Linear Perspective and the Renaissance Lyric

PMLA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (2) ◽  
pp. 280-297
Author(s):  
Kimberly Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Linear Perspective ◽  
Semantic Meaning ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
Art Form ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Geometric Effects ◽  
Formal Features

As recent art historical scholarship has demonstrated, the techniques of linear perspective displace narrative (the artwork's content) in favor of the relations between aesthetic objects (the artwork's form). In this regard, perspectival art performs a rhetorical transaction analogous to that of its “sister art,” lyric poetry. The formal features and poetic strategies of lyric parallel the geometric effects of perspectival art: both practices differentiate the aesthetic surface from the transparentizing demands of narrative. Each art form stages the interaction of irreconcilable terms—content and form—and documents the dynamic and incommensurable relation between semantic meaning and meaninglessness. Lyric's dominance in the Renaissance, exemplified here by sonnets of Sidney and Shakespeare, reflects a wider cultural valorization of the experiential and materializing priorities of the aesthetic, an affirmation of objective, apprehensible elements whose significance is unyoked from the obligation to narrative.

Textual Events

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Homeric Hymns ◽  
The World ◽  
Real Performance ◽  
Textual Traditions ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Ritual Practices ◽  
Formal Features

Recent decades have seen a major expansion in our understanding of how early Greek lyric functioned in its social, political, and ritual contexts. The fundamental role song played in the day-to-day lives of communities, groups, and individuals has been the object of intense study. This volume places its focus elsewhere, and attempts to illuminate poetic effects that cannot be captured in functional terms. Employing a range of interpretative methods, it explores the idea of lyric performances as textual events. Several chapters investigate the pragmatic relationship between real performance contexts and imaginative settings. Others consider how lyric poems position themselves in relation to earlier texts and textual traditions, or discuss the distinctive encounters lyric poems create between listeners, authors, and performers. In addition to studies that analyse individual lyric texts and lyric authors (Sappho, Alcaeus, Pindar), the volume includes treatments of the relationship between lyric and the Homeric Hymns. Building on the renewed concern with the aesthetic in the study of Greek lyric and beyond, Textual Events re-examines the relationship between the poems’ formal features and their historical contexts. Lyric poems are a type of sociopolitical discourse, but they are also objects of attention in themselves. They enable reflection on social and ritual practices as much as they are embedded within them. As well as enacting cultural norms, lyric challenges listeners to think about and experience the world afresh.

Τὸ καλόν as a Criterion for Judging Innovation (τὸ καινόν) in Greek Musical Pedagogy

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-32
Author(s):  
Antonietta Gostoli
Keyword(s):  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Epic Poetry ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
And Training

Abstract The Pseudo-Plutarchan De musica provides us with the oldest history of Greek lyric poetry from pre-Homeric epic poetry to the lyric poetry of the fourth century BC. Importantly, the work also contains an evaluation of the role of music in the process of educating and training citizens. Pseudo-Plutarch (Aristoxenus) considers the καλόν in the aesthetic and ethical sense, which makes it incompatible with the καινόν dictated by the new poetic and musical season.

Perceptual Underpinnings for “Good” Editing: A Fractal Analysis

Perception ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-297
Author(s):  
Julia J. C. Blau ◽  
Claudia Carello
Keyword(s):  
Fractal Structure ◽  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Structure Study ◽  
Event Perception ◽  
Aesthetic Appreciation ◽  
Technical Aspects ◽  
Environmental Event ◽  
Art Form ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Environmental Events

Filmmakers’ efforts not only advance film as an art form, they also provide insights about basic perception. This research was designed to uncover commonalities between the aesthetic appreciation of viewers of films and the perceptual capacities of observers of environmental events. We assessed whether the temporal structure of events in the environment is reflected in the temporal structure of events in film. Participants in Study 1 segmented neutral environmental events to establish a benchmark temporal structure. Study 2 compared the temporal structure of editing in amateur and professionally made films. Results from these two studies suggest a particular fractal structure common to environmental event perception and the editing structure of professional films. This hypothesis was then tested in an experiment that reedited one film so as to produce four different versions, each with a different fractal structure. These versions were evaluated by audiences in terms of aesthetics (e.g., general likability, comprehension, technical aspects of craft). The results suggest that the fractal structure typical of environmental event perception is preferred, even when it is not the original, artistically intended version. It is argued that narrative films succeed, at least in part, because their temporal structure reflects the temporal structure of environmental event perception.

