The British Journal of Aesthetics articles from April 1993

The British Journal of Aesthetics archives from April 1993

Assessing achievement in the arts.
April 1, 1993... |It is, however, the task of criticism to establish principles; to improve opinion into knowledge; and to distinguish those means of pleasing which depend upon known causes and rational deduction from the nameless and inexplicable elegancies...

From original to copy and back again.
April 1, 1993... Within aesthetics, exchanges about the nature of forgery have been made largely in response to Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art(1968). In his original scenario we are invited to contemplate two paintings: one is authentic and the other is...

The logic of representation.
April 1, 1993... This paper is concerned with showing a possible way of dealing with representation in pictures. We know that a painting (except an abstract painting) represents or stands for or refers to something different from itself. This obvious fact...

Post-modernism and the construct of the divisible self.
April 1, 1993... Current Euro-American society is aware of a profusion of alternative modes of thinking and consciousness, derived from other cultures, as no other people or civilization has ever been. The mere awareness of these other points of view enables...

Aesthetic criticism and the poetics of modern music.
April 1, 1993... Modern music, it has been said, has lost its way. In the course of its own development, it seems to have drifted off track, and to have condemned itself to a strange fate. There is little question but that the specialized languages and...

'What Strether knew': 'the novel' as art form. (Lambert Strether, protagonist of 'The Ambassadors' by Henry James)
April 1, 1993... In 1942 when I was very young and impressionable, my Professor of English cautioned us undergraduates: |Hamlet is not a man - Hamlet is a piece of dramatic poem'. His form of words, more sceptical than saying Hamlet is a part in a play,...

F.R. Leavis: intuitionist?
April 1, 1993... I |I call myself an "anti-philosopher'" wrote F. R. Leavis:[1] but was he accurate or is this a case of a great reader misreading his own texts? The latter possibility was implied by Peter Byrne when he argued in this journal that...

The incoherence of the aesthetic response. (response to R.M.J. Dammann, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 32, p. 13, 1992)
April 1, 1993... After all the discussion since Colin Radford's paper on emotional response in 1975,[1] it seems there is still a temptation to believe that fiction is fact, and so to go on rationally to be moved by it. Indeed R. M. J. Dammann has recently...

Mounce and Collingwood on art and craft. (response to H.O. Mounce, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 31, July 1991)
April 1, 1993... In his |Art and Craft'[1] H. O. Mounce has raised certain difficulties regarding Collingwood's account, in The Principles of Art,[2] of the differences between art and craft. Mounce tends to argue that Collingwood's distinction between art...

Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory.
April 1, 1993... This is is a wide-ranging and ambitious book.(*) Harrison aims to give a theory of narrative fiction, taking into account both work on the theory of meaning in the analytic tradition, and continentalist - in particular Derridean - approaches...

The Republic of Art and Other Essays.
April 1, 1993... This of eighteen essays(*) is extremely valuable, not only as an instance of excellent writing in philosophical aesthetics but also as testimony to significant developments in the subject. T. J. Diffey has been benignly formative in that...

Spirit and Beauty: An Introduction to Theological Aesthetics.
April 1, 1993... In our culture many of the finest works of painting, architecture, literature and music are products of the Christian religion. And art continues to contribute to contemporary Christian practice in many forms, from icons to anthems. Why...

The Good Society and the Inner World: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Culture.
April 1, 1993... Since this book is concerned, in the words of its subtitle, with psychoanalysis, politics and culture, only a segment of its rich tapestry is of direct relevance to readers of this journal: a part, that is, of the part concerned with culture....

The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses.
April 1, 1993... The privileging of the visual sense is a feature of contemporary Western societies upon which many modern and post-modern critics have commented. Ours is a civilization of the image, with proliferating visual technologies (TV, film, video)...

The Cycladic Spirit: Masterpieces from the Nicholas P. Goulandris Collection.
April 1, 1993... The art of the Cycladic islands in the central Aegean began to excite curiosity around the middle of the nineteenth century, when travellers first reported the presence there of ancient figurines and vases, finely made from local marble. From...

Patterns of Thought: The Hidden Meaning of the Great Pavement of Westminster Abbey.
April 1, 1993... Once I had begun to read this book, I found it very hard to put down and I made excuses to myself to read it when I should have been doing other things! It is as readable as a novel, having an enthralling strong narrative line and a nicely...

German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity.
April 1, 1993... Avoiding the lurid cliches of so much recent English writing on German art, Jill Lloyd's densely packed text suggests just how rich a vein is still waiting to be mined by the historian who casts a comparatively cold eye. Her themes range...

Visions of Symmetry: Notebooks, Periodic Drawings and Related Work of M.C. Escher.
April 1, 1993... This book, the product of more than fifteen years of research by its mathematician author, provides the definitive account of how Escher produced his renowned interlocking drawings, based on the regular division of the plane. According to...

The Symbolism of Style: Art as Therapy.
April 1, 1993... Rita Simon is a fine painter and illustrator, who also writes poetry. A founder member of the art therapy profession, she has devoted the past forty years to developing her understanding of the complex interplay between content and style in...

Aldo Rossi: The Complete Buildings and Projects, 1981-1991.
April 1, 1993... Hudson. 1992. pp. 300. Paperbound, 29.95 [pounds]. This is a splendid account of Aldo Rossi's work during the past ten years. In fact the period covered is somewhat greater than the book's title suggests. One of the most interesting of...

Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious, from the Magic Theatre to the Crucifixion of the Image.
April 1, 1993... This book, written by the Dean of Chapel at King's, Cambridge, is an interpretation of a number of Kierkegaard's works from the standpoint of a Christian. Dr Pattison traces an important theme in Kierkegaard's thought, the nature and relation...

Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art.
April 1, 1993... This is a very welcome book. Since art, for Nietzsche, is the fundamental guide to life, and |it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified', it is surprising that this is the first full-length...

A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory.
April 1, 1993... I have read this work of reference, albeit slowly, from cover to cover with both pleasure and profit. It has the two virtues necessary: thoroughness and impartiality. All the five main contemporary theoretical approaches to literature -...

Paradigms Regained: Pluralism and the Practice of Criticism.
April 1, 1993... In the preface James L. Battersby describes his book as |a reclamation project, an effort to recover for daily use much of what has been discarded as outmoded or worthless by current critical theory . . . and to restore, if not to primacy at...

Acts of Literature.
April 1, 1993... One of the major reasons why Jacques Derrida has had such a strong influence on literary criticism and theory is that he is primarily a commentator on texts rather than the kind of philosopher who discusses ideas and concepts in the abstract....