic.

This study is an important contribution to the intellectual history of Victorian England which examines the religio-aesthetic theories of some central writers of the time. Dr Fraser begins with a discussion of the aesthetic dimensions of Tractarian theology and then proceeds to the orthodox certainties of Hopkins' theory of inscape, Ruskin's and Arnold's moralistic criticism of literature and the visual arts, and Pater's and Wilde's faith in a religion of art. The author identifies significant cultural and historical conditions which determined (...) the interdependence of aesthetic and religious sensibility in the period. She argues that certain tensions in the thought of Wordsworth and Coleridge - tensions between poetry and religion, rebellion and reaction, individualism and authority - continued to manifest themselves throughout the Victorian age, and as society became increasingly democratic, religion in turn became increasingly personal and secular. (shrink)

One of the most ancient art forms, poetry, like other art forms, finds its roots embedded in activities that are not necessarily associated with art today, most notably religious rituals. Still, even while poetry is now commonly enjoyed for its own sake, many poems continue to be made for specific life events: weddings, funerals, presidential swearing-in ceremonies, anniversaries, and so on. Their connection to such events may call into question the art status of some poems; indeed, definitions of (...) poetry (as is the case with definitions of art in general) must provide an account that establishes the art status of poems while still acknowledging that some poems may be parasitic upon human activities and events that have no intrinsically artistic goals. Questions of this sort already presuppose a notion of art that divorces art works from those activities and events and establishes art-making as an endeavor in its own right, one that by definition is independent from any other goals and one that, were it to be mixed with other activities or goals, would have its art status threatened. However, just as a notion of art that denied art status to (say) the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC in virtue of its serving a function beyond the purely artistic would be seriously defective, so a definition of poetry that denied poetry status to W. H. Auden’s ‘Funeral Blues’ would be anemic at best. The intention to write a poem, therefore, is the intention to fit one’s work into a tradition, one in which, as happens to be the case, poems are written for various occasions. Likewise, the poetic tradition is one in which various formal means have been employed (alliteration, meter, rhyme schemes, etc.); a ‘transparent’ poetic intention (i.e. one in which the poet is aware of the character of her intention) would therefore involve responding to the formal dimension of the tradition in various ways (see Ribeiro 2007). (shrink)

