The Artistic Representation of Jesus in Hermann Cohen's Aesthetics

Cohen deals with the question of the possibility for art to represent God or the divine in some of his works, throughout all his philosophical production, but obviously above all in his main aesthetic work, sthetik des reinen Gefhls (1912). We can state that in Cohen's works this problem is posed with reference to three different religious fields: Greek polytheism, Jewish monotheism and Christianity. The topic of this essay will be Cohen's thought about the artistic representation of the divine in Christianity or in Christian art through the representation of Jesus. This topic will be examined with reference both to Kants Begrndung der sthetik (1889) and to sthetik des reinen Gefhls ; whereas in Kants Begrndung der sthetik Cohen devotes to the representation of Jesus just a short consideration in the historical introduction of the book, in sthetik des reinen Gefhls the representation of Jesus is object of far more attention. Here, Cohen's answer to the question of the possibility to represent the divine through the representation of Jesus is that Jesus' divinity, in the artistic representation of his figure, can only have a metaphorical value, the real meaning of which is that Jesus' story is the ideal story of the human being; in Kants Begrndung der sthetik and in other writings of the 80s, on the contrary, the idea of incarnation and of the divinity of Jesus is object of a different appreciation by Cohen. The comparison between these different stances can be a contribution to the comprehension of the changes in Cohen's view of Christianity through the years.

Keep Candy in the House

My mother’s love of Tootsie Rolls was the only fact I could grasp after her sudden passing. I wanted to share this and other memories of her through a eulogy that was whimsical, far-ranging, and entertaining, but I struggled to write one. My struggles reminded me of other writing challenges, such as my recent dissertation proposal, although there I was partly guided by my arts-informed research methodology framework. Gradually, I found some of those methodological elements could illuminate parts of eulogy writing: formal concerns, audience, presence and engagement, subjectivity, and meaning-making all resonate with arts-informed research’s commitment to form, audience, creative enquiry, researcher presence, and holistic quality. These connections show arts-informed research affords lifelong learning opportunities apart from academic practice; in this case, arts-informed research is a resource tool for navigating lived experiences of grief and grief writing. Moreover, arts-informed research encourages affective narratives and socially-constructed meanings to produce new understandings, which I realize here by including eulogy excerpts to produce an artistic representation of “research” about my mother (including her undying love of chocolate).

Network communication and its genres as objects of artistic representation (based on Russian literature)

The article analyses a new compositional peculiarity of modern fiction – the introduction of a text fragment related by its lexical and graphic features to one of the genres of network communication (chat, blog, electronic mail, etc.) into the structure of the literary works. The dialogue between characters, who communicate on the Net, becomes one of the stable text-forming means, performing various artistic tasks, including formation of the plotline, creating the image (atmosphere) of the time period, character images, reflection of “language taste of the epoch”, and so on. The reproduction of the main linguistic peculiarities of electronic genres, in its turn, enlivens the literary discourse to a considerable degree; the pastiche of network communication becomes one of the expressive means; the cultural dominant of our time – orientation towards visual perception of information – manifests itself. The research has revealed methods and means of transferring graphic and lexical features of genres of informal network communication in the fictional text. The main ways of reflecting the peculiarities of electronic speech are direct stylization (reproduction of alphabetic and other graphemes used in Runet) and indirect image (verbal designation of non-alphabetic graphemes), which becomes the basis of a new imagery, the tropics (laughing brackets, emoji got nervous, an offended smiley, etc.). The analysis of the features of the display of speech behavior on the Net allows to conclude about the formation of a kind of poetics for the artistic embodiment of the stable theme of modern literature – ”Man in the virtual sphere of communication and being”. The study is built on the basis of general philological analysis and specifically linguistic analysis of a fictional text (total number of analyzed works is about 60) and presents a part of the author’s separate research on the formation of Russian Internet lexis in the modern Russian language and realized within the framework of functional sociolinguistics.

