Blending: A Response

2006 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret H. Freeman

This response to the five articles in this special issue on blending focuses on how the power of blending as a basic human cognitive ability not surprisingly extends into all aspects of human creativity, illuminating such literary forms as narrative perspective, character and identity formation, and poetic styles, as well as reader reception and response or cultural development and transmission. In their extension of earlier studies of blending in poetry to drama, film, and prose narratives, these five articles reveal the possibilities of a broader scope for blending theory in literature. However, if blending theory is to succeed in modeling the human mind, it must also account for intentionality and feeling. In the second section of this article, therefore, I explore Susanne K. Langer's idea that literature creates the semblance of felt life, an idea that raises the possibility that form-meaning blending includes the iconic notion of form as feeling. Using Per Aage Brandt's cognitive-semiotic elaboration of Fauconnier and Turner's blending model and Masako Hiraga's model for metaphor-icon links in language, I suggest the possibility of constructing an aesthetic theory of literature that would reveal the central and crucial role that literature (and all the arts) play in human consciousness and feeling.

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 567-567
Author(s):  
Angel Duncan

Abstract This session identifies common misconceptions about identity for persons living with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD). Going beyond diagnostic brain imaging and neurocognitive testing, case studies and research in creativity from around the United States highlights consciousness of persons living with ADRD. Reviewing and discussing artworks is aimed to set dialogue in the question of where memory deposits emerge when engaged in creativity. Through art therapy techniques, this type of self-expression may provide new avenues in treatment for dementia care. Exploring the arts from those with Mild Cognitive Impairment to late stage Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, such as frontotemporal dementia, consciousness seems to remain intact despite neural death. This session aims to discourage poor spending allocations and establishing meaningful care. From clinical research trials to creativity of self-expression, the importance of why the arts and sciences matter are demonstrated as effective modalities that enhance quality of life.


The Napoleonic Wars took place from 1802 to 1815 and fundamentally altered the political, social, cultural, and military structures of Europe and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the world. This created a collective memory that influenced, and continues to influence, the modern world in a myriad of ways. The conflicts were a continuation of the French Revolutionary Wars, which bear their own collective and historical memory. They involved nearly every power in Europe, affecting them each to varying degrees. Political and legal systems changed, both as a result of Revolutionary ideals and the introduction of the Code Napoléon. Nationalism and national identity formation accelerated during the period, often benefiting from opposition to Napoleon or the destruction of existing systems wrought by the Revolutionary spirit that French armies brought to occupied territories, spurring the creation of national memory wherever they appeared. Napoleon and his power, undeniable genius, success, and ultimate failure have proven an irresistible and enduring figure of autobiographical and biographical memory in realms as diverse as fiction, wargaming, and history, both popular and academic. The methods of his armies became the paradigm for contemporary militaries, and their legacy continues to form the bedrock of collective, institutional, and popular memory. The arts contain their own cultural memory of Napoleon, many of which remain current. Collectively, the various aspects of the cultural and historical memory of the Napoleonic Wars have become a part of many important areas of history and historiography. As a result, works on Napoleon, his empire, and the Napoleonic Wars are voluminous and grow significantly every year.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wai-Chung Ho

Globalization, Nationalism, and Music Education in the Twenty-First Century in Greater China examines the recent developments in school education and music education in Greater China – Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan – and the relationship between, and integration of, national cultural identity and globalization in their respective school curriculums. Regardless of their common history and cultural backgrounds, in recent decades, these localities have experienced divergent political, cultural, and educational structures. Through an analysis of the literature, official curriculum documents, approved music textbooks, and a survey questionnaire and in-depth interviews with music teachers, this book also examines the ways in which policies for national identity formation and globalization interact to complement and contradict each other in the context of music education in respect to national and cultural values in the three territories. Wai-Chung Ho’s substantive research interests include the sociology of music, China’s education system, and the comparative study of East Asian music education. Her research focuses on education and development, with an emphasis on the impact of the interplay between globalization, nationalization, and localization on cultural development and school music education.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (164) ◽  
pp. 58-64
Author(s):  
Wu Changzhi

The article examines the synthesis of arts on the example of Chinese architecture. General historical questions of the development of Chinese culture and various arts during historical evolution are raising. Philosophical and religious positions of culture are distinguishing, which are identifying with the development of art. The question arises of the lack of a full analysis of ancient Chinese art for all types of artistic creativity that were developing during cultural development and formation: architecture, painting, calligraphy, music, sculpture, dance, and so on. A number of scholars who have developed methods of approaches to the systematization and study of the synthesis of the arts of ancient Chinese culture throughout its development are presenting. A number of techniques in painting and calligraphy that have a direct impact on the formation of the Chinese architectural environment are analyzing. These methodical conclusions can be useful in planning the activities of various organizational departments of architectural education and science. Problem statement: it became necessary to analyze and describe the methods and principles of organizing forms of art synthesis in Chinese architecture. Objective of the article: analyze the impact of forms of art synthesis in Chinese architecture. There is describing that the most important art form in China is painting. It is thanks to its compositional, color and harmonic laws that the general cultural world of ancient China is building. Color relationships, combinations with nature - all this through painting builds the canonical laws of architecture, music, dance, calligraphy, etc., taking into account national authenticity. It becomes the central core of the synthesis of Chinese art, generating its various forms for individual regions. In architecture, the action of forms of synthesis of Chinese arts is embodying through the organization of plasticity of the building, interior and exterior space, the ratio of small and large forms, and the location of accents. Experienced predecessors should be a role model for modern architects and artists. The combination of long-standing traditions of "synthesis of arts" with modern production technologies, as well as creative ideas of architects and artists of the XXI century can give new vectors of development of Chinese architecture and art science.


