Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, 19 essays document the April 1998 international congress held at Harvard University. They ponder on such topics as the phenomenology of the experience of enchantment, Leonardo's enchantress, the ambiguous meaning of musical enchantment in Kant's Third Critique, art and the reenchantment of sensuous human activity, the creative voice, the allure of the Naza, Henri Matisse's early critical reception in New York, Zizek's sublimicist aesthetic of enchanted fantasy, (...) and enchantment in Baroque festive court performance in France. There is no subject index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Although there are distinctly American artists-Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Grandma Moses, Thomas Hart Benton, and Andy Warhol, for example-very little attention has been devoted to formulating any distinctively American characteristics of aesthetic judgment and practice. This volume takes a step in this direction, presenting an introductory essay on the possibility of such a distinctly American tradition, and a collection of essays exploring particular examples from a variety of angles. Some of the essays in this collection extend pragmatist (...) and process insights about the important place aesthetics has in molding and assessing experience. Other essays examine the place of American aesthetics in relation to such particular forms of art as painting, literature, music, and film. Three essays attend to the aesthetic aspects of a flourishing life. In each of the essays, American aesthetics is understood to arise out of deeply felt personal, historical, and cultural backgrounds. Consequently, not only are such relatively abstract notions as harmony, fit, elegance, proportion, and the like involved in aesthetic judgment, but also religious, political, and social factors become embroiled in aesthetic discernment. Thus the ongoing pattern of American aesthetics is shown to be distinguishable from such other varieties of aesthetic thought as analytic aesthetics, New Criticism, and postmodern approaches to aesthetics. (shrink)

My thesis is that there is an aesthetic dimension of nature that is metaphysically significant, qualitatively pluralistic, and artistically creative, and that this accounts for the sensuous complexity of experience, as well as the possibility of discovering new qualitative features about the world and expressing them in novel forms, as exemplified in art. I call the philosophy that endorses the reality of this dimension Transcendentalist Aesthetics. The term "Transcendentalist" recalls the philosophy of New England Transcendentalism with its core in Ralph (...) Waldo Emerson, and which influenced the philosophical writings of Charles S. Peirce and the art of the nineteenth-century American landscape painters of the Hudson River School and Luminism. The primary overall goal is to present and argue for a Transcendentalist Aesthetics by making use of the philosophy of Emerson and Peirce, together with the writings and landscapes of the painters. More specifically, Emerson's claims about nature and art and the painters' representations of nature provide various poetic observations of nature that provide an empirical starting point concerning the rich aesthetic complexity of the world. This complexity finds a theoretical ground in Peirce's metaphysical cosmology, which presents a rationally coherent account of the greater structures and processes of the universe while possessing important aesthetic consequences for lived experience and art. The landscape paintings also have a role in that they are expressive of the Transcendentalist philosophy itself, serve as case studies for theoretical interpretation, and are concrete evidence that new qualitative features about the world may be discovered and realized in novel artistic ways. (shrink)

The publication of Art as Experience in 1934 marked a theoretical turning point away from the disinterested spectatorship of Kant towards an aesthetics of everyday life. Dewey’s major claim therein is that “aesthetic experience” is privileged and ought to be taken as paradigmatic for all experience because it is controlled by an affective unity that he calls “pervasive quality” which harmonizes thought and action with its social and environmental context. In 1935 Walter Benjamin argued that pre-industrial works of art have (...) an “aura” that exerts an affective lure on consciousness, and that the remnants of this aura in the post-industrial age may lead to the abandonment of critical thought and seduce the masses into the sway of fascism. This paper considers John Dewey’s aesthetic theory in light of the critical perspective developed by his contemporaries in the Frankfurt School. I will consider whether Dewey’s reliance on the qualitative dimension of experience undermines the critical reflection that, theoretically, prevents the “aestheticization of politics” that leads to the spread of fascism, and propose that pragmatist aesthetics would benefit from greater tolerance for the “negativity” exemplified by the critical theorists. (shrink)

