This is our backup site. Click here to visit our main site at MellenPress.com
Subject Area: Aesthetics
Casebier, Allan2006 0-7734-5816-6 164 pages
This book provides the reader with the first comprehensive explanation of the much used distinction between modernist and postmodernist art. Where so many readers and appreciators of the arts find the distinction confronting them at every turn but are unable to understand its nature or comprehend its value, the book provides a conceptual map of the terrain in which the distinction functions. At the same time, the notion of a surrealist style often leaves the reader of history of the arts with sheer mystification where clarity would be most welcome. It provides a much needed corrective to this situation by indicating how to identify surrealist art from its opposing styles. The book provides many illustrations in explaining these three dominant artistic styles of the twentieth century.
This work will appeal to academic readers in history of the arts, cinema and art history; theorists and students of literature and film; and general readers in the history of the arts.
Petty, Jonathan Christian
2021 1-4955-0859-5 744 pages
"This model has implications for music, language of emotions. For the psychological content reflected in the MNS and regulated by SES is emotion - primarily the feeling of personal safety in the presence of others, and secondarily, the eudaimonic or positive feelings made possible by such safety. The musical dimension of this maybe intuited when we consider the musical cadence - the 'descent to the tonic' - as a decisive feeling of arriving safely home, 'there's no place like home.' Music's ability to qualify feelings of mild apprehension - i.e. 'dissonance' - may well understood as maneuvers to heighten feelings of stability ('consonance') and homecoming ('tonic'), the essential feelings of personal belonging upon all other eudiamonic feelings are built."
From the Introduction
Dennis, Christopher
1997 0-7734-8434-5 144 pages
Examines Adorno's principal theme: the historical demise of tonality as the basis for the valid practice of musical art. This theme proceeds from his dialectical view of reality, and from the consequences of the historical change that began with the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie. Responses to these circumstances by the principal composers of the period span a continuum from authenticity, in acknowledgment of the end of musical art, achieved in the objectifying constructions of Schoenberg's 12-tone principles; to inauthenticity, in the pretence of Stravinsky's works to maintain a traditional tonality which is really dead. The consequences of this history for contemporary music are presented as Adorno described them in publications subsequent to Philosophy of Modern Music. Inconsistency is noted in Adorno's understanding of what tonality is, and where it actually applies: this casts doubt upon the notion of tonality from which its historical demise supposedly derives. Adorno's characterization of present historical trends is read as negative, and an interpretation of this apparently essentialist position is offered.
Griakalov, A.
2001 0-7734-3159-4 484 pages
This manuscript sums up reflections on contemporary philosophical aesthetics.
Aesthetics of Dislocation in French and Francophone Literature and Art: Strategies of Representation
Connon, Daisy2009 0-7734-4919-1 296 pages
This work specifically addresses the productive quality of states of dislocation in Francophone literature, cinema and visual culture. It is the first volume to substantially study dislocation within the French and Francophone cultures.
Roblin, Ronald
1990 0-88946-368-9 534 pages
Essays which attempt to communicate to the reader some of the major contributions of Frankfurt School critical theory to aesthetics by means of secondary studies of such figures as Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Lukács, Collingwood, Foucault, and Habermas. Essayists include Eugene Lunn, Douglas Kellner, Sabine Wilke, Barry Katz, Richard Wolin, Rainer Nägele, Lambert Zuidervaart, Thomas Huhn, Ronald Roblin, Janelle Reinelt, David Ingram, Margaret Rose, Stephen White, and Thomas Dumm.
Poole, Gordon
1996 0-7734-8763-8 152 pages
"Work as such doesn't concern me. What intrigues me, excites me, vexes me is the power of doing works. That's why nothing looked to me more coarse and negligible than the poet reduced to be being a poet." - Paul Valéry. Valéry's note, evidently directed against Mallarmé, gives track for the present volume, which is devoted to focus the idea of poeisis like building that is subjected to precise conditions, like putting into practice resources of a particular kind, like playing with transparent images. Within such a horizon, artistic doing appears to be the place where mind develops its own powers and states its knowing strategies. Thus operating, it defines again ab imis, the notion of art in the variety of its patterns, its forms, and its figures.
