Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful

Philosophy ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 36 (136) ◽  
pp. 71-73
Author(s):  
Anthony Quinton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Academic Philosophy

Burke's Enquiry is one of those books that hovers, importantly but ineffectively, at the fringes of the attention of most modern readers of philosophy. It is something that they have always meant to read some time but yet which they all too seldom get around to actually reading. Its neglect, no doubt, is mainly to be accounted for as part of the generally rather forlorn position of aesthetics in our intellectual landscape. Students of literature disregard aesthetics as at once too schematic and abstract for their purposes and as too often the work of people inadequately equipped for and experienced in the direct criticism of literature and the arts. Although the dominant style of modern criticism had as one of its principal sources a fairly consciously philosophical inquiry into the nature of literature, namely Richard's Principles of Literary Criticism, in its prevailing form, as manifested in the writings of Dr. Leavis and his fol-lowers, it is hostile to any pretensions to critical relevance on the part of academic philosophy. If it rejects impressionism for determinedly intellectual analysis of the detail of literature, it still relies on philosophy only in the loosest and most colloquial sense of the word in so far as it embodies a definitely articulated point of view on questions of morality. (This is not true, it should be added, of the corresponding American New Criticism.) On the other hand, aesthetics has only figured in the most fitful and peripheral manner on the agenda of twentieth-century analytic philosophy.

Newman, Aristotle, and the New Criticism: On the Modern Element in Newman's Poetics

PMLA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-271
Author(s):  
Norman Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Minority Report

Certain Aspects of modern critical theory can be defined in terms of its use—or rather, misuse—of Aristotle's Poetics, especially of Aristotle's conception of plot and his statement that poetry deals with universals rather than particulars. The same, of course, can be said of other periods as well. Sidney's view of Aristotle, for example, was confined to the notion that a poem was an imitation of an action, but he platonized even this conception by claiming that the action imitated was an ideal one—what ought to be rather than what is—and this, as we shall see, became quite a common distortion of the famous passage at the beginning of the ninth chapter of the Poetics. The other side of the coin is found in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' concern with the genres and the unities and their supposed rules. It cannot be said that Aristotle has been a vital influence on literary criticism since the nineteenth century, except for the current minority report being filed by the Chicago Critics, but these two aspects of the Poetics nevertheless offered a support and a challenge to certain nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics for clarifying their own ideas about poetry.

scholarly journals This Is My World: A Submariner’s Battlefield Diary

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yekaterina Postnikova ◽  
Viktoriya Volkova
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Personal Growth ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Personal History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Source Analysis ◽  
Extreme Conditions ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
Great Patriotic War ◽  
Red Army

Battlefield diaries written by simple soldiers and seamen are unique, rare, and practically uncensored sources of war anthropology. The authors combine the comparative historical method of literary criticism with source analysis, which enables them to consider the Great Patriotic War from the point of view of personal history and reveal the peculiarities of wartime ego-documents. The authors refer to the battlefield diary of G. I. Sennikov, a submariner of the Northern Fleet, written between 1943 and 1946. The diary combines the genres of a diary and an ego-document. The peculiarity of the text is the fact that it combines the functions of a battlefield diary (keeping the author’s memories, having a therapeutic effect, etc.) and those of the individualisation process which helps the author to construct and preserve their own personality (self-identification, self-expression, philosophical, analytical, and vicarious functions, etc.) in the extreme conditions of war (from Murmansk between 1943 and 1944 to Crimea between 1944 and 1946). The autobiographic narrative bears the typical features of a diary, reflecting the development of a young Red Army sailor, i. e. severe selfcriticism, the “other” individuality which the author painfully becomes aware of, a frank and quite often uncomplimentary analysis of situations related to sexual relations. Additionally, the diary reflects the crucial stages in the sailor’s personal growth. The author of the diary builds a world of his own and works out his own ethical code; also, he creates a life plan and sets goals for himself.

scholarly journals Una aproximación a la complejidad social e ideológica en Baja California Sur / Social and Ideological Complexity in Baja California Sur: an Approach

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-94
Author(s):  
Rossana Almada Alatorre ◽  
Rosa Elba Rodríguez Tomp
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Foreign Investment ◽  
Baja California ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Baja California Sur ◽  
Economic Point ◽  
Complex Thought ◽  
Siglo Xx ◽  
Society Today