An artistic discussion on the critical potential of African American expressive culture In a major reassessment of African American culture, Phillip Brian Harper intervenes in the ongoing debate about the “proper” depiction of black people. He advocates for African American aesthetic abstractionism—a representational mode whereby an artwork, rather than striving for realist verisimilitude, vigorously asserts its essentially artificial character. Maintaining that realist representation reaffirms the very social facts that it might have been understood to challenge, Harper contends (...) that abstractionism shows up the actual constructedness of those facts, thereby subjecting them to critical scrutiny and making them amenable to transformation. Arguing against the need for “positive” representations, Abstractionist Aesthetics displaces realism as the primary mode of African American representational aesthetics, re-centers literature as a principal site of African American cultural politics, and elevates experimental prose within the domain of African American literature. Drawing on examples across a variety of artistic production, including the visual work of Fred Wilson and Kara Walker, the music of Billie Holiday and Cecil Taylor, and the prose and verse writings of Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and John Keene, this book poses urgent questions about how racial blackness is made to assume certain social meanings. In the process, African American aesthetics are upended, rendering abstractionism as the most powerful modality for Black representation. (shrink)

Written in the American tradition, American Modern: The Path Not Taken describes how four major American thinkers practiced philosophy non-reductively by incorporating the arts and other human activities. Tejera provides a detailed analysis of Peirce, Dewey, Santayana, and Buchler, showing that the importance they placed on the human can cure what is missing in recent philosophy. American Modern will interest philosophers, historians of philosophy, and scholars of American intellectual history.

Hefty and serious—that is how this book feels when you pick it up. That was my subjective aesthetic experience anyway. Aesthetic judgment is, after all, one key to assessing our thoughts and perceptions. More on that soon, as you might expect.Hefty and serious also describes the questions with which the volume grapples: Is there, or can there be, a clear American Aesthetics, not merely aesthetics practiced by Americans? What would that look like? How would such a process affect the (...) minds and actions of Americans?The answers? It's complicated.The twenty essays in this volume trace the possibility of an American Aesthetics from foundational ideas of the past to the contemporary landscape. The goal is not only articulating an aesthetics that is distinctively American—aesthetics as a method for examining the arts and the artful—but also the possibility of aesthetics as a dynamic tool for pursuing a flourishing life within our hyper-capitalist, consumerist culture.Constant amongst the scholars gathered here is the assertion that aesthetics is not an abstract academic pursuit interesting only to the privileged and interested few but rather that aesthetics is the key element in the human pursuit of meaning and purpose in our lives. Aristotle would approve!Speaking of ancestors, the scholars here trace the work of grandparents such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Pierce, and William James, and parents such as the pragmatist John Dewey and the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. (Whitehead is from the UK but “American” in that he died in the US after a long career at Harvard and wrote his magnum opus, Process and Reality, in the US.) From these ancestors, the scholars gathered in this volume see a path forward: Art as conscious experience, as Dewey posited, and/or art as committed immersion in the process, as Whitehead claimed.Whitehead's process approach—process aesthetics—reminds us that each moment of our experience in this at once mundane and amazing world is an occasion of beauty and a telos—each moment is in the larger process of reality quite literally our last.William James attempted to map how we might free ourselves from the everyday and from everyday-ness: “We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib verbalities and verbosities and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up” (109). Yet, according to James, there is hope due to the fact that we human beings seek art and do art first and foremost because we enjoy it.Enjoyment was not the angle from which John Dewey approached the subject. According to Dewey our aesthetic reactions and interactions create the experience of art (and life) that re-accesses “an underlying harmony... that we vaguely remember” (112). For pragmatists, noticing a “thing” is entering a relationship with that thing, what David Strong terms in his essay, “correlational coexistence” (371).From these building blocks the scholars assembled propose ways to change US culture from one prone to ask, “What does it do?” into one in which it is increasingly possible to ask, “What does it mean?” This would be a fundamental shift in the dominant paradigms in US culture.How to get there? Randall E. Auxier offers a concise definition of “bad”—bad is something that is “lifeless and too much indebted to the actual.” My attempts at singing fall into that category, as do many American experiences conceived in the mode of what they do, not what they mean.That works of art escape or repel descriptions of their constitutive elements has proven to be a persistent philosophical conundrum through the centuries, as has the question of whether human feelings create an object or an object creates feelings, or both/and—Dewey's interaction of “organism and environment.” From whichever philosophical direction we approach this crux, aesthetic thinking can lead us to recognize and experience the inwardness of what we view as things—objects—and this examination can realign our personal axiology—our personal valuation of reality—the “ten thousand things” of ancient Chinese philosophy.Several authors cite Suzanne Langer's theory of symbol, broadening the scope of “art” well beyond Art with a capital A into the aesthetic and the ritualistic.The scholars gathered here are optimistic that aesthetic examination can create more of those rare moments (moments art can reliably create) in which our very being adjusts to the reality of existence, and we feel exhilarated and a part of the whole process of existence. We call this “nirvana” or “enlightenment.”That is another thing that feels hefty about this volume: the persistent optimism among the scholars that psychic wholeness and human flourishing are possible for more Americans. Robert S. Corrington terms this the “selving process,” roughly what Carl Jung termed “individuation.” This collection adds up to much more than the sum of its parts, as one idea inflected in a particular way by one author sparks off the same idea approached from a different perspective in another. This collection contains scholars on the cutting edge of process theology, pragmatism, aesthetics, and religion, many of whom are adept at crossing the traditional fences between academic fields. The US needs an American Aesthetics. As American poet William Carlos Williams wrote,It is difficultto get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lackof what is found there. (shrink)