Ethics, Aesthetics and the Historical Dimension of Language collects together Gadamer's most important untranslated writings on ethics, aesthetics and language. With a substantial introduction by the editors exploring Gadamer's ethical project and providing an overview of his aesthetic work, this book collects Gadamer's writings on ancient ethics, including the moral philosophy of Aristotle, and on practical philosophy. In the final section, Gadamer's writings on art and language are collected, including his examination of poetry, opera and painting among other (...) art forms, and such topics as artistic language and translation. This important collection is a useful resource for scholars in philosophy, studying hermeneutics, continental, 20th-century and German philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Baumgarten's Aesthetics: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives ed. by J. Colin McQuillanEmine Hande TunaJ. Colin McQuillan, editor. Baumgarten's Aesthetics: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. Pp. viii + 364. Hardcover, $130.00.Contemporary philosophers have often overlooked the originality and impact of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's views on aesthetics, and his contribution to the field is often reduced to his introduction of the term 'aesthetics' into the philosophical (...) lexicon. By illuminating the seminal character of Baumgarten's aesthetics and its enduring significance, J. Colin McQuillan's collection of twelve essays endeavors to rectify this neglect, particularly within the anglophone philosophical community. The collection aims to make recent scholarship on Baumgarten's aesthetics more accessible, with translated works from German scholars and their English counterparts presented in a single volume to entice anglophone readers. It stands as the first collection of essays devoted to Baumgarten's aesthetics to be published in English. Through the essays contained in this volume, readers are offered a comprehensive overview of Baumgarten's aesthetic theory and its progression as well as a deeper understanding of his substantial and influential contributions to the field.The collection begins with a comprehensive introduction by McQuillan, which provides insightful analysis of the reasons behind Baumgarten's neglected status and a concise biography of the philosopher. McQuillan lucidly summarizes Baumgarten's goals for his new science of aesthetics, the extent to which he was able to accomplish these goals, and what remained unfinished. McQuillan highlights Baumgarten's view that his aesthetics was not just a theoretical exercise, but rather had practical implications, such as the potential to enhance poetry, rhetoric, and other arts, and more generally all sensible cognition.The opening two essays of the collection offer dual perspectives on Baumgarten's aesthetics, one exploring the connection of his theories to the pursuit of establishing art as the presentation or representation of the absolute and the other presenting his aesthetics as modeled on the "art of invention" (ars inveniendi). Ursula Franke's essay contextualizes [End Page 711] Baumgarten's ideas within the historical framework and demonstrates his impact on the development of German idealist aesthetics, but it also serves as a valuable guide for further research on Baumgarten by providing an overview of contemporary research and avenues for engagement with his work. In the second essay, Stefanie Buchenau offers an insightful examination of the relationship between Baumgarten and Cicero, illuminating how the former crafted aesthetics as a new method of invention.The third and fourth essays of the collection have a narrower focus. In his analysis, Matthew McAndrew, following George Friedrich Meier, posits that Baumgarten, despite seemingly presenting two conflicting definitions of beauty—one attributing beauty to the object of cognition, and the other to the cognition itself—only held the former definition. Departing from previous interpretations that attempted to reconcile both definitions, McAndrew rejects the definition of beauty as the perfection of sensible cognition. Angelica Nuzzo argues that Baumgarten had a pluralistic understanding of truth and distinguished between aesthetic truth and logical truth. She examines Baumgarten's conception of aesthetic truth and contends that it is imperative to comprehend how poetry embodies and incorporates aesthetic truth. According to Nuzzo, Baumgarten believed that aesthetic truth is embodied.In the fifth essay, Simon Grote delves into the theological sources of Baumgarten's aesthetics. Grote claims that Baumgarten's definition of aesthetics was influenced by the definition of aisthēsis put forth by Halle Pietists. Indeed, he claims that seeing this connection between the Pietists and Baumgarten is vital to fully grasp the ethical dimensions of Baumgarten's early aesthetic theory. Like many Halle Pietists, Baumgarten was advancing a conception of moral education as involving the improvement of the human affects through the proper use of the sensible faculties. In the following essay, McQuillan examines the aspects of Baumgarten's aesthetics that set him apart from his rationalist predecessor Christian Wolff. Challenging the orthodox view that portrays Baumgarten as a Wolffian rationalist, McQuillan argues that Baumgarten limited the application of Wolff's mathematical method, circumscribed the scope of logic, and distinguished between sensible and intellectual perfection, separating what Wolff aimed to unite. In his contribution, Alessandro... (shrink)

