New Studies in Aesthetics – serie

This volume brings together a group of essays that examine the relationship between philosophy and literature - disciplines that have been opposed as often as they have been combined. While the focus is primarily on the plays of Shakespeare, there is a lengthy essay on the use of the style term maniera in art history, and a concluding survey and analysis of the relationship between philosophy and literature, from Plato to the present. The author applies the theory of meaning and logical analysis to contemporary problems in the arts and aesthetics.

Giovanni Gentile was one of the most important and controversial thinkers of twentieth-century Italy. His philosophy and fascist ideas reflect the defining characteristics of the Italian romantic rebellion against European and English enlightenment thinking. The Ariadne’s thread, which runs through and unifies all of Gentile’s thought, originates accordingly from his neo-Hegelian reaction to the philosophy of Kant and of Kant’s immediate predecessors. The range of Gentile’s ideas on pedagogy, logic, metaphysics, political theory, and aesthetics; the original way in which he developed and adapted the thoughts of Hegel, Fichte, and Marx; and finally, his description of himself as the philosopher of fascism all encourage us to revisit and re-evaluate his system. This book reveals how Gentile came to advocate his «actual idealism» and evaluates his systematic philosophy by making explicit inconsistencies that arise from within his system and by questioning his idealist assumptions.

In The Aesthetics of Decay, Dylan Trigg confronts the remnants from the fallout of post-industrialism and postmodernism. Through a considered analysis of memory, place, and nostalgia, Trigg argues that the decline of reason enables a critique of progress to emerge. In this ambitious work, Trigg aims to reassess the direction of progress by situating it in a spatial context. In doing so, he applies his critique of rationality to modern ruins. The derelict factory, abandoned asylum, and urban alleyway all become allies in Trigg’s attack on a fixed image of temporality and progress. The Aesthetics of Decay offers a model of post-rational aesthetics in which spatial order is challenged by an affirmative ethics of ruin.

Literary theory of the twentieth century in the Anglo-American tradition forms a coherent whole, dividing into discrete clusters. This theory is riddled with purely logical problems inherent in its enterprise, resulting from the fact that Modernist theory develops as an offshoot of Romanticism. Such fundamental flaws, or discontents, afflict all Modernist theory, from Russian Formalism through Structuralism and Deconstruction. The problems of Modernist theory cannot be solved; at most we can resolve to take theory in a new direction.

This book traces the intellectual history of twentieth century dance theory from its dependence on aesthetics for its model of conceptualization to its emergence as an autonomous field, primarily dependent on dance practice and experience. This history is traced through the analysis of writing on dance by dance theorists Elizabeth Selden, Margaret H'Doubler, John Martin, Rudolf Laban and aestheticians Susanne K. Langer, R.G. Collingwood, Nelson Goodman, and eleven other aestheticians who discussed dance in their aesthetic analyses of the arts. The analysis is organized by the author's Framework of Topics Intrinsic to Dance Theory which was inductively derived from all the writings and the author's extensive experience in dance.

Blindness has always fascinated those who can see. Although modern imaginative portrayals of the sightless experience are increasingly positive, the affirmative elements of these renderings are inevitably tempered and problematized by the visual predilections of the artists undertaking them. This book explores a variety of the (dis)continuities between depictions of the sightless experience of beauty by sighted artists and the lived aesthetic experiences of blind people. It does so by pressing a radical interdisciplinary reinterpretation of celebrated dramatic portrayals of blindness into service as a tool with which to probe the boundaries of the capacities of the sighted imagination while exploring the sensory detriment of our visually fixated notions of beauty. Works by J. M. Synge, W. B. Yeats, and Brian Friel are explored as a means of crafting a workable and innovative medium of theoretical and experiential exchange between the disciplines of literature, aesthetics, and disability studies. In addition to appraising previously unexamined aspects of the work of three of Ireland’s most celebrated modern dramatists, this book considers the consequences for blind people of the exclusionary and prohibitive elements of traditional aesthetic theory and art education. The insights yielded will be of value to those with an interest in modern literature, differential aesthetics, visual culture, perception, and the experience of blindness.