Showing papers in "The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism in 1992"

Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature

Abstract: This volume brings together Martha Nussbaum's published papers, some revised for this collection, on the relationship between literature and philosophy, especially moral philosophy. It also includes two new essays and a substantial Introduction. The papers, many of them previously not readily available to non-specialist readers, explore such fundamental issues as the relationship between style and content in the exploration of ethical questions; the nature of ethical attention and ethical knowledge and their relationship to written forms and style; and the role of the emotions in deliberation and self-knowledge. The author investigates and defends a conception of ethical understanding which involves emotional as well as intellectual activity, and which gives a certain type of priority to the perception of particular people and situations rather than to abstract rule.

The female nude : art, obscenity and sexuality

Abstract: List of Plates Introduction Part One: Theorizing the Female Nude 1 Framing the Female Body 2 A Discourse on the Naked and the Nude 3 A Study of Ideal Art 4 Aesthetics and the Female Nude 5 Obscenity and the Sublime Part Two: Redrawing the Lines 1 'The Damaged Venus' 2 The Framework of Tradition 3 The Lessons of the Life Class 4 Art Criticism and Sexual Metaphor 5 Breaking Open the Boundaries 6 Redrawing the Lines Part Three: Cultural Distinctions 1 Sacred Frontiers 2 Pure and Motivated Pleasure 3 Policing the Boundaries 4 Displaying the Female Body 5 Erotic Art: A Frame for Desire List of Works Cited Index

The Contest of meaning : critical histories of photography

Abstract: Part 1 What are the social consequences of aesthetic practice?: the museum's old / the library's new subject, Douglas Crimp the judgment seat of photography, Christopher Phillips from faktura to factography, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh the armed vision disarmed - radical formalism from weapon to style, Abigail Solomon-Godeau. Part 2 How does photography construct sexual difference?: what becomes a legend most - the short, sad career of Diane Arbus, Catherine Lord of mother nature and Marlboro men - an inquiry into the cultural meanings of landscape photography, Deborah Bright the graphic ordering of desire - modernization of a middle-class women's magazine, 1914-39, Sally Stein dykes in context - some problems in minority representation, Jan Zita Grover. Part 3 How is photography used to promote class and national interests? the corporate year in pictures, Carol Squiers c/overt ideology - two images of revolution, Esther Parada in the American East - Richard Avedon incorporated, Richard Bolton. Part 4 What are the politics of photographic truth?: photography's discursive spaces, Rosalind Krauss in, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography), Martha Rosler the body and the archive, Allan Sekula.

Issues in feminist film criticism

Abstract: Acknowledgments Introduction Patricia Erens I. Critical Methodology: Women and Representation Introduction Positive Images Screening Women's Films Linda Artel and Susan Wengraf There's More to a Positive Image Than Meets the Eye Diane Waldman The Place of Women in the Cinema of Raoul Walsh Pam Cook and Claire Johnston Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Laura Mulvey Film and the Masquerade Theorizing the Female Spectator Mary Ann Doane Hitchock, Feminism, and the Patriarchal Unconscious Tania Modleski Women and Respresentation Can We Enjoy Alternative Pleasure? Jane Gaines II. Rereading Hollywood Films Introduction Gentlemen Consume Blondes Maureen Turim Pre-text and Text in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Lucie Arbuthnot and Gail Seneca The Case of the Missing Mother Maternal Issues in Vidor's Stella Dallas E. Ann Kaplan "Something Else Besides a Mother" Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama Linda Williams Seduced and Abandoned Recollection and Romance in Letter from an Unkown Woman Lucy Fischer Illicit Pleasures Feminist Spectators and Personal Best Elizabeth Ellsworth White Privilege and Looking Relations Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory Jane Gaines III. Critical Methodology: Feminist Filmmaking Introduction The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film Julia Lesage Feminism, Film, and Public History Sonya Michel Textual Politics Annette Kuhn In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism B. Ruby Rich Rethinking Women's Cinema Aesthetics and Feminist Theory Teresa de Lauretis Dis-Embodying the Female Voice Kaja Silverman IV. Assessing Films Directed by Women Introduction Images and Women Robin Wood Unspoken and Unsolved Tell Me a Riddle Florence Jacobowitz and Lori Spring Desperately Seeking Difference Jackie Stacey Female Narration, Women's Cinema Helke Sander's The All-Round Reduced Personality/Redupers Judith Mayne Feminist or Tendentious? Marleen Gorris's A Question of Silence Mary C. Gentile Anti-Porn Soft Issue, Hard World B. Ruby Rich Variety The Pleasure in Looking Bette Gordon Glossary Selected Bibliography Index

Art and Engagement by Arnold Berleant

Abstract: Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: Aesthetics and Experience 1. Experience and Theory in Aesthetics 2. The Unity of Aesthetic Experience Part II: Engagement in the Arts 3. The Viewer in the Landscape 4. Architecture as Environmental Design 5. The Reader's Word 6. Musical Generation 7. Dance as Performance Part III: Art and Reality 8. Cinematic Reality 9. The Realities of Art 10. Epilogue: Art and the End of Aesthetics Notes Index

