Vom Problem einer demokratischen Ästhetik zur Ästhetik einer problematischen Demokratie

From the Problems of a Democratic Aesthetic to the Aesthetics of a Problematic Democracy In analyses of poems from the 18th, 20th and 21st century, this article juxtaposes different degrees of trust in a democratic political order and the role of poetry in it. Philip Freneau, who supported a radical interpretation of the American Revolution as initiating a new and better social order, searched for a democratic poetics commensurate with the value placed on common people. For Muriel Rukeyser and even more so, Langston Hughes in the 1930s, democracy felt threatened not only by fascism abroad but by racism and exploitation at home. In 2014, Claudia Rankines Citizen: An American Lyric registers, like Rukeyser and Hughes, the difficulties in constructing a consensual reality and pushes this notion much further; surprisingly, perhaps, her work continues to see art as important to alert us to this difficulty of modern democracies and divers societies.

Humphrey Jennings's ‘Film Fables’: Democracy and Image in The Silent Village

This essay explores modernism's aesthetic and political implications through examining the works of Humphrey Jennings. The essay takes as a starting point the tension inherent to the democratic aesthetic of Mass Observation between the individual observers and the editors who write up. This tension can be effectively examined in terms of what Jacques Rancière calls ‘film fables’: the Aristotelian ‘fable’ of dramatic action and cinema's ‘fable’ of egalitarian treatment of ‘passive’ images. The essay argues that the paradox between the two ‘fables’ can be observed in Jennings's works, especially in his essays on Thomas Gray, his ‘report’ poems, and The Silent Village (1943), a dystopian propaganda film set in a Welsh village invaded by Nazis Germany. By looking at these works, the essay illustrates how the utopian longing for ‘pure art’ in modernism is related to the impossible idea of ‘democracy’.

The Context of the Marxist-Leninist View of Slovak Literature 1945-1969

This paper resulted from an attempt to explore factors determining or underlying the "Marxificalion" of Slovak literature after 1945-- an attempt motivated by a hunch that certain Marxisl-Leninisl principles had provided a different insight into Slovak literature from that provided by the liberal, democratic "aesthetic appreciation" school of criticism in prewar Czechoslovakia. The idea that Slovak literary criticism has thrived, relatively, since World War II is by no means new and was advanced, for example, by emigre crilics.

Shadow and Light: Read, Dewey, Plato, and Aesthetic Education

This essay examines the aesthetics of Herbert Read, John Dewey and Plato, and their influence on contemporary aesthetic education. The aesthetics of Read and Dewey have been extremely seductive to aesthetic educators for two reasons, the first of which is that they provide a “democratic” or inclusive aesthetic which appears readily integratible into school curricula. The other reason is that Read and Dewey are explicitly prescriptive and practical in their recommendations. Yet the democratic aesthetic is found to be philosophically untenable and inadequate to art. Plato's aesthetics, to which both Read and Dewey claim allegiance, are more philosophically astute and present the fundamental dilemma of aesthetic education: how to reconcile the intrinsically subversive nature of art with the conservative aims of education. The essay contends that aesthetic educators must abandon their traditional arguments on behalf of the arts. They must confront the dilemma of conflicting aims and move towards a new basis for the inclusion of the arts in education. Concomitantly, education will be required to broaden its purposes so that what has hitherto been perceived as subversive will now be recognized as essential to the examined life — knowledge of complexity, paradox, and conflict which extend beyond “right answers. ”