Bruhn, Siglind
2023 1-4955-1076-X 368 pages
"Scholars and audiences continue to debate whether the development of European music unfolded in parallel to that in the other arts, literature and the fine arts in particular. ...The five principle chapters of this book follow the major developmental steps through which Schoenberg passes in the course of the years 1899-1914. The introductory pages of each chapter illuminate the relevant aesthetic aim in the context of a few typical paintings and literary works created at the same time, with the aim of highlighting significant correspondences. The glances at cross-disciplinary parallels arise from a twofold intention. They lead lovers of literature and the fine arts to the recognition that the stylistic innovations with which they are familiar from paintings and poems, sculptures and Prose, architecture and drama created in the years preceding World War I have their counterparts in music. ....[They indicate that] Schoenberg's development in this phase of his creative life to be unique." -Siglind Bruhn (Preface) This book was originally published in 2015 by Pendragon Press.
LaCroix, Richard L.
1988 0-88946-431-6 130 pages
An important interdisciplinary study of some of the concepts central to Augustine's philosophy of art, largely ignored in previous works.
Stanton, Bob
2000 0-7734-1250-6 88 pages
Having a deep interest in the visual arts, Stanton sees his poetic work in relation to four of the major art movements of the 20th century: Impressionism, Surrealism, Abstract Art, and Expressionism. Thus, he has prepared four major ‘galleries’ for us to view his word paintings. The first gallery shows us impressionistic portraits, self-portraits, landscapes, and vivid images of various scenes of everyday events and activities. The second gallery is filled with strange and sometimes playful ‘brainscapes’ (as opposed to impressionistic landscapes and seascapes). The third gallery contains abstract mood poetry revealing exotic, unexpected symbols and a variety of musical rhythms. The final gallery is made up completely of dramatic monologues, often employed for satiric purposes.
Wang, Aixue
1999 0-7734-8157-5 256 pages
Compares three pairs of plays by the Irish playwright J. M. Synge and the Chinese playwright Cao Yu, discussing some provocative dramaturgical similarities as well as profound aesthetic differences and uncovering a number of instances of Cao Yu's appropriation of Western literary models that have not been recognized before.
George, Emery E.
2003 0-7734-3432-1 156 pages
The diapason of the present volume is joy and hope in our new century and millennium. The one hundred poems explore the formal as well as mimetic possibilities of the villanelle. Among subjects, music and art are prominent. There are cycles of poems in homage to Bach, Mozart, the renaissance German sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider, the late Joseph Brodsky, and one of the startling minds of our century, Arthur Koestler. The poems aim at being an experience in sound, but they also invite us to think. Problems of perception are broached, and social and political comment is by no means absent. Song and comment reach one of their peaks in “Exemplary Tale” (no. 67), a poem on two young people in love, one a Croat, the other a Serb, talented opera singers and both dedicating themselves to working toward a more peaceful future.
Wacior, Slawomir
2007 0-7734-5427-6 316 pages
In the present study, the innovative and cerebral poetry of the Imagist movement, which revolutionized modern English and American poetry, has been analyzed in its contextual and intertextual relationships with other arts. Consequently, the book is like the texts it attempts to investigate, a peculiar hybrid, a collage of three basic materials or analytical perspectives: an excerpt from an Imagist manifesto sketched out in handwriting (context), a torn out printed page from a first edition of Des Imagistes (text), and a photograph of a museum installation of a room devoted to Modernist art (intertext).
Parr, Adrian
2003 0-7734-6564-2 240 pages
This study explores the work of Leonardo da Vinci with the aim of developing a concept of creative production, It argues that the conditions of a truly creative practice require an imaginative re-working of the real so that new and unforeseen realities can emerge. Studying Leonardo’s notebooks and sketches, where a cross-pollination of theory and practice abounds, it shows that creativity is critical power that operates in between the real and ideal, confounding the clear-cut distinction between them.
Lee, Sander H.
1992 0-88946-338-7 776 pages
Fifty-five essays by eminent contemporary philosophers on such topics as "The Devaluation of Value," "The Rationality of Pleasure-Seeking Animals," "Goethe's Moral Thinking," "The Second Death of Jean-Paul Sartre," "The Significance of Human Life after Auschwitz," and "What Can You Do with Art?" Complete with an appendix giving the history of the American Society for Value Inquiry and two additional appendices.
Blankenhorn, V. S.
2003 0-7734-6782-3 544 pages
This work is a systematic analysis and classification of Irish accentual verse-metres. It will interest linguists and students of metre, as well as ethnomusicologists studying the context of Irish traditional song, and musicologists studying the historical development of European song-forms. An assessment of previous contributions to the study of Irish verse-practice is followed by a general survey of metrical scholarship, which in turn lays the groundwork for a metrical theory of Irish accentual verse. Space is devoted to a phenomenologically-based discussion of the role of rhythm in spoken Irish and its implications for verse-structure. The heart of the work consists of a taxonomical survey of Irish accentual verse-types, in which the principal criterion for inclusion in a given category is the number of stressed syllables in a line. Following chapters deal with stanzaic and supra-stanzaic structure and verse-ornament, the musical context of verse, the ways in which musical metre differs from verse metre, and the implications of such differences for a system of versification primarily transmitted through a musical medium.