Music and text : critical inquiries

Abstract: List of figures List of contributors Preface Steven Paul Scher Acknowledgments Part I. Institutional Dimensions and the Contexts of Listening: 1. Music and literature: the institutional dimensions John Neubauer 2. Privileging the moment of reception: music and radio in South Africa Charles Hamm 3. Chord and discourse: listening through the written word Peter J. Rabinowitz Part II. Literary Models for Musical Understanding: Music, Lyric, Narrative and Metaphor: 4. Lyrical modes Paul Alpers 5. Origins of modernism: musical structures and narrative forms Marshall Brown 6. Metaphorical modes in nineteenth-century music criticism: image, narrative, and idea Thomas Grey 7. Narrative archetypes and Mahler's Ninth Symphony Anthony Newcomb Part III. Representation, Analysis and Semiotics: 8. Music and representation: the instance of Haydn's Creation Lawrence Kramer 9. Musical analysis as stage direction David Lewin 10. Poet's love or composer's love? Edward T. Cone 11. The semiotic elements of a multiplanar discourse: John Harbison's setting of Michael Fried's 'Depths' Claudia Stanger Part VI. Gender and Convention: 12. Whose life? The gendered self in Schumann's Frauenliebe songs Ruth A. Solie 13. Operatic madness: a challenge to convention Ellen Rosand 14. Commentary: form, reference, and ideology in musical discourse Hayden White Index.

Signatures of the Visible by Fredric Jameson

Abstract: In \"Signatures of the Visible\", one of America's most influential critics explores film and its culture, interrogating the relationship between the imaginative screen world and the historical world onto which it is projected. Beginning with his essay \"Reunification and Utopia in Mass Culture\", Jameson questions the critical-utopian potential of film in our commodified culture, where contests over value, desire, and power increasingly take place in the realm of the visual. In the postmodern world, asks Jameson, can the filmic form replace the novel as the predominant instrument for exploring social reality and social evolution? Jamesons's premise here is that of his previous literary investigations: history is transmitted through form itself, not content. By seeking the historical dimension of the visual in \"Signatures of the Visible\", he evaluates the power of the filmic form as a vehicle for the critique of culture and the diagnosis of social life.

Possible Palladian Villas: Plus a Few Instructively Impossible Ones

Abstract: From the Publisher: The villas of Andrea Palladio have been among the most influential buildings in history. Drawing on the architect's original published legacy of forty-odd designs, George Hersey and Richard Freedman reveal the rigorous geometric rules by which Palladio conceived these structures. Where most earlier attempts to analyze the villas are mere lists of numbers and ratios that ignore space distribution, the present rules produce actual designs. Using a computer, the authors test each rule in every possible application, establishing a degree of validity not possible in ad hoc analyses. Progressing from the architect's most obvious to his subtlest ideas, the computer ultimately creates villa plans and facades that are stylistically indistinguishable from those of Palladio himself. Possible Palladian Villas opens the way to similar analyses of other such "paradigmatic" designs, whether Chinese screens, Greek temples, baroque churches, or Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Houses. In fact a new approach to architectural history emerges: we can study designs that a given master might have produced but did not. Palladio's actual buildings, along with those of his generations of imitators, are set into the context not only of a new theory but of a new type of theory. Along with the Macintosh disk that runs the program, Possible Palladian Villas will fascinate the design community and students of architectural style, symmetry, and geometry. It will fill architectural historians with bracing dismay. George Hersey is Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. Richard Freedman, who designed the computer program, is a product marketer working on MS-DOS at theMicrosoft Corporation.

The role of aesthetic emotion in R. G. Collingwood's conception of creative activity

Abstract: In the strong or radical sense, the creation of a work of art succeeds, as Kant said, in exhibiting originality that is exemplary and unteachable. The creative artist generates new and valuable outcomes. He or she accomplishes this in a way that is neither predictable before it occurs nor traceable to prior rules-to prior necessary and sufficient conditions. ' Thus, how a creator knows precisely which element (color, line, texture, image, melody, harmonic support, etc.) to select and which to reject during the creative act seems answerable only after the fact, and then only in terms of our judgment that what was selected works within the finished whole. And we face a puzzle when we try to look within the subtleties and complexities of creative processes and wonder how an artist worked out the outcome. R. G. Collingwood faced this puzzle because he affirmed the strong view of creativity, although in a different form, and because he tried to explain what happens in creative processes in art. The difference in the form in which he assumed radical creativity lies in what is ordinarily called "the expression theory of art." The criticisms that have been directed toward this theory, although various, fail to address the subtleties of Collingwood's version of it. This is not the place to develop this point. Yet it is important to make it in the context of the puzzle of the artist's selections and rejections that infuse the creative act, because one of the subtleties of Collingwood's conception of art as the expression of emotion centers on the claim that "bad art" results when an artist attempts to express and fails. In this paper, we will examine two comments in Collingwood's The Principles of Art that illuminate what he meant or, in his terms, "was trying to mean."2 It is likely that he did not clarify this to himself and he may not have fully recognized its value in accounting for the artist's awareness of when he or she goes wrong or makes a right choice in the act of creating. These comments concern the role of aesthetic emotion in the awareness an artist has of the propriety or impropriety (the truth or corruption) of what is being expressed as it is being expressed. We shall offer two claims about the function of aesthetic emotion: (1) Collingwood suggests that the term "aesthetic emotion" has two senses, general (applying to all instances in which imaginative expression occurs) and specific (applying uniquely to the individual character of each imaginative expression), and (2) the first sense of aesthetic emotion indicates a way in which it, in the context of its second sense, can function as a guide during and at the completion of an artist's activity of expressing him or herself imaginatively.