Author(s):  
Olga A. Vasileva ◽  

This article discusses one relatively unknown aspect of the French writer and philosopher, Michel Butor’s works — his literary criticism through the example of “Improvisations sur Rimbaud”. Poet’s works are investigated by Butor unattainable apart from the stages of his life, and the most significant poems — in the context of the epistolary heritage of Rimbaud. Most attention is paid to the chapter “Improvisations”, dedicated to the collection of Rimbaud’s “Illuminations”: to the development of the theme of the city and its transformation, the role of structural rhyme and reprise at the beginning of the line overturning the classical system of versification, the appearance in the texts of Rimbaud mathematical structure. The new poetic language, the innovative artistic techniques of the poet , which are used in the composition of a number of texts in the collection, comprehensively explored by Butor, had an undeniable influence on the direction of the research for new literary forms in the works of Butor: his novel “Degrès”, which uses the numerical structure as a method of total description of reality as well as a number of texts written in the genre of experimental prose in which fragmentation is elevated to an aesthetic principle, the idea of synthesizing the arts is implemented and endless intertextual interactions are created.


2021 ◽  
pp. 45-72
Author(s):  
Steven Brown

This chapter examines both the biological and cultural evolution of the arts. Biological evolution of the arts deals with how humans evolved the species-specific capacities to create and appreciate artworks, while cultural evolution is about how artworks themselves, as cultural products, undergo changes in persistence over historical time and geographic location. The study of biological evolution includes both phylogenetic (or historical) and adaptationist (or Darwinian) approaches. The study of cultural evolution of the arts reveals the importance of a ‘creativity/aesthetics cycle’ in which the products of human creativity get appraised for their level of appeal by the aesthetic system, allowing them to either be transmitted to future generations or die out. This unification of creativity and aesthetics has far-reaching implications for both fields of study.


Author(s):  
Maggie Gray

This chapter engages with important strands of scholarship on comics work, arguing for a critical comics studies that attends to the political economy, social relations, and material processes of production. It examines the relationship between struggles over the organization of cultural labor and the forms of value inscribed in comics, via the case study of a specific site of British comics production that reimagined how comics work could be organized and the artistic value comics could have– the cooperative Birmingham Arts Lab Press (1969-1982) and its Ar:Zak imprint. Bringing together archival inquiry and participant interviews, wider historical research into the arts lab, alternative press, community arts and underground/alternative comics movements, and Marxist political and aesthetic theory, this chapter analyzes how struggles for an autonomous, democratized, participatory creative practice that took place within this context of comics production were embodied in the material and visual form of the comics made.


2020 ◽  
pp. 161-170
Author(s):  
Margaret H. Freeman

Throughout this book, I have attempted to take up Archibald MacLeish’s challenge to show how poets can carry the world in all its complexities into the human mind, in enclosing boundless space in a square foot of paper, and in how deluge can pour from the inch space of the heart. By exploring the workings of the cognitive sciences in approaches to poetry and reevaluating the nature of aesthetics as basic to both the sciences and the arts, I hope to have shown how a poem may create an icon of felt reality. Answers to MacLeish’s questions lie in recognition of a world that, in its never-ending changes and transformations, provides ever new horizons for seekers of knowledge and wisdom. Art in all its forms takes a necessary place along with the sciences in the human expressions of aesthetic cognition by iconically understanding the being of an infinitely changing reality.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-144
Author(s):  
Meghan Freeman

In the history of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, New Orleans's Newcomb College Pottery (founded in 1894) is often singled out as distinctive by virtue of its genesis as an experimental educational venture, all the more remarkable for emerging out of a small women's college located in the Deep South. Scholarship on NCP frequently rehearses the regionalist character of its diverse handicrafts and its adherence to the central tenets of Arts and Crafts. This article explores how Newcomb College Pottery was neither so strictly regionalist nor so pure an embodiment of the Arts and Crafts spirit as is often averred. Situating Newcomb College Pottery within contemporary cultural debates concerning the formation of a “New South,” I demonstrate how the architects and advocates of Newcomb, inspired by the 1884 Cotton Centennial, sought to craft a largely aspirational identity that marketed NCP as a model industry that heralded commercial and cultural development in the region. It was only later, I argue, as the Pottery developed from an educational experiment into a widely known and respected handicraft enterprise, that it embraced the anti-industrial rhetoric that animated the broader Arts and Crafts movement and adopted the more sentimental form of regionalism that traded on romantic evocations of the Old South, in repudiation of the socially and economically progressive energies that gave it birth.


2000 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Mansfield

The true greatness of this great century consists . . . not in its vain wars, and formal stage, and stilted eloquence, and pompous palaces, and grandiose art, but in the formation and working out of the political and social system of which these things were the first fruits. It is idle to indulge in academical discussions as to the merits of this system. We have inherited it, it has penetrated our lives in every direction, we act, we think under its invisible pressure, and its study is pregnant with teaching.— Emilia Dilke, Art in the Modern StateFUSING AESTHETIC INQUIRY WITH POLITICAL THEORY, Emilia Dilke’s Art in the Modern State heralds a shift in the evolving discipline of art history. Published in 1888, the book succeeds her well-received The Renaissance of Art in France (1879) and anticipates by a decade her multi-volume study of the arts of eighteenth-century France. Methodologically, however, Art in the Modern State stands apart from her other books. Predicated upon the supposition that art — indeed all cultural production — derives from and serves the “invisible pressure” of ideology, the book points to a new direction in Victorian aesthetic theory. Specifically, the book offers the first direct application of Marxist philosophy in an art historical text. That this innovation met and continues to meet with critical as well as popular indifference appears, at first, extraordinary. Considered within the context of Victorian art writing and materialist art history, however, the sources of this critical neglect begin to emerge.


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