Aesthetics, Technology, and Popular Movies

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Cutting
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Technological Changes ◽  
Analog To Digital ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Digital Production ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Sound Color ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Physical Changes

Popular movies are, with popular music, the most thoroughly and widely entrenched art/media forms on our planet. Because movies are a relatively new art form, the technological changes they have undergone can be linked to the aesthetic needs and responses of their audiences. Discussed here are the aesthetic consequences of public versus personal projection; the structural changes to accommodate storytelling; the physical changes that eliminate aversive qualities; the effects of the additions of sound, color, and the creation of wider images; the flirtations with 3D and higher frame rates; and the consequences of the switch from analog to digital production and reception.

scholarly journals THE NEGLECT OF THE AUTHOR IN NEW HISTORICISM

eTopia ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Ana Marquez
Keyword(s):  
New Historicism ◽  
Autonomous Agent ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Time Period

When discussing the emergence of New Historicism in American scholarship, it is imperative to assess its origins and influences. Mikhail Bakhtin’s exploration of the multiples of languages within the novel and Michel Foucault’s analysis of the role of the author in texts both catapulted the development of New Historical scholarship. Today, this method of scholarship approaches the author as a non-autonomous agent subjected by the multiple social, political, and cultural forces of his or her era. Similarly, literature is perceived as an art form not unique from others and should be analyzed to point toward overarching power structures to the same degree as any other mode of representation. In considering the author as a social construct, many New Historicists neglect to perceive the author as a potential formulator or modifier of reigning ideology. The fact of the matter is that literature is able to shape the ideology of a society, not merely represent it. In viewing the author as a construct of his time period, critics fail to attempt to determine which literary works were revolutionary in their ability to manipulate and change a given society’s underlying modes of thinking and practice.

scholarly journals A Reading of Fragments 926(a) and 926(g) PMG within the Context of the New Music

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-31
Author(s):  
Vasiliki Kousoulini ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
New Music ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Values ◽  
Generic Quality

There has been much controversy regarding the date, the performative context, and the generic quality of fragment 926 PMG, which has been preserved on papyrus (P. Oxy. 9 + P. Oxy 2687) in a rhythmical treatise by an unknown author. The verse fragments on this papyrus were composed in iambic dactyls (∪ — ∪ –) and used as examples of the occurrence of syncope in various lyric meters. Fragments 926(a) and (g) PMG are from a composition performed by a maiden chorus which bear similarities to Alcman’s partheneia and have affinities with archaic epic and lyric poetry. Supposedly, these fragments might have been fragments of partheneia composed in the time of the New Music. Nonetheless, they are not shaped according to the bulk of the aesthetic values and the compositional rules of the New Music. These fragments seem to belong to cultic songs created for maiden choruses, possibly, to honor Dionysus. The alternative is that they imitate such songs within a dramatic context. We may assume that these quasi-dithyrambic partheneia were composed to serve religious needs or at least imitated cultic songs. They looked backward to the archaic and early classical tradition of partheneia, and their existence is an indication that, in the days of the New Music, there was a poetic tradition upheld by “reactionary” poets.

Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art

2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Williams
Keyword(s):  
Art Form ◽  
The Aesthetic

By many recent accounts, dance and theory are natural bedfellows—an art form and a form of critique that are inherently unstable, difficult to discuss. Both are notoriously impervious to systematic accounts because they are in states of physical and conceptual motion, perpetually underdetermined.

