RIDING THE WILD OCEAN: HORATIU RADULESCU'S SUBCONSCIOUS WAVE IN THEORY, PERFORMANCE AND RECORDING

This article focuses on Radulescu's 1984 Subconscious Wave, for guitar and pre-recorded digital sound, a work that features on my 2019 solo CD recording Refracted Resonance, for Métier Records, alongside music by Tristan Murail, Christopher Fox, George Holloway and myself. The article places the work in the context of Radulescu's output, demonstrates how it displays the key aesthetic concepts that drive his music and shares my insights into the technical and interpretive aspects of preparing the piece for performance and recording. The article has been adapted from a lecture-recital given at the 2021 edition of the 21st Century Guitar Conference, which was hosted by the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (NOVA FCSH), Portugal in March 2021.

Estetika Karya Lukis Afianto Arifin

This study discusses Afianto Arifin's tendency to persist with a strong naturalism style during the incessant contemporary art. This study also discusses the journey of art, the factors behind his work attitude, and the aesthetic concepts contained in his paintings. To answer these problems, qualitative research methods are used which include observation, interviews, and literature study. The research was conducted in the City of Bukittinggi and Padang Pariaman district, West Sumatra province. Based on the research results, the beginning of Afianto Arifin's artistic career began in Jakarta. Apart from painting, Arifin also got a project to make sculptures and reliefs. After that, Arifin was diligent in making paintings. Arifin tends to raise objects of natural scenery and women's beauty. The idea of creating Arifin's paintings was influenced by artistic factors and cultural factors in his native area, namely Bukittinggi. The aesthetic concepts contained in Arifin's paintings are discussed from the point of view of art styles, art structures, as well as the interaction of media and meaning. Arifin is a person who tends to not want to be exposed and does not like to see exhibitions, this makes Arifin stick to his ideals and influences his artistic style until now.

Aesthetics and Politics of Poetry written in Tribal Languages of Kerala

Poems written in Tribal languages are a notable presence in contemporary Malayalam poetry. As there is no script for those endangered tribal languages, they are written in Malayalam script. They are being translated into Malayalam. These poems become a declaration of the aboriginal community and of the aesthetics that obscure mainstream aesthetic concept. Tribal communities in Kerala lives in the forest areas of Idukki, Wayanad, Palakkad, Kasaragod, Trissur, Cochin, Trivandrum and Kollam districts. These marginalized people are facing a crisis of survival. The neglect of the main stream society and the Government and the destruction of the habitat have made their lives miserable. Indigenous tribal languages are endangered. It is in this context that the new generation of educated Adivasis seek to document their survival problem through poetry in the tribal language itself. Poems are written in tribal languages such as Irula, Rawla, Malavettuva, Paniya, Mavila and Muthuvan appearing in social media and in print and book form, they symbolize a different sensibility. The aim of this paper is to findout the political attitudes, aesthetic concepts and features of languages of the aboriginal community by studying these poems.

Art as a Cipher of Transcendence

The article is devoted to the problems of artistic creativity at the end of XX - beginning of XXI centuries, defining its role in modern culture; culturological, art history and aesthetic concepts of modern art are analyzed in the article.

FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN's AESTHETICS BETWEEN PLATO AND KANT (TO THE QUESTION OF FORMATION OF THE CATEGORIES OF THE BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME)

The article analyzes the aesthetic views of Friedrich Hölderlin, and, first, his understanding of the categories of the Beautiful and Sublime. Particular attention is paid to the comparison of Hölderlin's views with the aesthetic teachings of Plato and Immanuel Kant, who had a great influence on the German poet. The author of the article concludes that Hölderlin sought to unite the Platonian and Kantian understanding of beauty, seeing the similarity between the concepts of Plato and Kant in the question of the source of the beautiful. The central for aesthetics of Hölderlin was the problem of combining the spheres of aesthetic and ethical, to solve which he relied on the idea of Kant about beautiful as a symbol of the moral good and the Teaching of Plato on the climbing of the soul to the Good. Hölderlin pays less attention to the theoretical development of the category of the Sublime than to the comprehension of the category of the Beautiful, however, in his writings, the Sublime is present implicitly, and Hölderlin's understanding of this category is close, on the one hand, to Platonian, bringing together the Beautiful and the Sublime, and, on the other, to Kantian understanding, which brings the Sublime together with the idea of infinity, God and the sphere of morality. The conclusions to which Hölderlin comes, are far from Platonism, and from Kantianism. The poet concludes about the central and leading role of poetry and poetic gift in the knowledge of the world, which should be aesthetic. This indicates a romantic way to interpret Hölderlin's aesthetic concepts of Plato and Kant.

