Julia Burbulla - Böcker

The Japanese landscape print has had a tremendous influence on Western art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Japan and in the West it is often seen as the dominant form in Ukiyo-e, pictures from the floating world. And yet for all its importance, it is a genre whose history has never been written. Beyond The Great Wave is a survey or overview for all those interested in discovering the inner dynamics of one of art history’s most remarkable achievements. However, it is also a quest narrative, in which landscapes and notions of Japan as a homeland are intertwined and interconnected.Although there has never been a book-length study of the Japanese landscape print in either Japanese or English, a great deal has been written about the two giants of the genre, Hokusai and Hiroshige. From what traditions did these two nineteenth-century artists emerge? Who were their predecessors? What influence, if any, did they have on other Ukiyo-e artists? Can their influence be seen in the shin-hanga and sôsaku-hanga artists of the twentieth century? This book addresses these issues, but it also looks at a number of other factors, such as the growth of tourism in nineteenth-century Japan, necessary for understanding this genre.

This book offers, for the first time in aesthetics, a comprehensive account of aestheticism of the 19th century as a philosophical theory of its own right. Taking philosophical and art-historical viewpoints, this cross-disciplinary book presents aestheticism as the foundational movement of modernist aesthetics of the 20th century. Emerging in the writings of the foremost aestheticists – Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, James Whistler, and their formalist successors such as Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and Clement Greenberg – aestheticism offers a uniquely synthetic definition of art. It captures the artwork’s relations between form and content, art’s independent ontology and autonomy, art’s internal completeness, criticism, immunity to recruitment, the uniqueness of each medium, and musicality, as well as the logical-theoretical affiliation of art for art’s sake to epistemology, ethics and philosophy of language.Those are used by Michalle Gal to formulate a definition of art in terms of a theory of Deep Formalism, setting aestheticism, which aspires to preserve the artistic medium, as a critique of the current linguistic-conceptual aesthetics that developed after the linguistic turn of aesthetics.

What is the relationship between habits and emotions? What is the role of the embodiment of emotions in a cultural habitat? What is the role of the environment for the formation of emotions and subjectivity?One way to address these questions is through discussing an emotional habitus – a set of habits and behavioral attitudes involving the body that are fundamental to emotional communication. But this set of habits is not independent of context; it takes place within a specific emotional habitat in which other bodies play a crucial role. Together, these constitute the foundation of sociocultural communities, psychologies of emotions and cultural practices – and they have much to contribute to the study of emotions both for cognition and aesthetics. Thus, the challenge of addressing these questions cannot be faced by either the sciences or the humanities alone.At the Berlin-based conference: Emotion and Motion, scholars gathered from various disciplines to broaden perspectives on the interdisciplinary field of embodied habits and embodied emotions. This book offers a new view on the related field of habitus and the embodied mind.

Geniale Entdeckungen wie auch gewöhnliche Praxen aus den Formal-, Ingenieur- und Naturwissenschaften prägen die Gartenkunst der Neuzeit. Seit jeher reagierte die Gartenkunst auf wissenschaftliche Revolutionen und gab wissenschaftlichen Ergebnissen, Methoden und Stilen einen ästhetischen Ausdruck. Umgekehrt nutzten Macht und Wissenschaft den Garten als Gestaltungsraum, um ihre Leistungsfähigkeit zu demonstrieren, und das Gartenmotiv, um ihre Utopien zu veranschaulichen.Die Beiträge des interdisziplinären Bandes greifen diese vielfältige und spannungsvolle Kooperation erstmalig sowohl im europäischen wie außereuropäischen Kontext auf. Sie machen deutlich, dass eine Gartenforschung, die über die geistig-literarische Kultur hinausgeht, besser imstande ist, die Perioden der Gartengeschichte zu erfassen und die gartenkünstlerischen Werke historisch angemessen zu bewerten.

