Aesthetic Cognition

2020 ◽  
pp. 140-160
Author(s):  
Margaret H. Freeman

This chapter places poetic iconicity within the broader context of aesthetics. The history of aesthetics has developed several diverse meanings over time and in different disciplines. The chapter therefore redefines the aesthetic faculty as basic to both the sciences and the arts. It involves purpose, intension, function, and value that leads to empathy and ethical judgment of human behavior and activity. Earlier chapters approached poetic iconicity mainly from the perspective of the poet’s motivations and intensions. This chapter shows how poetic iconicity can establish one means by which poetry can be aesthetically read and evaluated. After introducing what appear to be misreadings of a Matthew Arnold poem that do not take into account Arnold’s aesthetic principles as evidenced in it, the chapter shows that his poem “Dover Beach” is a meditation on the aesthetic faculty in creating a poem as an icon of the felt being of reality.

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-95
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Moser

Abstract This article considers the emotional status of grave goods in medieval China. Its purpose is twofold. First, the author investigates the conceptual structures available for interpreting the emotional processes involved in medieval burials. He argues that it is possible, and indeed productive, to read grave goods as traces of emotional operations and, in so doing, to articulate a dimension of the embodied processes that structured and motivated wider developments in the social and cultural history of China. Second, the author demonstrates how sensory-based analyses of grave goods can elucidate intermediating processes among the conceptualization of emotion in philosophical texts, the representation of emotion in the literary and visual arts, and the actual experience of emotion in premodern China. Using the recently discovered cemetery of the Northern Song Lü family as a case study, he articulates the emotional function of the aesthetic appreciation that occurred when selecting objects for burial. In explaining the relationship between the sensorial affect of the grave goods and the family's commitment to the abstract ideal of sincerity, the author uses the concept of the emotive object to chart common ground for histories of thought and the arts in China.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 375-383
Author(s):  
Marie-Claire Canepa ◽  
Michela Cardinali ◽  
Marianna Ferrero ◽  
Alessandro Gatti ◽  
Cristina Quattrini

During the refurbishing of the “Lombard Art of the XV-XVI century” department at the Pinacoteca di Brera (Milan), concluded in 2018, the Conservation and Restoration Center “La Venaria Reale” had the opportunity to study and restore the famous pictorial cycle of Men at Arms by Donato Bramante (1488-89). The paper aims to present the methodological approach and the results obtained with the last conservation treatment, aimed at a new and updated aesthetic proposal for the pictorial cycle. The main objective was to re-establish the unity of the images, compromised by the numerous lacunae left visible by previous treatments, respecting at the same time the material features of the paintings and the evidence of their particular conservative history.The interdisciplinary work group* has reconstructed the complex conservative history of the detached wall paintings, thanks to the technical observation of the surfaces and the scientific characterization of the constituent materials. The results were compared with the available historical documentation, in particular with historical photographs. The project allowed us to retrace the profound changes that the concept of pictorial integration has encountered over time, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. The conservation treatment also originated from the need of the Pinacoteca di Brera to update the aesthetic presentation of the works, facilitating the reading of the fragmented images due to numerous lacunae. d images due to numerous lacunae.


2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (8) ◽  
pp. 303-305
Author(s):  
Dalia Hanna ◽  
Rosemary Smyth

Aims and MethodWe sought to gain an impression of how the Psychiatric Bulletin has changed over time. We took a ‘snapshot’ of the journal in two time periods, comparing characteristics of articles published early in its development (1988–1992) with those published more recently in its current format (2002–2006).ResultsThe Bulletin has become more scientific, with the proportion of articles categorised as ‘original’ increasing from 31% (217/700) in the early period to 47% (263/565) in the later period. There is less emphasis on history of psychiatry and the arts.Clinical ImplicationsChanges in the Bulletin are in line with psychiatry and medicine in general, placing more emphasis and value on research with systematic methodology.


2020 ◽  

The Cultural History of Memory in the Eighteenth Century places in sharp relief the contrast between inspiring ideas that heralded an auspicious future and immemorial traditions that cherished a vanishing past. Waxing large during that era was the European Enlightenment, with its projects for reform and optimistic forecasts about the prospect of making a better world. Heritage was reframed, as martyrs for the cause of religious liberty and heroes for the promotion of the arts and sciences were enshrined in a new pantheon. They served as icons marking a pathway toward a presumed destiny, amid high hopes that reason would triumph over superstition to guide the course of human affairs. Such sentiments gave reformers a new sense of collective identity as an imagined community acting in the name of progress. Against this backdrop, this volume addresses a variety of themes in memory’s multi-faceted domain, among them mnemonic schemes in the transition from theist to scientific cosmologies; memory remodeled in the making of print culture; memory’s newfound resources for introspection; politics reimagined for the modern age; the nature of tradition reconceived; the aesthetics of nostalgia for an aristocracy clinging to a tenuous identity; the lure of far-away places; trauma in an age of revolution; and the emerging divide between history and collective memory. Along the way, contributors address such topics as the idea of nation in early modern politics; the aesthetic vision of Hubert Robert in his garden landscapes; the transforming effects of the interaction between mind and its mnemonic satellites in print media; Shakespeare remembered and commemorated; the role of memory in the redesign of historiography; the mediation of high and popular culture through literature; soul-searching in female autobiography; and commemorative practices during the French Revolution.