Psychological Compassion as Portrayed in Dorothea in Eliot’s Middlemarch and Louisa in Dickens’ Hard Times

This article has a cogent argument to investigate the similarities and differences between Eliot and Dickens’ techniques in revealing the insight natural expressions of compassion by analyzing the heroines’ characteristics portrayed in the common theme of their selected novels. This article adopts the Seven-Stage Model of Maslow’s (1970) Motivation Theory to analyze Dorothea in Eliot’s Middlemarch and Louisa in Dickens’ Hard Times. According to Maslow, individuals should satisfy the models’ conceptual expressions completely to reach an ultimate level, which is self-actualization needs. In this regard, Maslow maintained that those who have reached the pyramid’s peak are capable of love. The findings of this study indicate that Eliot shines by enhancing many prominent feminine touches, emotional and aesthetic concepts, and passionate experiences in her heroines’ personalities much more than Dickens who ignores them. For instance, Dorothea in Eliot’s Middlemarch satisfies all the conceptual expressions of the model’s self-actualization needs perfectly, while Louisa in Dickens’ Hard Times has many problems, particularly in getting love, esteem, as well as cognitive, aesthetic, and self-actualization needs. So, Eliot’s excellence suggests a powerful contribution by refuting and criticizing the Victorian masculine stereotypical mottos that women could not express more than half of life and they could not feel a passion.

The Applications of Domestication and Foreignization in the Translation of English and Chinese Movie Titles

Taking domestication and foreignization as the research object, this paper is meant to explore the applications of domestication and foreignization in English and Chinese film titles. Firstly, it probes into the main factors that have influence on the translation of film titles, namely ways of thinking, aesthetic concepts, business values and translators’ understandings of the cultural background of the source language. Secondly, by introducing translators like Venuti, Fu Lei, Qian Zhongshu and Eugene Nida, the paper demonstrates domestication and foreignization, and then discusses them in the film titles. Finally, the paper elaborates the reasons and examples behind domestication and foreignization and a combination of the two. According to the study, the usage of domestication or foreignization is closely connected with the linguistic characteristics and cultural background of English and Chinese. Besides, these two translation strategies reinforce each other and are closely interwoven.

On the Translatability of Cultural Phenomena: Modernismo and Modernism within and without Mass Culture

“Spanish American modernismo,” wrote Octavio Paz in 1972, “has no connection to what in English is called ‘modernism.’” Indeed, for a long time there was consensus in both critical traditions that “despite some parallels,” as Astradur Eysteinsson put it, “the differences between the two concepts are too many to warrant their critical coalescence.” In recent years, however, it has become the rule to discuss Latin American and Spanish modernismos within the Anglo-Germanic notion of modernism, as part of the broader concept of “global modernisms.” But how did two of the most important aesthetic concepts of the twentieth century from two distinct traditions go from misleading cognates to variants of the same phenomenon? This article offers a comparative history to explain the conditions of their mutual (un)translatability. It presents their divergent beginnings, briefly surveys their independent developments, and finally argues that, in the past few decades, both have similarly turned from differential to relational concepts mainly by transforming their relationship to mass culture. They have thus gone from high-literary ideologies of exclusion to fields of research on the networks and dynamics of modern culture. As they did, however, their standing within their respective critical traditions has changed in opposite ways.

The Development and Aesthetic Pursuit of Opera Films in this Century (2000-2015)

This paper examined the development of opera films in regard to cultural traditions and modernization, the evolution and analysis of new aesthetic concepts, the cultural reasons for continuous development and the expansion of communication channels. Based on these analyses, this paper concluded with the call for China to continuously improve and develop of the Chinese opera films in the hope for a new “golden age.”

Writings, Emotions, and Oblations: The Religious-Ritual Origin of the Classical Confucian Conception of Cheng (Sincerity)

Cheng 誠 (sincerity) is one of the primary concepts in the Confucian tradition as well as Chinese intellectual history. Its rich implications involve dimensions of religion, ritual, folk belief, ethics, psychology, cosmology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and literature. In the Confucian classics, cheng is described as the “Dao of heaven”; humans through cultivation can reach the mysterious state of “the utmost sincerity functioning as spirits” and thus can “assist the transforming and generating power of heaven and earth.” Because of cheng’s rich, sacred, and mysterious implications, it has been regarded as the most difficult and perplexing of Chinese concepts. Scholars have long studied cheng mainly from the perspective of philosophy to analyze its ideological conceptions in the Confucian classics, resulting in fruitful and inspiring interpretations. However, because they have not traced the origin of cheng to its rich religious, ritual, and literary sources, their interpretations have been unable to answer the question: why is cheng covered with such a mysterious veil? In recent decades, some scholars have started exploring cheng’s relationship with ancient religious beliefs and rituals, but so far a comprehensive examination of the religious-ritual origin of this significant concept remains lacking. To discover cheng’s mysterious origins, we must apply a synthetic approach of etymological, religious, philosophical, and literary studies. Drawing upon both transmitted and excavated texts, this essay first analyzes the graphic-phonetic structure and semantic implications of the character cheng 成 (completion), which was the character cheng’s 誠 early form. It then examines the rich meanings implied in both characters related to sacrificial-divinatory rituals, including invoking the spirits with sincere writings, emotions, and oblations, in order to seduce them to descend and enjoy the offerings, as well as perfectively completing the human-spirit communication. Finally, the essay discusses how those religious beliefs and ritual ceremonies evolved into Confucian ethical values and aesthetic concepts, thus lifting the mysterious veil from cheng.