In this brief work, which is the English version of Die Permanenz Der Kunst, translated and revised by Marcuse and Erica Sherover, Marcuse offers a critique of and a contribution to Marxist aesthetic thought. In contrast to Marxist orthodoxy which explains works of art as the products of social class consciousness, and which thus reduces their truth and quality to "the totality of the prevailing relations of production", Marcuse claims that the political potential of art lies not in its explicitly (...) revolutionary content, nor in its societal context, but precisely "in art itself, in the aesthetic form as such". Marcuse draws his examples of authentic art from eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature, while he explicates and defends the claim that the revolutionary character of art lies in its "transhistorical substance," a substance constituted by its "aesthetic form," which he tentatively defines as "the result of the transformation of a given content into a self-contained whole: a poem, play, novel, etc.". Although Marcuse proffers his criticisms of advanced capitalist and state socialist ideologies to his readers throughout the text, the main thrust of his criticism is directed to Marxist treatments of art which devalue "nonmaterial forces, particularly of the individual consciousness and subconscious and their political function" ; these "nonmaterial forces" for Marcuse are Eros and Thanatos, whose tension is doubly mediated by aesthetic form: first in the sublimation or stylization of content performed by the artist, and second in the de-sublimation which occurs in the audience's perception of these works of art. In these processes of sublimation and de-sublimation, the play of the "metasocial forces" of Eros and Thanatos is exhibited "between individual and individual, male and female, humanity and nature". According to Marcuse it is through such exhibition of forces that individuals "reclaim their subjectivity, their inwardness" and consequently transcend their social determination, although for Marcuse this reclamation cannot be directly translated into political praxis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 368-370 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry, by David Bromwich; xvii & 256 pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001; $49.00 cloth, $16.00 paper. In his preface to this gathering of his essays and reviews on twentieth-century American and British poetry, David Bromwich regrets that it is "too late (...) to suppress the evidence of a critic educating himself in public" (p. xi). But even the earliest work reprinted in Skeptical Music--"The Making of the Auden Canon," published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1976, when the author was still a graduate student at Yale--hardly qualifies as juvenilia. Indeed, in Bromwich's case, evidence of a critic educating himself in public seems to have been suppressed from the start. No single explanation will account for an author's precocity, but the consistency of Bromwich's critical voice over the last quarter century is certainly related to his early preoccupation with William Hazlitt, the subject of his first book. In choosing Hazlitt as his model, Bromwich rejected what he took to be the legacy of systematic and professional literary theory extending from Coleridge to each new school of academic criticism. Bromwich's own development as a critic has therefore been subtler and more introspective than the critical retooling of so many of his colleagues. Although never far from the evaluative art of the reviewer, Bromwich has come to favor the more speculative dimension of his work. The more recent the piece, the more overt the attempt to imagine "what was in the poet's mind, or what was in the poem's mind, on the theory that certain thoughts and feelings are worth the trouble to characterize because of their strangeness and originality" (p. xi).Some of the most compelling chapters in Skeptical Music imagine what was in the poet's mind, or the poem's mind, by telling stories about complex relationships between poems by different poets--between the work of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, or T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane. These are stories about literary influence, or deep temperamental affinity. As in Harold Bloom's work, the stories are grounded in close readings, usually of the passages the critic prizes for their aesthetic superiority.A related procedure is at work in "Stevens and the Idea of the Hero"--a long speculative piece on Wallace Stevens's transfer of allegiance, at a crucial moment in his career, from the pragmatism of Nietzsche to the pragmatism of William James. What Stevens found "most persistently attractive" in Nietzsche's pragmatism, Bromwich coolly explains, was "the suggestion that the good of existence is change" and that "our most vivid acknowledgment of that good comes from the ability to imagine a life wiped clear of ourselves" (p. 71). But the Nietzschean sublime proved insufficient for Stevens. During the Second World War, the poet was confronted by "the reality of American soldiers going off to fight... for a cause which, as Stevens saw it, they could only make true by their fighting" (p. 68). Stevens turned to James for "the less brutal idea of a [End Page 368] man or woman who is made great by an enterprise in which others have a part" (p. 78).Bromwich's argument that Stevens became a more valuable poet when he located heroism in human solidarity, not just Nietzschean contingency and self-creation, bears a family resemblance to the work of one of James's heirs, Richard Rorty. Like Rorty, Bromwich often feels the pressure to adjudicate between the claims of the individual artist and the claims of the community; and like Rorty, he makes his judgements on a case by case basis, without recourse to a set standard, rule, or theory. In the closing chapter of Skeptical Music--"Is Taste Moral?"--Bromwich directly addresses the tension between aestheticism and the social good, a subject that also surfaces at the close of his preface and at numerous moments throughout the book. But the claims of the community seem relatively muted... (shrink)

From the point of view of reflected postmodernity, Ágnes Heller constructs her own discourse of aesthetics on the basis of György Lukács’s contribution. She locates aesthetics in her social philosophy, philosophy of history, and ethics, transforming aesthetics from a ‘Marxist Renaissance’ to a ‘post-Marxist’ position, and points out that the paradoxes of modern culture can be avoided by a personality that is autonomous and moral in action. The notion of the beautiful character in everyday life is a symbol of the (...) ideal type of society and of the good life in contrast to the God-forsaken world of modern dilemmas and the domination of the sublime in postmodernism. It is the expression of freedom and democracy in the contemporary age. Heller’s neo-humanist aesthetics is in essence the presentation of her cultural politics as a Great Republic. (shrink)

James H. Donelan describes how two poets, a philosopher, and a composer - Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Hegel, and Beethoven - developed an idea of self-consciousness based on music at the turn of the nineteenth century. This idea became an enduring cultural belief: the understanding of music as an ideal representation of the autonomous creative mind. Against a background of political and cultural upheaval, these four major figures - all born in 1770 - developed this idea in both metaphorical and actual musical (...) structures, thereby establishing both the theory and the practice of asserting self-identity in music. Beethoven still carries the image of the heroic composer today; this book describes how it originated in both his music and in how others responded to him. Bringing together the fields of philosophy, musicology, and literary criticism, Donelan shows how this development emerged from the complex changes in European cultural life taking place between 1795 and 1831. (shrink)

