Mickey Mouse: Utopian and Barbarian

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Mourenza
Keyword(s):  
Work Of Art ◽  
Mickey Mouse ◽  
Unpublished Note ◽  
Arcades Project ◽  
The Individual

This chapter explores Walter Benjamin’s writings on Mickey Mouse, focussing especially on the unpublished note ‘Mickey Mouse’ (1931), ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933), and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (1935–1939). These texts are read in conjunction with other essays from the period, such as ‘The Destructive Character’ (1931) and ‘Karl Kraus’ (1931), since Benjamin detected in the anarchic, destructive, and technologically driven figure of the early Mickey Mouse a similar project to overcome bourgeois civilization and, especially, the individual subjectivity upon which humanism was based. The chapter also draws on some references to Disney films as dream images in the Arcades Project (1928–1940).

Erfahrung ohne Erfahrenden

2009 ◽  
Vol 2009 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-78
Author(s):  
Petr Kouba
Keyword(s):  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
New Beginning ◽  
Individual Structure ◽  
The World ◽  
Il Y A ◽  
Individual Existence ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Intentional Structure

This article examines the limits of Heidegger’s ontological description of emotionality from the period of Sein und Zeit and Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik along the lines outlined by Lévinas in his early work De l’existence à l’existant. On the basis of the Lévinassian concept of “il y a”, we attempt to map the sphere of the impersonal existence situated out of the structured context of the world. However the worldless facticity without individuality marks the limits of the phenomenological approach to human existence and its emotionality, it also opens a new view on the beginning and ending of the individual existence. The whole structure of the individual existence in its contingency and finitude appears here in a new light, which applies also to the temporal conditions of existence. Yet, this is not to say that Heidegger should be simply replaced by Lévinas. As shows an examination of the work of art, to which brings us our reading of Moravia’s literary exposition of boredom (the phenomenon closely examined in Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik), the view on the work of art that is entirely based on the anonymous and worldless facticity of il y a must be extended and complemented by the moment in which a new world and a new individual structure of experience are being born. To comprehend the dynamism of the work of art in its fullness, it is necessary to see it not only as an ending of the world and the correlative intentional structure of the individual existence, but also as their new beginning.

Postscript: charismatic things and social transaction in Renaissance Italy

Urban History ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 474-482
Author(s):  
THOMAS V. COHEN ◽  
ELIZABETH S. COHEN
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Urban Culture ◽  
New Age ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Cultural Products ◽  
The World ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
The Individual

In 1860, Jacob Burckhardt published his view, still influential today, of an artful, urban Italian Renaissance that launched Europe on its passage to modernity. A lively revisionary scholarship has challenged Burckhardt on many points, but his famous formulae still resonate: the state as work of art; the development of the individual; the discovery of the world and of man. Although we now know that Italy did not alone invent the new age, it was for many years a trendsetter, especially in the domains of cultural production at the centre of this collection of essays. Republican and princely polities alike framed these developments, but, whoever ruled, Italy's unusually intense urbanization (paired with that in another well-spring of culture in the Low Countries) fostered innovation. In Renaissance cities, people and groups invested heavily in special actions, objects and places – charismatic cultural products empowered by holiness, beauty, fame and ingenuity – that fortified solidarity and resilience in uncertain times. This essay collection addresses a conjunction of urban culture and society distinctive to Renaissance Italy: an array of encounters of artifacts with ways of living in community.

scholarly journals The use of a form phenomenon in the process of training students majoring in art and design

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 229-234
Author(s):  
Mikhail Yuryevich Biryukov
Keyword(s):  
Professional Training ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Design Activity ◽  
Highly Qualified ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Art And Design ◽  
Artistic Activity ◽  
Environmental Objects ◽  
Holistic Understanding ◽  
The Individual

The main purpose of higher education is to provide training of highly qualified personnel for all basic directions of socially useful activity in accordance with the needs of society and the state, the needs of the individual in intellectual, cultural and moral development, deepening of knowledge, abilities and skills and their expansion. In modern pedagogy and aesthetics there is an undeniable opinion that in spiritual activities of the individual creating a work of art is a major component of an artistic activity. The foundation of artistic activity is considered to be any object of reality and a substantive or spiritual environment. Creating a work of art its author enjoys social and individual emotional experience, reflecting the reality in the form of artistic images, which consist of art ideas, art assessment and the artistic emotions. Analyzing design activity, we can say that its main purpose is a holistic understanding and design of environmental objects. At the intersection of design with the production of the phenomenon of shape is beyond the scope of art, acquiring great importance in the industrial life of society. In this regard, familiarity with the form and special attention to it is important in the study of artistic and design disciplines in the process of professional training of students majoring in art and design.

