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Aesthetic Issues in Theory and Practice
A more specialized upper-level course, team-taught by faculty
from departments of art and art history, literature, and
philosophy, might center on aesthetics, a particularly rich
field for cross-cultural inquiry. Since this topic will be
greatly enhanced by the addition of background reading, here
are some secondary works that you may want to review with
your colleagues in the other disciplines as you plan your
syllabus.
François Jost, ed., Aesthetics and the Literature of
Ideas: Essays in Honor of A. Owen Aldridge (1990),
presents analyses of cross-cultural aesthetic questions,
with an emphasis on Chinese and Western intersections.
Frank Palmer, Literature and Moral Understanding: A
Philosophical Essay on Ethics, Aesthetics, Education, and
Culture (1992), is also useful.
Some popular textbooks are the following. Richard L. Anderson, Calliope’s
Sisters: A Comparative Study of Philosophies of Art (1989),
abounds with good, short, illustrated discussions of
the visual traditions of many of the non-Western cultures
represented
in The Norton Anthology of World Literature,
second edition, including Eskimo, Navajo, Yoruba, Japanese,
and
early Indian art as well as the major Western styles.
John W. Bender and H. Gene Blocker, eds., Contemporary Philosophy
of Art: Readings in Analytic Aesthetics (1993);
George Dickie, Richard Sclafani, and Ronald Roblin,
eds., Aesthetics:
A Critical Anthology (1989); and Joseph Margolis,
ed., Philosophy
Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics (1987),
are also useful.
Norton readings likely to stimulate fruitful discussion
of some classic topics appear under different headings,
although it must be said that virtually every text
in the anthology
would be responsive to virtually any of these questions.
- What is taste? How and to what extent is it culturally
determined?
Chuang Chou, Chuang Tzu
Petronius, The Satyricon
Kālidāsa, Śākuntalā
Li Ch‘eing-chao, "Afterword" to Records on Metal and
Stone
Rumi, Ghazals
Medieval Lyrics: A Selection
Anonymous, The Ruin
Hildegard of Bingen, A Hymn to St. Maximinus
Villon, from The Testament
Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book
Kenko, Essays in Idleness
Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, "true
art"
Montaigne, "Of the Power of the Imagination"
Pope, The Rape of the Lock
Voltaire, Candide, Chapter 22, "the man of taste" on
tragedy
Bashō, The Narrow Road of the Interior
Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, Spleen LXXIX
Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
Yeats, Lapis Lazuli
Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows
Desai, The Rooftop Dwellers
Goodison, "To Us, All Flowers Are Roses"
- Is art mimetic or ideal? Should it reflect the world
as it is or ought it to project a vision of perfection?
The Iliad, Book XVIII
Aristotle, Poetics
Shakespeare, Hamlet, esp. II.2 and III.2, on
holding "the
mirror up to nature" and its consequences
K‘ung Shang-Jen, The Peach Blossom Fan
Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone
Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
Dickinson, 449 ("I died for Beauty")
Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil
Mann, Death in Venice
Rilke, "The Panther"
Stevens, "Peter Quince at the Clavier"; "Anecdote of the
Jar"; "The Idea of Order at Key West"
- Does art play a role in the formation of morality?
K‘ung Shang-jen, The Peach Blossom Fan
Cao Xuequin, The Story of the Stone
Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
Tolstoy, The Death of Iván Ilych
Kawabata, Snow Country
Akhmatova, Requiem
Senghor, Prayer to the Masks
Silko, Yellow Woman
Goodison, "I Shall Light a Candle of Understanding
. . . "
- Is it possible for formal questions to exist independently
of political positions? Is the judgment of a work of art
always relative or are there works of indisputable excellence?
Murasaki, The Tale of Genji
Blake, "The Lamb"; "The Tyger"
Coleridge, Kubla Khan
Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind"; "A Defence of Poetry"
Mallarmé, "The Tomb of Edgar Poe"; "The
virginal, vibrant, and beautiful dawn"
Verlaine, The Art of Poetry
Rimbaud, The Drunken Boat
Tzara, From Dada Manifesto 1918, Proclamation
Without Pretention
Yeats, "Among School Children"
Rilke, "Archaic Torso of Apollo"
Eliot, The Waste Land
Neruda, "I’m Explaining a Few Things"; "Ode to a Tomato"
Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths
Senghor, To New York
Robbe-Grillet, The Secret Room
- What is the nature of the creative process?
The Leiden Hymns
The Bible: The Old Testament, Genesis 1, 11
The Koran, Surah 55, The Merciful
Cantares Mexicanos, Song IV
Wordsworth, "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern
Abbey"
Coleridge, Kubla Khan
Keats, "On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer"
Continental Romantic Lyrics: A Selection
Leopardi, "To Sylvia"
Becquer
Whitman, Song of Myself; "Out of the Cradle
Endlessly Rocking"
Tagore, "On My Birthday—20"
Dario, "I Seek a Form"
Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author
Rilke, "The Swan"; "Spanish Dancer"
Stevens, poems
Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Orpingalik, My Breath
Goodison, "The Pictures of My New Day"
- To what extent are human beings their own artistic
creations? In what kind of world is this a meaningful question?
Machiavelli, Letter to Francesco Vettori
Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Pope, The Rape of the Lock
Bashō, The Narrow Road of the Interior
Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author
Beckett, Endgame
Silko, Yellow Woman
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