American Aesthetics: Theory and Practice (SUNY series in American Philosophy and Cultural Thought)

Proposes a distinctly American approach to aesthetic judgment and practice. Although there are distinctly American artists―Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Grandma Moses, Thomas Hart Benton, and Andy Warhol, for example―very little attention has been devoted to formulating any distinctively American characteristics of aesthetic judgment and practice. This volume takes a step in this direction, presenting an introductory essay on the possibility of such a distinctly American tradition, and a collection of essays exploring particular examples from a variety of angles. Some of the essays in this collection extend pragmatist and process insights about the important place aesthetics has in molding and assessing experience. Other essays examine the place of American aesthetics in relation to such particular forms of art as painting, literature, music, and film. Three essays attend to the aesthetic aspects of a flourishing life. In each of the essays, American aesthetics is understood to arise out of deeply felt personal, historical, and cultural backgrounds. Consequently, not only are such relatively abstract notions as harmony, fit, elegance, proportion, and the like involved in aesthetic judgment, but also religious, political, and social factors become embroiled in aesthetic discernment. Thus the ongoing pattern of American aesthetics is shown to be distinguishable from such other varieties of aesthetic thought as analytic aesthetics, New Criticism, and postmodern approaches to aesthetics. Contents 6 List of Illustrations 10 Preface 12 Acknowledgments 14 I. Introduction 16 1. Toward an American Aesthetics 18 Aesthetics—A Definition 19 The American Background 22 Classic American Philosophers 24 The Kantian Framework and First Domain of Aesthetic Judgment 26 The Second Domain of Aesthetic Judgment 27 The Third Domain of Aesthetic Judgment 30 The Felt Aspect of Aesthetic Judgment 32 Characteristics of American Aesthetics 35 New Criticism as Overly Constrained 38 High-Art Analysis 40 Postmodernism 43 Conclusion 44 Notes 46 II. Philosophical Contributions to American Aesthetics from the Past 52 2 The Primacy of Aesthetic Judgments: Emerson’s Deontological-Transcendentalist Account of Tragedy 54 Introduction 54 Emerson’s Tragic Sense 55 Terror and Tragedy in the Twenty-first Century 60 Tragedy after Emerson? 62 Notes 67 3 Peirce and Edwards on the Argument from Beauty 74 I 74 II 75 III 81 IV 84 Notes 87 4 A Semeiotic Account of Paintings as Pure Icons that Communicate Beautiful Feelings 90 Paintings as Pure Icons Interpretable Via Emotional Interpretants 91 The Process of Painting and the Endowment of Paintings with Beautiful Feelings 97 Beautiful Paintings and the Norms that Ground Aesthetic Inquiry 102 Notes 105 5 The Pragmatist Aesthetics of William James 108 II 108 III 110 IV 111 Notes 123 6 Between Nature and Art: Some Analytical Exemplifications of Dewey’s Aesthetics 126 Nature as Matrix and Medium 126 The Scroll and the Smile: Experience Has No Edges 131 Paradigms of Painting: On Representation, Expression, and Abstraction 138 Shaping Nature: Qualities of Space-Time in Art and Life 144 A Final Word Connecting Us to the Beginning 148 Notes 148 III. American Aesthetics: Contemporary Theoretical Contributions 150 7 Axiological Landscape Theory: Uniting Aesthetics, Ethics, and Inquiry 154 Introduction 154 Summary of the Hypothesis: Basic Answers to Basic Questions 156 Background: Fitness Landscapes, Axiological Pluralism, Determinate Histories, Appraisal Dimensions 158 Key Concepts: Value, Possibility, Virtuality, Potential, Landscape, Affordance, Engagement, Determination, Realization, Foreclos 162 Applications of Axiological Landscape Theory 165 Conclusion 171 Notes 171 8 Experience and Signs: Toward a Pragmatist Literary Criticism 172 Aesthetics, Quality, Possibility 173 Literature, Sensation, Relations 177 Criticism, Theory, Philosophy 181 Notes 185 9 Music, Time, and the Egress of Possibility 192 Part I: Possibility in Time and Music, and Being toward Death 193 Part II: Being toward Life as the Art of Being toward Death 204 Part III: The Hiatus as the Ground of Person 208 Notes 220 10 Harmony, Existence, and the Aesthetic 226 Harmony 227 Goodness in Harmony 231 Beauty and Existence in Harmony 234 The Situation of Appreciating Beauty 237 Beauty in