ABSTRACTUnderstanding sudcalifornian society today requires the adoption of a perspective that is anchored in the complex thought, given the fact that during the last two decades of the twentieth century it has been the recipient of multiple elements that have served as catalysts for changes and setbacks in the construction of subjectivity. We witness the emergence of advances in terms of what is understood as “development” from an economic point of view, based on the opening to domestic and foreign investment; politically and ideologically we lurch from side to side, with the citizens' vote alternating between personalities deeply entrenched in the community more than being based on concrete political proposals. “Values” in terms of morality and traditions emphasise, on one side, the respect and tolerance which have characterised Sudcalifornia at least for the second half of the twentieth century; but, on the other hand, are skewed towards shaping a society that could be called neoconservative, for it adopts positions and values already vindicated by other societies in the heart of the countryRESUMENComprender en la actualidad a la sociedad sudcaliforniana requiere de una perspectiva anclada en el pensamiento complejo pues a partir de las últimas dos décadas del siglo XX ha sido receptora de una multiplicidad de elementos que han servido como impulsores de cambios y retrocesos en la construcción de la subjetividad. Asistimos a la emergencia de avances en términos de lo que se entiende por “desarrollo” desde la visión económica, con base en la apertura a la inversión nacional y extranjera; política e ideológicamente damos tumbos de un lado a otro, alternando el voto ciudadano más entre personalidades arraigadas en la entidad que con base en propuestas políticas concretas; los “valores” en términos de la moral y las costumbres, por un lado acentúan el respeto y la tolerancia que ha caracterizado a Sudcalifornia al menos durante la última mitad del siglo XX y, por otro, se sesgan hacia la configuración de una sociedad que podríamos denominar neoconservadora, pues adopta posturas y valores reivindicados por las sociedades del centro del país.

The Philosophical Enquiry, theories of the sublime and the sister arts tradition

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hélène Ibata
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Verbal Representation ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Sister Arts ◽  
Isolated Point

This first chapter emphasises what Burke’s Enquiry owes to the existing discourse on the sublime (to Longinus and Addison in particular), in order to highlight its innovations, more specifically its aesthetically stimulating irrationalism and sensualism. It then focuses on Burke’s unique distinction between visual and verbal representation, his rejection of their common mimetic basis, and his argument that only the non-mimetic, suggestive medium of the verbal arts, language, may impart the sublime. At a time when parallels between the arts prevailed, this was an isolated point of view, which introduced a new paragone situation, and a challenge to visual artists. The end of the chapter examines a number of competing theories of the sublime that were compatible with painting, which makes it possible to enhance the specificity of the Enquiry and the paradox of its appeal to visual artists.

Southern Enclosure as American Literature

Black Market ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 138-183
Author(s):  
Aaron Carico
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
New Deal ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Paper Money ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Land Grabs ◽  
Racial History

Set against the backdrop of Southern land grabs in the 1830s and again in the 1930s that were meant to sustain the cotton economy, this chapter studies the literary representation of the poor whites who were side-lined by the slave plantation’s expansion and modernization, and who were then remade into a national folk by literary elites. Facilitated by these Southern enclosures, the ambivalent canonization of poor whites as the nation’s folk would have a decisive and determining influence on the constitution—and the racial covenant—of American literature, and not only on its Americaness but also on its literariness. Slavery was the condition of possibility for this literature, but its role, along with that of the enslaved, was silenced. From frontier humor to the New Criticism, this chapter reveals a submerged racial history beneath the canonization of U.S. national literature, which was undertaken in the early twentieth century in U.S. literary criticism, explainingthe roleof New Deal photography, of paper money and paperwork, and modernism in literary style in the constitution of American literature as both discipline and object.

Coleridge on Science, Philosophy, and Poetry: Their Relation to Religion

1959 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucyle Werkmeister
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Human Activities ◽  
Mathematical Problem ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Science Philosophy ◽  
David Hartley ◽  
The French Revolution

In 1791, when he was eighteen years of age, Coleridge came across Burke's A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Although he was sufficiently interested to read the essay, he was not impressed by it. In fact, if one is to judge his reaction by the jeu d'esprit, “Mathematical Problem,” it was chiefly one of amusement. Although he went on to read Burke's other essays, he was attracted by the character of the author and the style of his writing rather than by his point of view; for, certainly a young man who was an avowed disciple of David Hartley, a champion of the French Revolution, and the originator of Pantisocracy could find little comfort in the works of Edmund Burke. But the zeal for Hartley, the French Revolution, and Pantisocracy was short-lived; and by 1796 Coleridge had turned, a “thought-bewilder'd man,” to a reading of Bishop Berkeley.The influence of Berkeley, especially of the later Platonic Berkeley, began to show in his work almost at once; the influence of Burke continued to lag. Out of his reflections on Berkeley, however, came a new admiration for Burke, particularly for his Philosophical Inquiry; and, from the combined teachings of the two, Coleridge ultimately derived suggestions for a theology broad enough to account for and to give meaning and purpose to all human activities. I should like here to indicate briefly the use he made of these suggestions with respect to science, philosophy, and poetry. I do not mean to imply that there were no other influences at work in the formulation of his views; but I do submit that these two influences are basic and that Coleridge's position can be adequately understood only in terms of them.