In the 1980s, when the American art market flourished, critics were heavily concerned with theory. In T_he Aesthete in the City_ David Carrier offers a personal view on the artistic activity of that decade. He begins with a theoretical perspective on the relationship between two very different forms of artwriting: art criticism and art history writing. Carrier surveys the developments within theory during the 1980s, focusing on constructive critical analysis of the then fashionable work of Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, (...) T. J. Clark, and Jacques Derrida. He provides detailed accounts of a number of painters, among them Thomas Nozkowski, David Reed, and Sean Scully, whose development he followed closely. Carrier argues that the greatest American artistic tradition,Expressionism, provides the basis for an ongoing tradition of abstract painting, a rich system whose potential has not yet been exhausted. Carrier's earlier work was concerned with a philosophical study of the methods of art criticism. This book turns to the theory and practice of art criticism, concentrating on a concrete discussion of individual theorists and artists. (shrink)

As environmental concerns rightly take a greater role in the critical reevaluation of the American philosophical tradition, it behooves us to return again to the often slippery notion of “nature” to ask if it can be redeemed as not merely the canvas on which human endeavor is depicted but an active element of the diverse and distinct philosophical perspectives that make the tradition. Indeed, there is a great need to depict the potentially subversive ways that human and nature can (...) be understood as radically connatural, in intimate ecological and constructive relations that make nature not just the instrument for the exertion for human wants and desires but also thoroughly and... (shrink)

Moby-Dick has long served as an index of contemporary events and changing paradigms. Yet despite its long and varied history of interpretation, an analysis of the novel’s reception history demonstrates a striking unanimity of purpose. In nearly every instance, Ahab’s excesses and inhumanities are identified and prohibited in the name of ensuring that the novel can aid in the work of furthering the aesthetic education of man. In the process, the artwork’s integrity, achievement and essential irreducibility are subordinated to the (...) demand that artworks provide essential moral instruction. The present essay reconstructs this common task through a close reading of the novel’s reception history, tracking its development from the time of Melville’s contemporaries to more recent debates between Donald E. Pease and William V. Spanos. Through Theodor W. Adorno’s work on aesthetics and society, this critical reinterpretation of Moby-Dick tries to better understand the “wicked book” its author first recognized, and for whose infernal birth he felt, in his own words, “as spotless as the lamb.”. (shrink)

The Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics offers a comprehensive overview of Latin American aesthetic and conceptual production addressing the more-than-human environment at the intersection between art, activism, and critique. Fields include literature, performance, film, and other audiovisual media as well as their interactions with community activisms. Scholars who have helped establish environmental approaches in the field as well as emergent critical voices revisit key concepts such as ecocriticism, (post-)extractivism, and multinaturalism, while opening new avenues of dialogue with (...) areas including critical race theory and ethnicity, energy humanities, queer-*trans studies, and infrastructure studies, among others. This volume both traces these genealogies and maps out key positions in this increasingly central field of Latin Americanism, at the same time as they relate it to the environmental humanities at large. By showing how artistic and literary productions illuminate critical zones of environmental thought, articulating urgent social and material issues with cultural archives, historical approaches and conceptual interventions, this volume offers cutting-edge critical tools for approaching literature and the arts from new angles that call into question the nature/culture boundary. (shrink)

In the present paper an interpretation of the political dimension of pragmatic aesthetic reflection is proposed. The interconnection between politics and aesthetics in three classic American pragmatists: William James (1842–1910), John Dewey (1859–1952), and George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) is evoked. The author claims that by emphasizing the role of democratic values in philosophy and life, the classic American pragmatists encroach upon the field of the arts and aesthetics. Their emphasis put upon individual activity, free expression of thoughts, plurality (...) of the forms of expression, and acceptance of criticism as a tool helping create better solutions in human cooperation can easily be converted into the postulates about the character of the artistic principles and of the nature of the aesthetic norms and values. (shrink)

This book proposes an original philosophy of nature, contributes to our understanding of two of America’s greatest philosophers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles S. Peirce, and examines the philosophical expressions of the art of nineteenth-century American landscape painting.

This essay considers the recuperation of beauty as a productive critical strategy in discussions of African American dance. I argue that black performance in general, and African American concert dance in particular, seeks to create aesthetic sites that allow black Americans to participate in discourses of recognition and appreciation to include concepts of beauty. In this, I suggest that beauty may indeed produce social change for its attendant audiences. I also propose that interrogating the notion of beauty may (...) allow for social change among audiences that include dance theorists and philosophers. Through a case-study consideration of work by three African American choreographers, Donald Byrd (b. 1949), Ulysses Dove (1947 – 1996), and Abdel Salaam (b. 1949), I ultimately hope to suggest critical possibilities aligning dance performance with particular aesthetic theory relevant to its documentation and interpretation. (shrink)

Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age examines a variety of significant multidisciplinary and multicultural topics within the subject of aesthetics. Addressing the vexed relation of the arts and criticism to current political and cultural concerns, the contributors to this volume attempt to bridge the two decades-old gap between scholars and critics who hold conflicting views of the purposes of art and criticism. By exploring some of the ways in which global migration and expanding ethnic diversity are affecting cultural productions and prompting (...) reassessment of the nature and role of aesthetic discourse, this volume provides a new evaluation of aesthetic ideas and practices within contemporary arts and letters. (shrink)

Enfolding Silence is a rare gem for exploring the aesthetic dimensions of epistemology and meaning-making through the arts in the context of historic communal injury. Author Brett Esaki invites his audience to consider how Japanese Americans have developed various art forms to cope with, resist, and transform traumatic experiences of racism, including the mass, unlawful internment of nearly 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II. By examining an extended ethnographic case study, educators and students can reflect on how (...) a community teaches aesthetically across generations, as one generation traumatized by racism teaches what matters culturally, aesthetically, and spiritually to the next. Esaki is... (shrink)