This book explores a paradox: how can a musical work that was written specifically for a certain architectural space «survive» dramatic changes in performance conditions, as in the case of Handel’s Messiah? From the chamber music hall in Dublin where it was first performed in 1742, small baroque theaters, and the chapel of London’s Foundling Hospital, performances of Messiah after Handel’s death moved to cathedrals, to new and large 19th-century concert halls, and finally to the immense Crystal Palace in Sydenham. Are there boundaries determining an adequate performance? How can we define the quality of room acoustics and how does this quality affect the performance as actual sonorous presentation of a musical work? In short, how do different acoustical conditions affect basic aesthetic premises?There are no simple answers to these complex questions, which elicit different responses according to varying points of view. This aspect of cultural history necessarily calls for an investigation based on systematic, historical, and psychological methods. In the first part of this book, which draws from an extensive database of documents on halls, theatres, and churches, essential concepts from the main disciplines involved are introduced in order to define quality of room acoustics in relation to different performance situations. This background then serves as framework to investigate the performance history of Handel’s Messiah in the second part.

Baroque novels focus on the psychology of love, while love in the context of nature is the subject of the pastoral genre. Introducing animals to such texts proves unexpectedly challenging. The inclusion of pets in the artistic representation involves a reversal of scale and various modes of comedy, including socio-political satire. At a time when some writers fantasize that children can be born of a human-animal couple, or question the degree of free will and physiological determinism influencing human or animal actions, scientific and philosophical enquiries threaten to reduce the whole animated world to a physiology akin to one of automatons. It is a criticism levied by the sentimentaires against the libertines. Eventually, the study must be initiated with the monitoring of the modulated and variable conceptions of the persons constituting a «couple» and the status of the «pet».

The book examines the presence of medicine matters in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merry Wives of Windsor, and documents how the theme of medicine can acquire particular importance for the interpretation of the plays: namely, it matters. Andrea A. Conti provides information on certain aspects of the medical context of the Renaissance, effecting the essential connections with previous and subsequent periods and furnishing the necessary background for the understanding of the state of the art of medicine at the time. Luisa Camaiora presents a close reading of the comedies, and identifies for each a specific and dominant medical facet, then proposed as a structural key for the analysis of the plays. The medical motifs enucleated determine the critical perspective for the discussion of the dramatic characters and events and for the interpretation of the overall meaning and significance of the single works. Features and references related to the sphere of medicine, identified in the comedies, are also commented upon and examined in the context of this medical reading of the plays.

What is life? is a query that never dies… Most modern-day approaches to this enduring question attempt to define what life is, from the standpoint of science, philosophy, religion, medicine, etc. In this book, the conception of life in Western culture is explored through a host of words that has come down to us from antiquity. The author presents a flowing linguistic view of life from the distant past. The etymologic heritage is traced to ancient Greek – to the philosophical foundation of Western thinking. The author pursues a path into prehistory, looking at the development of words from roots in the Indo-European language family, which includes the classical languages of Greek and Latin, as well as English and many other Eurasian languages – ultimately, in the common ancestral Proto-Indo-European (PIE) tongue. In so doing, one finds a shared lexical genealogy underlying the linguistic source of the Western notions of life. The diversity of word-forms that are associative of life in today’s vernacular grew out of a seemingly labyrinthine – though, in reality, a highly integrative – state of comprehension of the affiliation between the mortal human being and the natural environment in the prehistoric PIE civilization. In the logos of ancient Greek thought, emanating from the ancestral mythos of the PIE and early Mediterranean peoples, the ideas of "life" and "nature" were fused into a unified vision of existence – as can be seen in the prehistoric origin of the verb be itself. This book concentrates on more than sheer words; it is also on how we – the living, sentient beings that we are – speak of our very being in space and time in the world around us. The birthright of a conjoined sentience of life and nature has branched-out through the ages of Western thinking. The legacy today is a fossilized linguistic Tree of Life, engendering a plurality of words for "life"; wherein, each of us must create our own meaning of "life."