Author(s):  
Serinity Young

The desire to transcend the mundane and the terrestrial, and to reach new heights of spiritual experience, has been expressed through myths, folk tales, and the arts throughout the world and across centuries. Flight from both the captivity of earth’s gravity and the mental constraints of time-bound desire are the backbone of myth-making. Women and goddesses have figured prominently in such myths, both as independent actors and as guides for men. Women Who Fly is a history of religious and social ideas about such aerial females as expressed in legends, myths, rituals, sacred narratives, and artistic productions. It is also about the varied symbolic uses of women in mythology, religion, and society that have shaped, and continue to shape, our social and psychological reality. The motif of the flying female is an intriguing and unstudied area of the history of both religion and iconography. It is a broad topic. Rather than place restrictions on this theme (or its imagery), or force it into the confines of any one discipline or cultural perspective, the goal here instead is to celebrate its thematic and cultural diversity, while highlighting commonalities and delineating the religious and social contexts in which it developed. Aerial women are surprisingly central to any full and accurate understanding of the similarities between various religious imaginations, through which these flying females have carved trajectories over time.


2010 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 346-352
Author(s):  
Noah Heringman

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.


2004 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Artur Freitas

Os anos 60, especialmente depois do golpe militar de 1964, marcam um momento de grande radicalização política nos discursos artísticos. Após uma década de considerável hegemonia do projeto construtivo, o ressurgimento da figuração, num primeiro momento, e a posterior influência das neovanguardas internacionais, levariam alguns artistas brasileiros a abrirem espaço, em suas produções, às efervescentes questões sociais e políticas nacionais. Assim sendo, e tendo em vista a inserção estético-ideológica das artes plásticas entre o golpe de 64 e o Ato Institucional número 5, este artigo propõe-se, em linhas gerais, a fazer um levantamento sumário de alguns dos aspectos estéticos, políticos e institucionais mais relevantes da história da arte no Brasil daqueles anos. Quanto aos aspectos institucionais, como se dirá, esse período corresponde a um momento inicial dentro do processo de reestruturação econômica e de fomento do mercado brasileiro de bens simbólicos, fenômeno este que terá seu auge, pouco depois, no “milagre brasileiro”. No que toca aos aspectos políticos, a repressão e a censura presentes desde os primeiros governos militares acabam de certo modo por incentivar os mais diversos tipos de contestação dentro dos meios culturais em geral e do artístico em particular. E, finalmente, no que toca aos aspectos estéticos, um certo posicionamento ideológico – tanto frente à institucionalização da cultura quanto frente ao autoritarismo de um regime opressor – surge reelaborado poeticamente sob a forma de linguagem, criando uma espécie de fusão entre todos esses aspectos conjunturais, ao que sugiro a noção de religação, que aqui surge como viés de interpretação. Political Poetics: plastic arts between the 64 coup and the AI-5 Abstract Especially after the military blow of 1964, the sixties mark a moment of great political radicalism in the artistic discourse. After a decade of considerable hegemony of the constructive project, two reasons make brazilian artists create works open to the main social and political national subjects: in a first moment, the resurgence of figuration and, later, the influence of international neo-avantgardes. So, considering the aestheticideological situation of the arts between the blow of 64 and the Institutional aspects Act number 5, this article intends to do a synthetic rising of some aesthetic, political and institutional aspects more important in brazilian art history of those years. Regarding to the institutional aspects, that period corresponds inside to an initial moment of the process of economical restructuring and fomentation of the brazilian market of symbolic goods, phenomenon that will be in the peak, after, in the “brazilian miracle”. Regarding to the political aspects, the repression and the censorship – existent from the first military governments – they motivate the most several reply types inside in general of the cultural ways and of the artistic way in matter. And, finally, with relationship to the aesthetic aspects, a certain ideological positioning – it so much front to the institutionalization of the culture as front to the authoritarianism of an oppressor regime – aestheticly restored appears under the language form, appearing a type of union among all those aspects of the situation. And, if I suggest the religation to name that union, I suggest it because that notion here appears as interpretation access.


Author(s):  
Zehui Zhang

With the passage of time, people’s lifestyle and life philosophy have changed a lot; people began to pursue a higher quality of life. Chorus art is a spiritual civilization that shows a harmonious beauty. Through the melody of music works and chorus art, students are resonated, and music is used to guide students to be active and to enjoy beauty from beautiful melodies and strong rhythms. This paper studies the edification of students’ aesthetics from the art of chorus. Through the development history of chorus art in Western countries and China, this paper expounds the diversified development process of chorus, further analyze the aesthetic characteristics of chorus art, and guide people to feel the connotation of chorus art from the perspective of music aesthetics, and provide countermeasures for the development of chorus art.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Sullivan

Abstract What role do the arts play in the study of the history of emotions? This essay reflects on the position that aesthetic works and arts-oriented methodologies have occupied in the field’s development since the early 2000s. It begins by connecting artistic sources to anxieties about impressionism within cultural history, before looking at examples from literature that help illustrate the advantages works of art can bring to the study of emotion over time. Chief among these benefits is the power of artistic sources to create emotional worlds for their audiences – including, of course, historians. Ultimately, in arguing for a greater use of aesthetic works in our field, the essay makes the case for a more overtly emotional history of the emotions.


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