Aesthetic and Philosophical Reflections on Mood

Aesthetic and Philosophical Reflections on Mood PDF

Author: Birgit Breidenbach

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-04-19

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1000067610

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This study explores the concept of Stimmung in literary and philosophical texts of the modern age. Signifying both 'mood' and 'attunement', Stimmung speaks to the categories of affective experience and aesthetic design alike. The study locates itself in the nexus between discourses on modernity, existentialism and aesthetics and uncovers the pivotal role of Stimmung in 19th- and 20th-century European narrative fiction and continental philosophy. The study first explores the philosophical and aesthetic origins and implications of Stimmung to, then, discuss its role in the narrative fiction of three key authors of modern literature: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard. These readings demonstrate a significant shift towards an aesthetic of affective intensity and immediacy, in which the experience of the reading process takes centre stage as each author develops an aesthetic philosophy of Stimmung in their own right. Through its focus on the concept of Stimmung, the study thus unearths a fundamental link between existentialist concerns and narrative practice in modern literature.

Aesthetics in Grief and Mourning

Aesthetics in Grief and Mourning PDF

Author: Kathleen Marie Higgins

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0226831043

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"A philosophical exploration of the value of aesthetics in loss and grieving. Loss and grief are destabilizing forces. As a bereaved person grapples with the reality that their loved one is gone and feels only shakily connected to the surrounding world, the tangibility of sensory objects can be grounding. In Aesthetics of Grief and Mourning, philosopher Kathleen Marie Higgins highlights the role of aesthetics in the grieving process, offering a guide for how being attuned to aesthetics can aid those experiencing loss. While some activities associated with loss-such as participation in funerals-are culturally scripted, many others are relatively everyday, including attending to sensory objects, telling stories, reflecting on artworks, experiencing music, and engaging in creative projects. Higgins shows how attending to these aesthetic practices helps those who have experienced loss, and she also sheds light on the importance of aesthetic engagement with the world for individual and community flourishing"--

Fiction and Emotion

Fiction and Emotion PDF

Author: Bijoy H. Boruah

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13:

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Why do people respond emotionally to fiction when they know that it is only make-believe? This question which is fundamental to aesthetics and literary studies, is here tackled from a new perspective. The author first discusses the various answers that have been offered by philosophers formAristotle to Roger Scruton. He shows that while some philosophers have denied any rational basis to our emotional responses to fiction, others have argued that the emotions evoked by fiction are not real emotions at all. In contrast, Dr Boruah argues that fictional emotions are rational, and thatthey are based on the same sorts of beliefs that we form about real situations and real people. He illustrates his discussion throughout by an extensive use of literary examples, ranging from Shakespeare to Tolstoy.

Placing Aesthetics

Placing Aesthetics PDF

Author: Robert E. Wood

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0821412809

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Aesthetics, argues Wood (philosophy, U. of Dallas) lies not at the periphery of the speculative tradition, but at its center, and is linked to a sense of the whole that withers when thought focuses exclusively on specialization. Selecting moments from the tradition, he locates the aesthetic concern within the larger framework of the philosophy of thinkers from Plato and Aristotle through the Middle Ages and German tradition to Dewey and Heidegger. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Mood and Trope

Mood and Trope PDF

Author: John Brenkman

Publisher:

Published: 2020-01-20

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 022667326X

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"John Brenkman's book addresses fundamental questions in modern aesthetics by folding the recent "affective turn" in critical theory back toward the "linguistic turn," against which it is usually opposed. His aim is to re-ground affect theory on the reflections of major modern philosophers (particularly Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Deleuze) about sensation, feeling, emotion, mood, passion, and attunement, and to test those reflections through specific poetic works. Affect, Brenkman argues, can be studied with some precision in poetry because it resides there not in speaking about feelings but in the very speaking and way of speaking. Brenkman confronts Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Deleuze with an intentionally heterogeneous set of authors and artists, including Pinter and Poe, Baudelaire and Li-Young Lee, Shakespeare, Tino Sehgal and Rineke Dijkstra, Francis Bacon, and Percy Bysshe Shelley and Jorie Graham. The book ultimately has much to tell us about the vocation of criticism. Criticism, Brenkman, is incapable of systematicity but must instead be attuned to the singularity and plurality of literary and artistic creations. For criticism today, "What is art?" is a less pressing question than "What does this work do?" and "What do these works do?""--

Imaginative Moods

Imaginative Moods PDF

Author: Dorthe Jørgensen

Publisher: Aarhus Universitetsforlag

Published: 2021-01-29

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 8772195614

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Following modern and postmodern philosophy’s critique of metaphysics, experiences of transcendence are often considered ‘aesthetic’ rather than ‘metaphysical.’ However, aesthetics is mostly identified with the study of art, and aesthetic phenomena are considered particularly sensuous. This book criticizes such an approach to aesthetics, which has led many philosophers and theologians to neglect or reject aesthetics as a philosophical or theological discipline. It demonstrates how contemporary philosophy and theology may benefit from studying the mind-opening and world-transformative nature of our experiences of transcendence. In addition, it presents the significance of such experiences for the understanding of, for example, art, faith, prayer, presence, beauty, sensitivity, imagination, receptivity, and divinity. Imaginative Moods: Aesthetics, Religion, Philosophy is related to the simultaneously published monograph Poetic Inclinations: Ethics, History, Philosophy. Together they constitute a comprehensive presentation in English of the author’s philosophy of experience, which includes new ways of conceiving of and applying aesthetics, hermeneutics, and phenomenology, and of integrating these disciplines, as well as theology.

Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s Magazines

Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s Magazines PDF

Author: Alice Wood

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-12

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 1351967398

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This book explores responses to the strangeness and pleasures of modernism and modernity in four commercial British women’s magazines of the interwar period. Through extensive study of interwar Vogue (UK), Eve, Good Housekeeping (UK), and Harper’s Bazaar (UK), Wood uncovers how modernism was received and disseminated by these fashion and domestic periodicals and recovers experimental journalism and fiction within them by an array of canonical and marginalized writers, including Storm Jameson, Rose Macaulay, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf. The book’s analysis is attentive to text and image and to interactions between editorial, feature, and advertising material. Its detailed survey of these largely neglected magazines reveals how they situated radical aesthetics in relation to modernity’s broader new challenges, diversions, and opportunities for women, and how they approached high modernist art and literature through discourses of fashion and celebrity. Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s Magazines extends recent research into modernism’s circulation through diverse markets and publication outlets and adds to the substantial body of scholarship concerned with the relationship between modernism and popular culture. It demonstrates that commercial women’s magazines subversively disrupted and sustained contemporary hierarchies of high and low culture as well as actively participating in the construction of modernism’s public profile.

Life-Writing, Genre and Criticism in the Texts of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland

Life-Writing, Genre and Criticism in the Texts of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland PDF

Author: Ailsa Granne

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-27

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1000091996

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Sylvia Townsend Warner has increasingly become recognized as a significant and distinctive talent amongst twentieth-century authors. This volume explores her remarkable relationship with Valentine Ackland - her partner for forty years - by closely examining their letters and diaries alongside a selection of their other texts, in particular their poetry. This analysis reveals the crucial role their writing played in establishing, maintaining, and defending their intimacy and describes the emergence of an alternative textual world upon which they became wholly reliant. Examining how Warner and Ackland exploited the distance between their lived life and their accounts of it, gives rise to many fascinating and untold stories. Furthermore, in investigating the fluidity of the boundaries between letters, diaries and fiction this book also provides a fresh perspective on these life-writing forms. Warner and Ackland's need to speak as women, writers and lovers, shaped their texts, so that they became not simply records of events, nor acts of communication, but complex documents in which love is won and lost, myths are created, and lives are changed, as will be the perspectives of those who read this book.

Embodiment and the Cosmic Perspective in Twentieth-Century Fiction

Embodiment and the Cosmic Perspective in Twentieth-Century Fiction PDF

Author: Marco Caracciolo

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-13

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1000088855

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In dialogue with groundbreaking technologies and scientific models, twentieth century fiction presents readers with a vast mosaic of perspectives on the cosmos. The literary imagination of the world beyond the human scale, however, faces a fundamental difficulty: if, as researchers in both cognitive science and narrative theory argue, fiction is a practice geared toward the human embodied mind, how can it cope with scientific theories and concepts— the Big Bang, quantum physics, evolutionary biology, and so on—that resist our common-sense intuitions and appear discontinuous, in spatial as well as temporal terms, with our bodies? This book sets out to answer this question by showing how the embodiment of mind continues to matter even as writers— and readers—are pushed out of their terrestrial comfort zone. Offering thoughtful commentary on work by both mainstream literary authors and science fiction writers (from Primo Levi to Jeanette Winterson, from Olaf Stapledon to Pamela Zoline), Embodiment and the Cosmic Perspective in Twentieth-Century Fiction explores the multiple ways in which narrative can radically defamiliarize our bodily experience and bridge the gap with cosmic realities. This investigation affords an opportunity to reflect on the role of literature as it engages with science and charts its epistemological and ethical ramifications.

Modernist Literature and European Identity

Modernist Literature and European Identity PDF

Author: Birgit Van Puymbroeck

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-13

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 1000088375

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Modernist Literature and European Identity examines how European and non-European authors debated the idea of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. It shifts the focus from European modernism to modernist Europe, and shows how the notion of Europe was constructed in a variety of modernist texts. Authors such as Ford Madox Ford, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Aimé Césaire, and Nancy Cunard each developed their own notion of Europe. They engaged in transnational networks and experimented with new forms of writing, supporting or challenging a European ideal. Building on insights gained from global modernism and network theory, this book suggests that rather than defining Europe through a set of core principles, we may also regard it as an open or weak construct, a crossroads where different authors and views converged and collided.