Spariosu, a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia, is really a philosopher of culture. In this book, in his earlier Literature, Mimesis, and Play: Essays in Literary Theory, and in different articles, he outlines a theory influenced by Eric Havelock, E. R. Dodds, Werner Jaeger, and Rene Girard, but which in fact is quite original. The author argues in the first half of his book that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Western culture accommodates two opposing concepts (...) of play. The first, the aesthetically moderated view of Kant and Schiller, is more rational and mediated. While this model of play is a reaction against the repression of the play instinct by the rationalist and post-Aristotelian tradition, it stops short of a full return to Dionysus. According to Spariosu this type of moderation merely intends to provide some flexibility to the empirical-rationalist mainstream of Western thought and to enrich it. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to synthesize four major elements of aesthetic experience that have previously appeared isolated whenever an attempt at conceptualization is made. These four elements are: Immanuel Kant’s disinterested pleasure, Robin G. Collingwood’s emotional expressionism, the present writer’s redemptive emotional experience, and, lastly, Plato’s concept of Beauty. By taking these four abstracted elements as the bedrock for genuine aesthetic experience, this article aims to clarify the proper role of art as distinct from philosophy and intellectualization. Rather (...) than a medium conducive to intellectual understanding, it is argued that the sphere these four elements of aesthetic experience demarcate is one in which art leads to an emotional understanding that transforms the human condition and it imbues it with new meaning only to be found in a moment of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

Because of his preoccupation with the formal aspects of music and literature, Theodor W. Adorno is often regarded as the most aesthetically oriented thinker of the Frankfurt School theorists. It is Adorno’s perceived commitment to aestheticism—the study of art for art’s sake and the study of art as a source of sensuous pleasure, rather than as a vehicle for culturally constructed morality or meaning—that many scholars have criticized as hostile to genuine, concrete, substantive political, social, and ethical engagement with the (...) arts. _Adorno and Ethics_—the first issue of _New German Critique_ to be published by Duke University Press—takes issue with Adorno’s critics. These essays reconsider Adorno’s unique brand of aestheticism, revealing a “politics of aestheticism” and exploring the political and ethical dimensions of his writings. One contributor links the ethical turn taken in Adorno criticism with related developments in American poetry and poetics. Another examines Adorno’s aphorism “Gold Assay” for the ways in which it anticipates one of his seminal works, _The Jargon of Authenticity_. Focusing on Auschwitz and the testimony of its survivors, one contributor explores the impact of the Holocaust on modern philosophy and reason, a relationship that he argues Adorno never specified. Another contributor considers the figure of the animal in the writings of Kant, Adorno, and Lévinas, exploring what it might mean to live, as Adorno suggests, as “a good animal.” _Contributors_. J. M. Bernstein, Detlev Claussen, Samir Gandesha, Alexander García Düttmann, Christina Gerhardt, Martin Jay, Robert Kaufman, Michael Marder, Gerhard Richter. (shrink)

In this original study, Rachel Coventry expands Heidegger's philosophy of art to include his ontological account of poetry and technology. Following Heidegger's definition of technology as preventing authentic poetic language, alongside his argument that poetry can successfully confront technology, Coventry considers the possibility of great poetry in the digital age.

Why have poets played such an important role for contemporary philosophers? How can poetry link philosophy and political theory? How do formal considerations intersect with philosophical approaches? These essays seek to establish a dialogue between poetry and philosophy. Each essay contributes to our understanding of the relationships between theory and lived experience while providing new insight into important poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Victor Hugo, and others. The broad range of metaphysical, phenomenological, aesthetic, and ethical approaches (...) announce important new paths for a reinvigorated study of lyric poetry in the decades to come. (shrink)

Poetry, painting, park. Goethe and Claude Lorrain KempfFranz R.legenda. 2020. pp. 260. £75. hbk.

Contains the _Poetics _ and the first twelve chapters of the_ Rhetoric_, Book III.