Poetics of the Uncanny: A Post-Phenomenological Critique of D. H. Lawrence and Somerset Maugham’s Short Fiction

Taking issue with Sigmund Freud’s premise on the subject, this essay seeks alternately to inquire into, challenge, and broaden our understanding of the uncanny. Even though this genius from the field of psychoanalysis is quite right in wreathing the uncanny with the murky aura that it wears to date, his insistence on driving one way traffic from heimlich to das unheimliche while at the same time refusing to let it out of “the realm of the frightening” gives a kind of staleness and fixity to the subject of the uncanny, which is no less than its undoing, especially when it comes to its artistic representation. Eschewing psychoanalytical debates and focusing rather upon the post-phenomenological discourse, I’ll show as to how the homely artistic devices like paradox, reversal, thematic and narrative flux, unswerving matter-of-factness yield an uncanny import in “The Rocking-Horse Winner” and “The Book Bag,” the two short stories by Lawrence and Maugham respectively. Insisting upon the essential uncanniness of art, this article proposes that the uncanny hinges on what Martin Seel (2005) describes as art’s fundamental “irreality” and Theodor Adorno (1973) calls “appearances”. I hypothesize that the uncanny owes its life to a continual movement of the subject matter between openness and closure, between imagination and reality, between the outer world and the inner domain, between what Bhabha (1992) alludes to as the world and the home.

Epic

As the son of Zeus, accomplisher of great tasks, and civilizing agent, Heracles appears an archetypal hero, central to any number of myths and whose deeds dominate artistic representation. Yet his appearances in extant early Greek hexameter poetry are fleeting and carefully circumscribed. In this chapter we survey the references to an epic Heracles in order to establish common elements (his “fabula”); consider what picture emerges from the (fragmentary) epics devoted to him; and examine his role in the foundational epics of Hesiod and Homer. Heracles comes across as a quintessential hero who metes out and endures suffering, while simultaneously appearing outlandish, excessive, and one of a kind. His extreme individualism marks him out as a problematic figure in Homer’s grand coalition narratives that represent and interrogate political participation.

WORLD IMAGE IMPRESSIONS IN "DEVONU LUGOTIT TURK"

The article discusses the importance of the image of the world in Mahmud Kashgari`s "Devonu lug'otit turk" the art of artistic representation.

‘Ein sonderbar’ Ding’: Music, the Historical and the Problem of Temporal Representation in Der Rosenkavalier

Der Rosenkavalier is an opera that foregrounds time: the problem of time, as transience, passing and ultimately death for the aging Marschallin, and a potentially more redemptive quality, the category of the Augenblick associated with the young lovers Octavian and Sophie, in which the temporal intersects with the eternal. It is also a work that has traditionally marked the turning point in Strauss's relation to historical time and the idea of musical progress, as the composer supposedly retreated from the modernity of Salome and Elektra to a more conservative idiom. The temporal qualities manifested in Der Rosenkavalier invite comparison with another work from this period that similarly foregrounds the concept of time, Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg. In this self-styled ‘novel of time’, Mann raises a number of problems concerning the human limitations on perceiving time and its artistic representation, especially with regard to music. Disputing the contention of the narrator of Mann's novel that music cannot ‘narrate time’, I show that Strauss's music in fact exemplifies music's capacity to express ‘the historical in time’, using Der Rosenkavalier as a case study for addressing the philosophical problem of temporal representation in art. I argue that Der Rosenkavalier – both Hofmannsthal's text and Strauss's music – is in several significant ways ‘an opera about time’ – the temporal and the eternal, the historical and what I call the ‘metahistorical’.

Does an artistic representation of brand logos increase their effect on customers?

Background: In numerous fMRI studies, brands strongly confound the customers economic decisions on a neural level by modulating cortical activity in reward-related areas. Objective: To test the hypothesis that the effect of logos can be increased by artistic logo representations, we presented logos in original and artistically changed versions during fMRI. Methods: Following a pre-study survey on the familiarity of original brand logos, 15 logos rated as familiar and 10 logos rated as unfamiliar were selected for fMRI experiment. During fMRI, 15 healthy subjects were presented with original and artistically changed logos out of the familiar/unfamiliar categories. A whole-brain and ROI analysis for reward-related areas were performed. Moreover, logo-induced valence and arousal were measured with the self-assessment manikin. Results: Whole-brain analysis revealed activation in bilateral visual cortex for artistically changed logos (familiar/unfamiliar) compared to original logos. No significant effect could be detected for the ROI analysis. On average, the logos caused neutral emotions. However, when analyzing valence and arousal for familiar/unfamiliar and original/artistically changed logos separately, familiar original logos evoked stronger positive emotions than familiar artistically changed logos. Artistically changed logos (familiar/unfamiliar) excited participants significantly more than original logos. Conclusion: Artistically changed logos elicit activation in the bilateral visual cortex but not in reward-related areas.