What Makes That Black? The African American Aesthetic in American Expressive Culture delineates the African-American aesthetic in both the African-American culture and the artistic cultural formation of the United States. It presents a definition of the African-American aesthetic using a typology of seventy-four tenets-markers that expand the aesthetic's definition to include its artistic structure, cultural function, and consciousness.¿The book is both anecdotal and scholarly, creating an accessible dialogue in a research area sometimes burdened by excessive (...) scholarly nomenclature. The power of story (art) reaches into cognitive spaces and impact understandings unreachable by linear academic argument. ¿Physical features such as images, links to visual media, glossary, bibliography, and index make the project easier for teachers/students to use.¿The book approaches the African-American Aesthetic from wide-ranging sources, cross-referencing literature, dance, oration, music, dress, sub-Saharan African aesthetics, scholarly text, visual arts, athletics, children's games, and anecdotal accounts. (shrink)

Mono no Aware and Gender as Affect in Japanese Aesthetics and American Pragmatism argues that gender is best understood as a felt sense of the organization of the human body. Through Japanese aesthetics and American pragmatism, this book argues that re-understanding gender as an affect, or a feeling, can expand the ways that gender is understood, enacted, and theorized in experience.

The British Aesthetic Tradition: From Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein is the first single volume to offer readers a comprehensive and systematic history of aesthetics in Britain from its inception in the early eighteenth century to major developments in Britain and beyond in the late twentieth century. The book consists of an introduction and eight chapters, and is divided into three parts. The first part, The Age of Taste, covers the eighteenth-century approaches of internal sense theorists, imagination theorists and associationists. The second, (...) The Age of Romanticism, takes readers from debates over the picturesque through British Romanticism to late Victorian criticism. The third, The Age of Analysis, covers early twentieth-century theories of Formalism and Expressionism to conclude with Wittgenstein and a number of views inspired by his thought. (shrink)

MIRJAM HORN, POSTMODERN PLAGIARISMS: CULTURAL AGENDA AND AESTHETIC STRATEGIES OF APPROPRIATION IN US-AMERICAN LITERATURE, WALTER DE GRUYTER, BERLIN/BOSTON, 2015.Marko Bogunović.

Subjunctive Aesthetics argues for the importance of ecocritical approaches within Mexican Studies. This monograph engages with established and up-and-coming Latin American ecocritical scholars who argue that Latin America offers an important corrective to Anglocentric approaches to the Anthropocene by foregrounding colonialism and empire.

The photographer and reformer Jacob Riis once wrote, “I have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club.” Riis was not alone in his belief that beauty could tame urban chaos, but are aesthetic experiences always a social good? Could aesthetics also inspire violent crime, working-class unrest, and racial murder? To answer these questions, Russ Castronovo turns to those who debated claims that art could democratize culture—civic reformers, anarchists, novelists, civil (...) rights activists, and college professors—to reveal that beauty provides unexpected occasions for radical, even revolutionary, political thinking. B eautiful Democracy explores the intersection of beauty and violence by examining university lectures and course materials on aesthetics from a century ago along with riots, acts of domestic terrorism, magic lantern exhibitions, and other public spectacles. Philosophical aesthetics, realist novels, urban photography, and black periodicals, Castronovo argues, inspired and instigated all sorts of collective social endeavors, from the progressive nature of tenement reform to the horrors of lynching. Discussing Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlie Chaplin, William Dean Howells, and Riis as aesthetic theorists in the company of Kant and Schiller, Beautiful Democracy ultimately suggests that the distance separating academic thinking and popular wisdom about social transformation is narrower than we generally suppose. (shrink)

This article identifies temporality as a constructed and elemental level of aesthetic experience, and exposes the elemental role of such aesthetic experience in the unfolding of contemporary Latin American liberatory thought. This particularly with regard to the sense of temporality that underlies the unfolding of the development of modernity, a development that occurs throughout the colonization of the Americas in the construction of a rational European ego cogito and its "other." Temporality in the westernizing linear sense figures a projective (...) horizon for the perception and understanding of existence and its coming. The key aim and meaning of all existence under this linear temporality is order and progress. However, ultimately in looking at Latin American thought and experience one finds a distinct sense of history and temporality beyond the possible determination of that sustaining westernizing European thought. In the recognition of distinct temporalities space-times open for rethinking modernity and the accompanying senses of humanity, life, freedom, and philosophical thought's issues and ways of articulating beings. (shrink)