RESUMO Este artigo é uma tentativa de conectar a emergência da observação de segunda ordem na filosofia crítica com a teoria da autonomia estética desenvolvida pelo primeiro romantismo alemão. Ao delinear a gênese de um sistema da arte autônomo a partir da recepção da filosofia crítica, minha intenção é mostrar como esses desenvolvimentos filosóficos aparentemente hermenêuticos se relacionam com o nascimento de um sistema de produção e reprodução de obras de arte, que – como argumentarei – são a própria materialização (...) do código do sistema. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Joseph Margolis LITERATURE AND SPEECH ACTS The trivial truth that literature employs language has been fastened on regularly and repeatedly to spawn a remarkable variety of misconceptions. Most famously, in the context of aesthetics, it has led to the untenable thesis that all art is language,1 and to the more pointed claim that works of art somehow affirm propositions that may be linguistically rendered and straightforwardly judged true or (...) false. It has also embarrassed a good deal of theorizing about the nature of aesthetic experience and the aesthetic orientation, and has led to preposterous views about the aesthetic status of the literary arts and the exaggerated importance of words in literature. These developments are reasonably well known, partly because they form a venerable portion of the history of aesthetics, partly because the doctrines at stake take so many apparently persuasive guises—even in our own time. There are other views, however, also largely based on the example of literature, that are at once useful because they are corrective of other abuses and are in their turn prone to newer mistakes that bid fair to become fashionable. The ambivalent corrective I have in mind may be marked by the thesis that a work of art is an utterance of some sort. In effect, the thesis stresses the distortion that results from pretending to address art relevantly solely in terms of the palpable properties of some object or product—more or less on the model of examining a perceptually accessible physical object. Attention is required, on the theory, to the act or agency of the artist by which the work is "uttered," in a sense quite close to that in which a forger is said to "utter" a bad check: by this simple strategem, we are led to see that biographical, historical, intentional considerations are instructive about a work of art in an essential way and that the properties of an artwork cannot possibly be restricted to its merely sensory or sensuous features (if indeed, admitting conceptual art, a particular work has any such features at all). The proposal, therefore, is at least a heuristically useful one. Whether it ought also to be enshrined as definitional of 39 40Philosophy and Literature art is another question altogether, qualified partly by its being entirely possible to save the corrections without the thesis, partly by the debatable force of definitions themselves. A rather specialized but utterly misleading and unpromising version of the utterance theory maintains that literature as such, as well as such particularly important distinctions within literature as fiction, poetry, and metaphor, may be perspicuously defined or distinguished in terms of a speech-act model. We must be careful here. The general thesis that the phenomenon of language cannot be adequately analyzed apart from contextual considerations bearing on speakers' intentions, shared assumptions and background beliefs between speakers and hearers, and the actual histories of conversations and the like has now been abundantly confirmed by a variety of theorists—including, prominently, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, H. P. Grice, John Searle, Keith Donnellan, George Lakoff, and Zeno Vendler. Still, the general concession that familiar syntactic and semantic studies of the phenomenon of language omit an entire dimension of language, as Austin so ably demonstrated, has rather little to say about the distinctions normally debated in the context of literary theory and the appreciation and criticism of literature. (This may well seem paradoxical. The argument has yet to be supplied.) But since the application of the speech-act model to literary analysis shows some tendency to attract advocates, it may be useful to draw explicit attention here to the inherent limitations and difficulties of the enterprise. Obviously, if language must be analyzed at least in part in terms of the context of performing speech acts, it will be impossible to ignore altogether the speech-act dimension of literary utterances. The question remains: what can and what cannot be illuminated by means of the speech-act model? Precisely how restricted a general speech-act model is—that is, one not restricted just to literature—can be seen at a stroke simply by noting that the meanings of sentences (i) cannot be equated with what speakers... (shrink)

At the heart of the relationship between philosophy and poetry, and of the philosophical and the literary tout court, is the relationship between poetry and prose. In the increasingly influential work of Giorgio Agamben, whose impact continues to grow across a wide range of disciplines, the relationship between philosophy and poetry, poetry and prose, receives renewed attention and significance. Situating Agamben's philosophical, poetic prose in relation to the legacy of the prose poem from Charles Baudelaire through (...) Walter Benjamin and Rosmarie Waldrop, ?Philosophy, Poetry, Parataxis? explores the implications of what Agamben calls ?whatever being? or ?whatever singularity? for our understanding of the potentialities inherent in the relationship between contemporary writing practices and what Agamben calls The Coming Community. In contributing to the development of innovative, alternative forms of textuality at once ?philosophical? and ?poetic,? contemporary writers such as Agamben and Waldrop share an understanding of the informing role of parataxis in inflecting philosophy and poetry, poetry and prose, toward what we might call an aesthetics and politics of apposition. (shrink)