Essay review: Geology's youthful romance with the landscape

2010 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 346-352
Author(s):  
Noah Heringman
Keyword(s):  
Essay Review ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
European History ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Dynamic Phase ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of Geology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Over Time

Dean's Romantic Landscapes documents the influence of rapid advances in the nascent geosciences on literature and the arts during an especially dynamic phase of British and European history. His ten substantive chapters, along with numerous illustrations and appendices, provide exceptionally rich documentation of verbal and visual motifs that we can now recognise as geological. More than this, he argues that ‘the geological’ itself arose together with ‘the sublime’ and ‘the picturesque’ as a new way of understanding landscapes as changing over time. Dean uses the element of time to distinguish ‘the geological’—as it occurs in poems, travel narratives, and paintings, as well as in works more commonly held to belong to the history of geology—from the other two categories. Numerous chapters are geographically based, skillfully interweaving travel journals of major Romantic writers with popularising geological works on the Harz, Vesuvius, and Fingal's Cave, among other sites. Other chapters are organised around concepts such as ‘Time and Chance’ and ‘Relics of the Flood’. The book concludes, fittingly, with a chapter on extinction—the culmination of the ‘naturalistic’ worldview that Dean traces throughout this book as a contested but ultimately triumphant legacy of Romantic thought.

Towards a semiotic model of mixed music analysis

2006 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
PHILIPPE LALITTE
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Music Analysis ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Real Time Processing ◽  
Time Processing ◽  
Semiotic Model ◽  
The One ◽  
Meaningful Relationships ◽  
Potential Interactions

In this paper I try to outline a model that can bring out the meaningful relationships between ‘the instrumental’ and ‘the electronics’ in mixed music. The model is based on the semiotic square which is considered in semiotics as a powerful conceptual framework to examine the relationships between two terms (S1/S2) and their negative (non-S1/non-S2), terms which can be characters, situations, actions, concepts, etc. Two paradigmatic axes represent the relations between the actors of mixed music: the sources (instrumental and electronic) on the one hand, and the manipulations (real-time processing and sound projection) on the other. According to the semiotic square, the relations inside the environment are defined in terms of contrariety, contradiction and complementarity. This model allows us to start out with a purely technological description of the ‘mixed music’ genre and of individual pieces, with the advantage of a pre-operative analysis of the system. It describes the immanent structure of the environments and releases the potential interactions between the instrumental and the electronics of mixed music. These interactions are examined, from a paradigmatic point of view, with numerous representative pieces of mixed music from the twentieth century.

Culture and musical hermeneutics: The Salome complex

1990 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Richard Strauss ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Musical Hermeneutics ◽  
Gustave Moreau

From Flaubert to Richard Strauss, male artists in late nineteenth-century Europe were fascinated by the figure of Salome. This fascination, indeed, amounted to a genuine craze. One representation sparked another: J.-K. Huysmans fantasised about paintings by Gustave Moreau; Oscar Wilde expanded on Huysmans; Aubrey Beardsley illustrated Wilde. Fine editions of Wilde's Salome with Beardsley's illustrations remained cult objects well into the twentieth century. In general, the Salome craze, like the science and medicine of its day, sought to legitimise new forms of control by men over the bodies and behaviour of women. The present paper revisits this well-known episode in cultural history with two distinct aims in mind, one interpretative, the other methodological. The interpretative aim is to offer a feminist approach to the fin-de-sièclecompulsion to retell the Salome story with lavish attention to misogynist imagery - those quivering female bodies and gory male heads. The methodological aim is to find a meeting ground for literary criticism and musicology as both disciplines aspire to become vehicles of a more comprehensive criticism of culture.

scholarly journals Three Italian Illuminated Cuttings in the Royal Library of Copenhagen: the Master B. F., Attavante and the Master of Montepulciano Gradual I

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Eleonora Mattia
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
History Of Collecting ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Catalogue Raisonne

Eleonora Mattia: Three Italian illuminated Cuttings in the Royal Library of Copenhagen Some observations on the history of collecting illuminated cuttings serve to introduce three unpublished Italian fragments that are part of a collection of illuminated fragments conserved in the Royal Danish Library. The miniatures are described from the point of view of their liturgical and art-historical content and are presented in the form of entries in a catalogue raisonné. The Master B. F., who grew up under the shadow of Leonardo de Vinci, was among those miniaturists most sought-after by collectors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century because of his evident stylistic debts to the great painter. The beautiful miniature in Copenhagen can now be added to the other known works of this Master and is critical not only to the reconstruction of his corpus, but also for the history of collecting, as it comes from the prestigious Holford Collection. It was already correctly attributed when it entered the collection of the Royal Library; it is here inserted into the activity of the artist, a dating is proposed, and a provenance is suggested from the series of choir books in the monastery of Santi Angelo e Nicolò a Villanova Sillaro in Lombardy, which were broken up around 1799. The Danish cutting here attributed to Attavante has a specific iconography that demonstrates an originality and an independence from models followed by contemporary Florentine painting, qualities not always acknowledged to the well known miniaturist whose extensive figurative production has sometimes been considered repetitive. A third fragment is here attributed to the Pisan Master of Montepulciano Gradual I. This anonymous miniaturist is at the centre of the most recent and innovative studies of fourteenth-century Tuscan painting: his activity belongs to the diversified texture of artistic production between Florence and its nearby cities, with expressive modalities independent of the tradition of the more strictly Giottesque masters. The miniature attributed to him here is to be added to the catalogue of his works, dispersed as they are in many European and American collections.

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