Art 241 Conclusion 245 Notes 246 11 Historical-Aesthetic Complementarity: An American Philosophical Contribution to the Study of Religion 250 Introduction 250 Defining the Task 254 Corrington, Dewey, and Peirce 256 Conclusion 263 Notes 265 IV. Applying American Aesthetic Theory to Practice 268 12 An Exemplary Critic in the Tradition of American Aesthetics: Harold Rosenberg 272 The Creative Individual 275 Rosenberg and Greenberg 276 Rosenberg and Aesthetic Judgment 278 Notes 284 13 Experiential Immersions in Beauty: A Confluence of James Turrell’s Light Spaces and Whitehead’s Aesthetics 288 Notes 295 14 Dialogue: From Rich Experience to Minimalist Expression 298 15 The Fabric of Thirdness: A Concert Pianist’s Peircean Interpretation of Performance 312 Introduction: The Concert Pianist 312 A Style of Styles: κaλόϛ as Normative Foundation, and Pianistic Abductions 313 Realism, Categories, and Mechanical Nominalists 318 Impediments of Nominalism, Peirce’s “Aesthetic Frame of Mind” and “Aesthetic Abduction” 322 Notes 323 16 Inspiring Singers toward Emotional Communication through Aesthetic Discovery 326 Crowd Source the Artistic Intent 328 Engineer Their Artistic Discovery 328 Diagram of a Rehearsal Model for Aesthetic Experience 329 Poetry 329 Music 330 Combined Expressive Power of the Two Art Forms 330 Dynamic: Feeling-Meaning versus Volume 331 Rhythm: Implied Meaning of Eighth, Quarter, and Whole 331 Melody and Harmony 331 The Cumulative Effect of Crowd Sourcing the Artistic Intent 332 Moving toward Transcendence 332 Appendix A 333 Notes 334 17 Budd Boetticher’s Transcendental Westerns, or, Schrader, Bazin, Sartre, and Neville Walk into a Saloon 336 Introduction 336 Schrader’s Transcendental Style 337 Applying the Transcendental Style to Boetticher’s B Westerns 339 Stoic Hero and Appealing Villains: Bazin and Kitses 340 Critics Save Boetticher and Make Him an Existentialist: Sartre and the Westerns 341 Neville, Nature, and Broken Symbols 345 Notes 349 V. Aesthetic Aspects of a Flourishing Life 352 18 Resolving the Tension of Everyday Aesthetics in a Deweyan Way 354 Connections to Gulick’s Project of an American Aesthetics 358 A Rereading of Clive Bell’s Aesthetics so as to Expand the Scope of Our Inquiry 361 Experiencing the Ordinary in an Ordinary Way 366 My Deweyan Solution to the Dilemma 367 Ritualization 367 Concluding Note 370 Notes 371 19 The Struggle for Centering Things in an Age of Consumption 374 Introduction 375 Aesthetic Commodification and Aesthetic Loss 376 The Aesthetic Appeal of Centering Things 385 Untroubling Ourselves by Troubling Ourselves for Centering Things 390 Notes 391 20 The Dynamics of Selving and the Aesthetics of Ecstatic Naturalism 394 The Dynamics of the Selving Process 394 Art, Ecstatic Naturalism, and Selving 399 The Aesthetics of Ecstatic Naturalism 403 Bibliography 408 List of Contributors 412 Index 416 "Although there are distinctly American artists-Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Grandma Moses, Thomas Hart Benton, and Andy Warhol, for example-very little attention has been devoted to formulating any distinctively American characteristics of aesthetic judgment and practice. This volume takes a step in this direction, presenting an introductory essay on the possibility of such a distinctly American tradition, and a collection of essays exploring particular examples from a variety of angles. Some of the essays in this collection extend pragmatist and process insights about the important place aesthetics has in molding and assessing experience. Other essays examine the place of American aesthetics in relation to such particular forms of art as painting, literature, music, and film. Three essays attend to the aesthetic aspects of a flourishing life. In each of the essays, American aesthetics is understood to arise out of deeply felt personal, historical, and cultural backgrounds. Consequently, not only are such relatively abstract notions as harmony, fit, elegance, proportion, and the like involved in aesthetic judgment, but also religious, political, and social factors become embroiled in aesthetic discernment. Thus the ongoing pattern of American aesthetics is shown to be distinguishable from such other varieties of aesthetic thought as analytic aesthetics, New Criticism, and postmodern approaches to aesthetics"-- Provided by publisher __Proposes a distinctly American approach to aesthetic judgment and practice.__