Ut Pictura Poesis: Aesthetic Writing & Writing Aesthetics
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
The Beautiful, both as an intellectual ideal and practical expression, traces to ancient origins, and had long courted controversies even before its formalisation into schools, genres, media, and techniques. Among its variegated incarnations, painting and poetry (and music, I would add) were celebrated, and occasionally denigrated, as sister arts, however tenuous or obvious their connection may be. Perhaps it is no accident that the seminal point of aesthetic study – and controversy – began with the inception of Western philosophy in Classical Greece, when logic and reason were increasingly exalted as the highest form of human activity. In some ways, Plato’s relentless rebuke against poetry, and representational art in general, is the natural outgrowth of Western intellectualisation advanced by the Pre-Socratic thinkers, Sophists, and Socrates himself no less. His (mis)characterisation of the poet and the artist notwithstanding, the consequent polarisation of mind and body, ratiocination and sensation, has been ironically productive, inviting innovative theories and defences, inquiries and practices, from philosophers, aestheticians, artists, and poets alike. In this unit, we will examine Plato’s thesis against mimetic art, particularly poetry, and a selection of ground-breaking and paradigm-setting reflections from Horace, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Arthur Schopenhauer, John Keats, and more recently, Wassily Kandinsky. As we negotiate this rich philosophical terrain, we will delve into salutary, as well as contrary, intersections between the Beautiful, the Good, the intellectual, the sensual, the spiritual, the intuitive, the communicability of feeling, the power of imagination, the possibility of human freedom, and the redemptive power of art. At the same time, we shall apply these concepts, when warranted, to our perusal of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (“Apollo and Daphne”, “The Rape of Proserpine”, “Pygmalion”), William Shakespeare’s sonnets (Sonnets 16, 18, 55, 65) and The Winter’s Tale (1623), John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820), Felicia Hemans’s “Properzia Rossi” (1828), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/91), and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). As an investigatory exercise, this heuristic study of aesthetic theory and practice meditates on the conception of the Beautiful in art, literature, and society; as a self-exploratory activity, this survey reflects on the effect, the impression, the function, the frustrating limitation of the Beautiful in our own lives.
READING TEXTS:
I. Theoretical Readings:
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756). Rpt. in Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology. Ed. Steven M. Cahn and Aaron Meskin. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (1790). Rpt. in Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology. Ed. Steven M. Cahn and Aaron Meskin. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008.
Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Trans. with intro. by M. T. H. Sadler. New York: Dover Publications, 1977.
Keats, John. John Keats: Selected Letters Ed. by Robert Gittings with intro. by Jon Mee. Oxford: OUP, 2002.
Plato. The Republic and Symposium. Rpt. in Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology. Ed. Steven M. Cahn and Aaron Meskin. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008.
Schiller, Friedrich. Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man (1795). Rpt. in Aesthetical and Philosophical Essays. London: Dodo Press, 2007.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation (1818/19). Rpt. in Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology. Ed. Steven M. Cahn and Aaron Meskin. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008.
Third Earl of Shaftesbury. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711). Rpt. in Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology. Ed. Steven M. Cahn and Aaron Meskin. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008.
II. Literary Readings:
Hemans, Felicia. “Properzia Rossi.” Rpt. in Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Prose, and Letters. Ed. Gary Kelly. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2002.
Horace. “Book Three: XXX.” Rpt. in Odes. Trans. by James Michie with intro. by Gregson Davis. New York: The Modern Library, 2002.
Keats, John. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Rpt. in John Keats: Complete Poems. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2003.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. by A. D. Melville with intro. by E. J. Kenney. Oxford: OUP, 2008.
Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Ed. with commentary by Stephen Booth. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.
— The Winter’s Tale. Ed. Stephen Orgel. Oxford: OUP, 1998.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ed. with intro. and notes by Joseph Bristow. Oxford: OUP, 2008.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Ed. with intro. and notes by David Bradshaw. Oxford: OUP, 2008.