<P>While there are many books on the romantics, and many books on Heidegger, there has been no book exploring the connection between the two. Pol Vandevelde’s new study forges this important link. </P> <P>Vandevelde begins by analyzing two models that have addressed the interaction between literature and philosophy: early German romanticism (especially Schlegel and Novalis), and Heidegger’s work with poetry in the 1930s. Both models offer an alternative to the paradigm of mimesis, as exemplified by Aristotle’s and Plato’s discussion of (...) poetry, and both German romanticism and Heidegger owe a deep debt to Plato. The study goes on to defend the view that Heidegger was influenced by romanticism. The author’s project is thus both historical, showing the specificity of the romantic and Heideggerean works, and systematic, defending aspects of their alternative mode of thinking while also pointing to their weaknesses. </P>. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the practice of categorizing works of art and its relationship to art criticism. How a work of art is categorized influences how it is appreciated and criticized. Being frightening is a merit for horror, but a demerit for lullabies. The brushstrokes in Monet's "Impression, Sunrise" (1874) look crude when seen as a Neoclassical painting, but graceful when seen as an Impressionist painting. Many of the judgments we make about artworks are category-dependent in this way, but previous research (...) has rarely examined in depth the ontological structure of art categories, how they are generated and maintained, and how they function. This dissertation fills this gap. The proposal of this dissertation can be summarized as follows. Categories (especially genres) should be analyzed as clusters of rules that regulate the responses and behaviors of agents in the artworld. The visual mundaneness is a critical reason to consider Duchamp's "Comb" (1916) provocative, given the existence of the readymade as a set of rules that justifies such reasoning. The critical and appreciative practice of which categorization is a part is a social practice of making, declaring, proposing, reforming, and developing rules of appreciation. How we appreciate artworks, and how criticism guides our appreciation, is sensitive to how we categorize artworks. How we categorize artworks is sensitive to what categories have been set up in our community and which categories are active regarding each artwork. (shrink)

This paper examines the hitherto neglected resonance between Danto's and Derrida's concepts of the Artworld and the Frame. In doing so, I challenge prevalent understandings of Danto's theoretical framework, highlighting the necessary instability that he integrates into his definition of the art object. Equally, I emphasise the applicability of Derrida's deconstructive concept to the concrete conditions of contemporary artistic practice. I begin by examining the tensions present in Danto's definitional approach, as it demands a complex vision of Artworld relations. I (...) then consider how the ontologically constitutive character of Danto's Artworld may be re-examined through Derrida's concept of the parergon, as a supplementary techné that is fundamentally unstable and fragmented. Through this comparative reading I show that despite their different approaches, Danto's and Derrida's philosophies of art advance similar ontological conclusions. I thus argue that while their differences should not be minimised, our understanding of Danto's and Derrida's aesthetic concepts is enriched through recognition of their unforeseen correspondences. (shrink)

From the late nineteenth century to the 1950s one of the main foci of aesthetic inquiry was the attempt to develop definitions of art and such related concepts as visual art, music, tragedy, beauty, and metaphor. Clive Bell (1958) famously stated that either all works of visual art have some common quality or when we speak of “work of art” we speak nonsense. DeWitt H. Parker (1939) argued more generally that the assumption underlying every philosophy of art is the existence (...) of some common nature present in all the arts. This search for a common quality or nature of art was generally taken to be a form of essentialism. (shrink)