The whole of Marx's project confronts the narrow concerns of political philosophy by embedding it in social philosophy and a certain understanding of the aesthetic. From those of aesthetic production to the "poetry of the future" (as Marx writes in the Eighteenth Brumaire), from the radical modernism of bourgeois development to the very idea of association (which defined one of the main lines of tradition in the history of aesthetics), steady references to Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe, and the idea (...) that bourgeois politics is nothing but a theatrical stage: the aesthetic has a prominent place in the constellation of Marx's thought. This book offers an original and challenging study of both Marx in the aesthetic, and the aesthetic in Marx. It differs from previous discussions of Marxist aesthetic theory as it understands the works of Marx themselves as contributions to thinking the aesthetic. This is an engagement with Marx's aesthetic that takes into account Marx's broader sense of the aesthetic, as identified by Eagleton and Buck-Morss - as a question of sense perception and the body. (shrink)

The overall trend toward globalization in design, greatly enhanced by digital technologies, has raised issues and challenges on how to preserve the cultural differences and values of different societies. There is a tendency to lose touch with local cultural values when designing artefacts for global use, and social nuances and traditions risk to be flattened or stereotyped in the pursuit of developing new technologies and products for the global society. Attempts to reduce the tension between the global and the local (...) in design can be seen in the development of standards and guidelines for cross-cultural design, that are mostly focused on user interface design. However, when moving from preferences, metaphors, appearance, and navigation toward cultural models of interaction and physical design, new methodologies and tools for cross-cultural design are needed. This paper describes a poetry-inspired design method for cross-cultural sharing within the design process. The approach uses poetry to sensitize the designer to the subtleties and diversity of a culture so that the design can be given new aesthetic and cultural significance. The methodology is exemplified by actual design cases developed within the course “Cultural Sensitivity” of the Master’s Degree Program in Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology, where poetry was used for uncovering underlying or implicit assumptions, intercultural differences and similarities, as well as for general sensitization of young designers. (shrink)

This study explores the relationship between the poetic language of Donne, Herbert, Milton, and other British poets, and the choral music and part-songs of composers including Tallis, Byrd, Gibbons, Weelkes, and Tomkins. The seventeenth century was the time in English literary history when music was most consciously linked to words, and when the mingling of Renaissance and 'new' philosophy opened new discovery routes for the interpretation of art. McColley offers close readings of poems and the musical settings of analogous texts, (...) and discusses the philosophy, performance, and disputed political and ecclesiastical implications of polyphony. She also enters into current discourse about the nature of language, relating poets' use of language and composers' use of music to larger questions concerning the arts, politics and theology. (shrink)

Consonant with the ongoing “aesthetic turn” in legal scholarship, this article pursues a new conception of law as poetry. Gestures in this law-as-poetry direction appear in all three main schools in the philosophy of law’s history, as follows. First, natural law sees law as divinely-inspired prophetic poetry. Second, positive law sees the law as a creative human positing (from poetry’s poesis). And third, critical legal theory sees these posited laws as calcified prose prisons, vulnerable to poetic (...) liberation. My first two sections interpret two texts at the intersections among these three theories, namely Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “A Defense of Poetry” and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Shelley identifies a poetic rebirth in the ruins of natural law, suggesting a philosophy of law as “natural poesis.” And Tocqueville names several figurative aristocracies capable of redeploying aristocratic law against democratic despotism, suggesting a philosophy of law as “aristo-poetic counterforce.” Finally, I propose a new theory of law as poetry bridging these two theories, “natural aristo-poetic counterforce.”. (shrink)

_The Literary Wittgenstein_ is a stellar collection of articles relating the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to core problems in the theory and philosophy of literature. Amid growing recognition that Wittgenstein's philosophy has important implications for literary studies, this book brings together twenty-one articles by the most prominent figures in the field. Eighteen of the articles are published here for the first time. _The Literary Wittgenstein_ applies the approach of Wittgenstein to core areas of literary theory, including poetry, deconstruction, the (...) ethical value of literature, and the nature and logic of fictional discourse. The literary dimension of Wittgenstein's own writings is also explored, such as the authorial strategy of the _Tractatus_, and writing and method in the _Philosophical Investigations_. Major literary figures discussed in the book include William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, and Friedrich Hölderlin. By mapping out the foundations of a new approach to literature, _The Literary Wittgenstein_ is essential reading for anyone interested in the relevance and application of Wittgenstein's thought to literary theory, aesthetics, and the philosophy of language and logic. (shrink)