McAloon, Francis X.
2008 0-7734-5022-X 264 pages
Grounded in the investigative tools of interpretation theory, theo-poetic aesthetics, and literary criticism, this book proposes and employs an interdisciplinary methodology for the analysis of poetic prayer tests, focusing upon the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Interspersed throughout the text are brief interchapters, which offer practical illustrations of the sort of transformative reading this work proposes.
Harris, Morag
2002 0-7734-7029-8 252 pages
Will, Frederic
1993 0-7734-3038-5 212 pages
The first section of the book deals with the births of language and literature from consciousness, and the formation of literary history. Explores Husserl's mapping of the origins of language, and subsequent language theories in Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Heidegger. Section Two traces privileged Homeric shelters such as the bowers off the battle-line in the Iliad and hidden islands like Ogygia in the Odyssey. It tracks that same language-sheltering into several Biblical wombs -- Sarai's, Mary's or Jonah's whale's, and turns from these to language shelters constructed by Sappho for her passion, Saint Paul for inner salvation, and by the creator of the Bhagavad Gita. The final section looks at the intimate intermeshing of literature and music with the Zeitsgeist, and finally, locates the impulse to literature and all art in the pulse of biology.
Bruhn, Siglind
2023 1-4955-1181-2 296 pages
"Olivier Messiaen, master of sounds, was gifted with an unusual visual sense. While his physical eyes always needed thick glasses, his inner eye saw much that remains hidden to most. Music and Color is the title of the only volume of conversations published under the composer's own name rather than under that of the respective interviewer, thus drawing the readers' attention to the importance Messiaen attached to one of the basic aspects of visual perception. ...Were one to move in the direction of inner perception, one would arrive at the dimension of contemplations and visions. This book aims to direct its readers' interest specifically toward the metaphysical, theological, and sometimes mystical visions manifested in the two piano cycles whose movements are compiled under the titles of 'visions' and 'contemplations' respectively." -Siglind Bruhn (Preface)
Mythic Hero's Appearance in the Twelve Seasons of Nature: His Dramatic Action in Literature and Film
Eriksson, Edward2012 0-7734-4082-8 172 pages
The hero in literature and film is an expression of seasonal occurrence. His behavior exhibits, symbolically, the relationship of the sun to the earth in twelve phases. It begins at the March equinox and proceeds through the natural year. He assumes, then, twelve distinct characterizations. His conflicts and successes reflect the natural conditions of Early Spring, Mid-Spring, Late Spring, and so on. It creates an aesthetic development that primarily converts traditional mythic dynamics (based in agriculture) into story lines. His character in a given season suggests the dynamism of that season in a modern cultural context. As all works of literature and film either indicate or suggest a seasonal moment, all heroes as will be shown by reference to over a hundred novels, plays, short stories, and films, are characterized by the force of aesthetic sublimation in sympathy with their seasonal set.
von Morstein, Petra
1986 0-88946-326-3 275 pages
Presents a theory of art according to which artworks represent kinds of experiences; also provides a philosophical understanding of the distinct peculiarities inherent in the experiencing of art.
Sellin, Eric
1993 0-7734-9361-1 172 pages
Analyzes the aesthetic thrust of the three most important avant-garde movements in the twentieth century, defining both similarities and differences in their poetics. In compelling essays like "A Will to Art," "Modern Drama and Nonverbal Poetics," "Le Chapelet du hasard: Ideas of Order in Dada-Surrealist Imagery," "Three Modes of Semantic Accrual," and "The Aesthetics of Ambiguity," Sellin explores the inner workings of the creative impulses and the resulting poetic structures which inhere in the creative works of these early avant-garde movements.
Loewen, Gregory V.
2012 0-7734-3929-3 184 pages
Loewen looks at the ways art can preserve the self as an archived project. Does art reflect personal growth and can one’s view on it change over time? Why do people identify with particular works of art and not others? The pertinent question in this book is how art reflects the personal identity of its creator and how responses to works of art can divulge information about the audience as well. Art can also serve to memorialize the changes that the self goes through while living. He also argues that artistic expression provides a forum for our truest selves to become represented.