scholarly journals Действие принципа нонселекции в языковoй организации постмодерного художественного текста

2018 ◽  
pp. 260-269
Author(s):  
Elena Stepanowna Perelomowa
Keyword(s):  
Literary Text ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Selection Principle ◽  
Associative Chain ◽  
Clear Sign ◽  
Postmodern Art ◽  
Poetic Function ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Linguistic Means

The article discusses the organization of linguistic postmodern literary text. Analyzes the poetic works of Ukrainian postmodern art discourse for selection by the authors of language means of expression to achieve communicative goals. Word in a work of art does not only nominative function, it is used in a subjectify lingual space and determine speechthinking freedom of speaker. The author draws attention to the fact that the poetic function of language, along with the reference, ambiguity and gives it an opportunity for the ambiguity of the utterance. In connection with this understanding of the meaning of art depends on the different attitudes to the very subject of the statement saying, an the method of reading the text. Related words in the concept of becoming unfit for the image “literal” pattern of life. Therefore, a clear sign of postmodernism become Ukrainian verbal games, heteroglossy languages, discourse, linguistic hybrids, marginal dictionaries. He rejects the discourse of a totalitarian society, the official lexicon of Soviet-style language as inadequate to express the individual senses and feelings, instead of resorting to repetition of words, obscene language, citations, etc. The essence of the product is replaced by rhythmic melodic phrase, a phrase open to freely attach to it any associative chain. In the process of generation of artistic expression is present in the selection principle nonselection linguistic means of expression. The dialogue is born and polylogue game between the text of culture, the reader, the author.

Temporal Adoption, Novelistic Prosthesis

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew van der Vlies
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
New South ◽  
Double Negative ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Mechanical Reproduction ◽  
The Future ◽  
Arcades Project ◽  
Representative Work ◽  
Ivan Vladislavic

This chapter argues that the work of Ivan Vladislavić offers a sophisticated response to the dangers of selective memory—and memorialization—that characterizes some responses to the disappointments of the ‘new’ South Africa. Using Svetlana Boym’s differentiation (in The Future of Nostalgia) between reflective and recuperative forms of nostalgia, the chapter considers the turn to nostalgia in South African letters, and places in that context the negotiation of a ‘critical nostalgia’ in representative work by Vladislavić—including ‘Propaganda by Monuments’, The Restless Supermarket (2001), Portrait with Keys (2006), and Double Negative (2010). It assesses the usefulness of Walter Benjamin’s work (including the ‘Theses’, Arcades Project, and ‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ essay) for engaging with the affective politics and formal provocativeness of Vladislavić’s work, which balances past and future, disappointment and utopianism, a concern with this place and every place.

Art, understanding of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Lyas
Keyword(s):  
Alternative View ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Economic Organizations ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Church

Art engages the understanding in many ways. Thus, confronted with an allegorical painting such as Van Eyk’s The Marriage of Arnolfini, one might want to understand the significance of the objects it depicts. Similarly, confronted with an obscure poem, such as Eliot’s The Waste Land, one might seek to understand what it means. Sometimes, too, we claim not to understand a work of art, a piece of music, say, when we are unable to derive enjoyment from it because we cannot see how it is organized or hangs together. Sometimes what challenges the understanding goes deeper, as when we ask why some things, including such notorious productions of the avant garde as the urinal exhibited by Marcel Duchamp, are called art at all. Some have also claimed that to understand a work of art we must understand its context. Sometimes the context referred to is that of the particular problems and aims of the individual artist in a certain tradition, as when the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields is understood as a contribution by its architect to the vexing problem of combining a tower with a classical façade. Sometimes the context is social, as when some Marxists argue that works of art can best be understood as reflections of the more or less inadequate economic organizations of the societies that gave rise to them. The understanding of art becomes a philosophical problem because, first, it is sometimes thought that one of the central tasks of interpretation is to understand the meaning of a work. However, recent writers, notably Derrida (1972), query the notion of the meaning of a work as something to be definitively deciphered, and offer the alternative view of interpretation as an unending play with the infinitely varied meanings of the text. Second, a controversial issue has been the extent to which the judgment of works of art can be divorced from an understanding of the circumstances, both individual and cultural, of their making. Thus Clive Bell argued that to appreciate a work of art we need nothing more than a knowledge of its colours, shapes and spatial arrangements. Others, ranging from Wittgenstein to Marxists, have for a variety of different reasons argued that a work of art cannot be properly understood and appreciated without some understanding of its relation to the context of its creation, a view famously characterized by Beardsley and Wimsatt (1954) as the ‘genetic fallacy’.