History in Three Dimensions

2020 ◽  
pp. 99-168
Author(s):  
Mike Goode
Keyword(s):  
Binocular Vision ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Linear Perspective ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Immersive Media

The chapter analyzes how the nineteenth century’s two most significant immersive media—panoramas and stereoscopic photographs—comment on and draw attention to their differences as media through their respective uses of Walter Scott’s novels and poems, and, in turn, how these medial differences bring into relief the aesthetic and philosophical novelty of Scott’s own efforts to write visually. To make its argument, the chapter draws on a wide variety of archives and forms of evidence, including: period guidebooks to panoramas; the histories of media technologies like camera obscuras, linear perspective, and stereoscopes; Victorian stereographs of Scotland, especially by George Washington Wilson; readings of visually evocative passages in Scott’s Waverley, Ivanhoe, and The Fair Maid of Perth; Eugène Delacroix’s painting Rebecca and the Wounded Ivanhoe; and Romantic writings on optics and vision, including Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft and his friend David Brewster’s scientific treatises on monocular and binocular vision.

Introduction

Popular Music ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Motti Regev
Keyword(s):  
Art Form ◽  
Long Line ◽  
Extraordinary Experiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic

How does one tell the history of an art form? Looking at classic examples like Gombrich's The Story of Art (London, Phaidon Press, 1950) or Read's A Concise History of Modern Painting (London, Thames and Hudson, 1959), it seems that, at their core, such projects conventionally consist of annotated lists: extended commentaries on a long line of works and artists, in other words a canon. These works are typically presented as peaks of the aesthetic power of the art form in question, as ultimate manifestations of aesthetic perfection, complexity of form and depth of expression which humans are capable of reaching through this art form. Such presentations hide an implicit promise that, with proper knowledge, encounters with these works will result in extraordinary experiences.

scholarly journals Symptoms and Anachronisms in the Contemporary Scenery of Portuguese Lyric Poetry

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Norival Bottos Jr ◽  
Pedro Carlos Louzada Fonseca
Keyword(s):  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Octavio Paz ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Aesthetic

We'll observe and analyze some aspects of Brazilian and Portuguese contemporary lyric. Such review will be mainly based upon reflections of thinkers as Giorgio Agamben, Octavio Paz and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht regarding the possible distinction between modernism, postmodernism and latency of complex temporality; as well as the insertion of such discussion in the perspective of the aesthetic paradigm crisis, insflated by the kairological temporality. We'll see the dynamic between possible temporalities, articulation contexts and enunciation implicated by chronotopes in constant progression. We'll also evaluate poems of Ana Luisa Amaral e José Tolentino, among the Portuguese poets, and Paulo Henrique Brito e Nuno Ramos among the Brazilian ones. Alongside pursuing distinctive features, and potential similarities of such literary endeavors with the temporalities in which they're inserted. Such observations and reflections aim specially the discussion about  a picture of positive transformations in the contemporary Portuguese-Brazilian lyric. <b>Sintomas e Anacronismos no Cenário Contemporâneo da Poesia Lírica Portuguesa</b>Observaremos e analisaremos aqui alguns aspectos da lírica contemporânea portuguesa. Tal estudo será predominantemente baseado pelas reflexões teóricas de pensadores como Giorgio Agamben, Octávio Paz e Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht a respeito da possível diferenciação entre modernismo, pós-modernismo e latências de temporalidade complexa; bem como a inserção de tal discussão na perspectiva da crise de paradigmas estéticos, insuflada pela temporalidade kairológica. Acompanharemos, assim, a dinâmica entre temporalidades possíveis e os contextos de enunciação e de enunciados implicados por cronótopos em constante evolução. Analisaremos, ao lado das teorizações citadas, poemas de autores como Ana Luisa Amaral, Nuno Ramos e José Tolentino. Buscaremos tanto traços distintivos quanto possíveis semelhanças de tais agenciamentos literários com as temporalidades nas quais eles estão inseridos/incertos. Tais observações e reflexões visam, sobretudo, a discussão a respeito de um quadro de crises/transformações positivas da lírica contemporânea portuguesa.

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