Sullivan, Karen
2007 0-7734-5317-2 188 pages
This study breaks new ground by focusing on the role of the arts in Rousseau’s novel, Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, and through them demonstrates the underlying consistency of his thought. Although he never elaborated a formal aesthetic doctrine, Rousseau’s ideas on the arts provide the foundation for the novel and can be discerned therein. Moving between his theoretical and literary writings, this study reveals how Rousseau achieved his aesthetic and ethical goals, examining his alternation between the roles of censor and champion of the arts. This book contains 12 black and white photographs.
Little, Jonathan David
2011 0-7734-1426-6 492 pages
This is the most comprehensive survey of the major sources of inspiration for Western composers who sought to infuse their musical works with an ‘Eastern’ flavor. The book discusses the aesthetic, philosophical, political , geographical, literary and historical forces at work during the period. This book contains thirty-one black and white photographs and fifteen color photographs.
Brooks, Linda M.
1996 0-7734-8752-2 248 pages
Exploring theories of the sublime from Neoclassicism to the Postmodern, this study questions the widely-accepted view of the sublime as an aesthetics that glorifies the self. It argues that the aesthetics of terror that pervaded 18th and early 19th-century Europe was part of a generic movement toward the dissipation of the unity underwriting conventional concepts of identity. Closely analyzing the divisiveness underlying the sublime in Burke's Enquiry, Kant's third Critique, Schiller's ten years of aesthetic essay, and Coleridge's scattered aesthetic writings, the study moves beyond such leading scholars of the sublime as Thomas Weiskel, Frances Ferguson, Jean-François Lyotard, and Neil Hertz, offering a perspective on the sublime that breaks new ground in our understanding of romantic identity and its relation to the postmodern self.
Schlig, Michael
2004 0-7734-6190-6 180 pages
Mirrors that appear as motifs in the visual arts and literature abound throughout the history of all cultures of the world. Given its universality, the mirror often has served has a metaphor for introspection, self-contemplation and even autobiography, and has symbolized the structuring of works of fiction and drama. This study specifically examines the figurative mirrors that not only call attention to some aspect of the content of the work in which they appear, but also to the aesthetics with which that content is expressed. As such, it follows in the tradition of works such as M.H. Abrams's landmark study of the transition from Neoclassicism to Romanticism in England The Mirror and the Lamp and Marguerite Iknayan's The Concave Mirror: From Imitation to Expression in French Esthetic Theory: 1800–1830, but differs in that it seeks to incorporate theoretical and historical considerations of visual representation to the study of the mirror analogy in writing. Most importantly, and to the best of my knowledge, no such study exists that examines the mirror metaphor of representation in the literary tradition of Spain.
While the mirror metaphor is such a commonplace throughout the centuries of artistic and literary aesthetics, surprisingly little more than the two above-mentioned studies exist that explore the motivations underlying use of the mirror analogy. This study incorporates contemporary theories of semiotics and reader response along with more eclectic and traditional approaches to aesthetics in order to address the theoretical implications raised by the appearance of the metaphor in evolving contexts (i.e., across artistic movements and periods). In light of this, the theoretical and comparative considerations throughout the study could also be of interest to scholars and students of French, English and comparative literatures in spite of the focus on the Spanish tradition.
Potter, Martin
2009 0-7734-3854-8 320 pages
The only study to focus on these three novels. The argument departs from previous scholarship by emphasizing the ambivalence and even, to some extent, hostility, evinced by each of the authors to aspects of modern social conditions, and by examining their discontents in detail. Also shows a portrayal by the authors of a gradual increase in the tensions they detect in social and artistic conditions during the modern period.
Will, Frederic
1993 0-7734-3040-7 88 pages
This is a sequence of seventy-five vignettes: one to four-page mind-pictures of places, persons, ideas, and moral issues; a harvest of decades of looking and feeling. The themes advance thus: observations of objects in space; concern with aesthetics and the arts (sculpture, architecture) that organize space; travelling -- which moves through, and fills with, space; evolution and nature; the imagination -- as maker of art, and our sense of space; the religious instinct as an outgrowth of the imagination; the religious and the mythical -- how they are inter-related; our potential for compassion and solidarity; and the chances we have to export life with us beyond the grave. A world-view expresses itself here in pictures of the world; a blend of poetry, logic, historical observation, and mini-fictions.
Ligo, Larry L.R.
2022 1-4955-0936-2 900 pages
This two-book set provides a thorough examination and interpretation of nearly every major painting that Edouard Manet publicly exhibited between 1861-1882 in his struggle to create a new style called modern art. The author demonstrates that Manet developed a unique and new style of painting by employing Charles Baudelaire's aesthetic theory. In this way Manet created the characteristic style of modern art.
This combined, consecutively paginated, two volume book set contains 139 colored illustrations.