Cooper's Last Novels, 1847–1850

PMLA ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 75 (5) ◽  
pp. 583-590
Author(s):  
Donald A. Ringe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Memorial Address ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The Individual ◽  
William Cullen

Until the appearance of James Grossman's biography in 1949, James Fenimore Cooper's last five novels had received little critical attention. The nineteenth century practically ignored them. Even William Cullen Bryant in his judicious memorial address delivered in 1852 passed over them with hardly a word, while thirty years later, Thomas R. Lounsbury flatly stated that “not one of them has the slightest pretension to be termed a work of art.” In the twentieth century, the first critics to concern themselves with the rehabilitation of Cooper's reputation—Vernon L. Parrington, Robert E. Spiller, and Yvor Winters—concerned as they were with the broader aspects of Cooper's thought, devoted little space to the discussion of tales that were not especially pertinent to their immediate purposes. During the last dozen years, however, the novels have begun to attract more attention, with Harold H. Scudder and W. B. Gates in particular pointing out various sources that Cooper used in composing two of the tales. Among the critics, Grossman has written the fullest analyses of the individual books, and, most recently, Howard Mumford Jones and Charles A. Brady have each treated the late novels at some length. All three have pointed out the strong religious emphasis apparent in several of them.

Visions and Revisions: Chapter Lxxxi of Middlemarch

PMLA ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 72 (4-Part-1) ◽  
pp. 662-679
Author(s):  
Jerome Beaty
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Internal Force ◽  
Literary Creation ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

Literary genius in the nineteenth century was associated with “inspiration,” “spontaneity,” “emotion,” “imagination,” “the unconscious,” and other such indications of the nonratiocinative. Not all critics and writers of the century stressed all aspects of the nonratiocinative: some spoke of effect, using this cluster of words to denote the appearance of spontaneity, the freedom from classical or mechanical rules, the superiority of the mysterious, the individual, the unanalyzable in a work of art; others, especially those in that growing group whose concern was with the relationship between the writer and his work, stressed the irrational elements in the creation of literature. Among the latter there were differences in emphasis too: some stressed the whim of inspiration, its independence of the will; others stressed the frenzy, the ecstasy, the total unconsciousness of the act of literary creation. Among the latter there were those who further claimed that a passage created under the “spell” is never revised; for if this external or internal force is irrational because superior to reason, its results cannot then be submitted to the lesser pronouncements of rational judgment. Some even went so far as to combine all of the above into a single antiratiocinative aesthetic: the writer of true genius composes only when the whim of the muse dictates; he does not prepare himself for these moments of vision by planning or “calculating” his subject or approach; he is seized and illuminated, writing swiftly and effortlessly; he does not revise; the result gives the reader a comparable spontaneous, ecstatic, undefinable emotion.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Espen Hammer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Mass Society ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Quest Narrative

Franz Kafka’s The Trial stands as one of the most influential and emblematic novels of the twentieth century. Yet, as the overused adjective “Kafkaesque” suggests, rather than as a work of art in its full complexity, it has all too often been received as an expression of some vaguely felt cultural or psychological malaise—a symbol, perhaps, of all that we do not seem to comprehend, but that nevertheless is felt to haunt and influence us in inexplicable ways. Its plot, however, is both complex and completely unforgettable. A man stands accused of a crime he appears not to have any recollection of having committed and whose nature is never revealed to him. In what may ultimately be described as a tragic quest-narrative, the protagonist’s search for truth and clarity (about himself, his alleged guilt, and the system he is facing) progressively leads to increasing confusion before ending with his execution in an abandoned quarry. Josef K., its famous anti-hero, is an everyman faced with an anonymous, inscrutable yet seemingly omnipotent power. For all its fundamental strangeness, the novel seems to address defining concerns of the modern era: a sense of radical estrangement, the belittling of the individual in a bureaucratically controlled mass society, the rise perhaps of totalitarianism, as well as the fearful nihilism of a world apparently abandoned by God....

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