Vere Gordon Childe’s theory of craft specialisation was an important influence on Arnold Hauser’s book The Social History of Art, published in 1951. Childe’s Marxist interpretation of prehistory enabled Hauser to establish a material foundation for the occupation of the artist in Western art history. However, Hauser’s effort to construct a progressive basis for artistic labour was complicated by art’s ancient connections to religion and superstition. While the artist’s social position and class loyalties were ambiguous in Childe’s accounts of early (...) civilisations, Hauser consigned artists to the lower echelons of society. This relegation did not imply that Hauser had a low regard for artistic skills. Quite the opposite, the artist’s inferior social status enabled Hauser to distance artists from the ruling class, and consequently, to separate artistic handiwork from the dominant ideology that works of art manifested. (shrink)

According to Wittgenstein, in the remarks collected as Culture and Value , ‘People nowadays think, scientists are there to instruct them, poets, musicians etc. to entertain them. That the latter have something to teach them; that never occurs to them.’ 18th and early 19th century art-lovers would have taken a very different view. Dr. Johnson assumed that the poets had truths to impart, while Hegel insisted that ‘In art we have to do not with any agreeable or useful child's (...) play, but with an unfolding of the truth.’ Though it still exerts a submerged influence, the concept of artistic truth has since sustained hammer-blows both from modernist aestheticism, which divorces art from reality, and from postmodern subjectivism about truth. This article aims to resurrect it, seeking a middle way between Dr. Johnson's didactic concept of art , and the modernist and postmodernist divorce of art from reality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Child's Creation of a Pictorial WorldEllen Handler SpitzThe Child'S Creation of a Pictorial World, by Claire Golomb. Mahwah, New Jersey: Erlbaum, 2004, 388 pp.Children's drawings fill us with wonder and delight. They may tend, however, to puzzle us, especially if we seek to comprehend them in terms appropriate to the drawings of mature artists or in terms relevant for other pictorial forms and expressions. (...) Likewise, they may puzzle us if we make the mistake of supposing that they represent in any direct or obvious way the cognitive development of young children or if we see them only as comical, inept efforts at depicting external reality. Children's drawings stimulate many nagging questions, among them the one as to why it should be that a child who knows so much and who is verbally so articulate may be graphically capable of depicting so little.Claire Golomb's work has proven extraordinarily helpful here as a corrective because Golomb, after many years of research and reflection, writes about these youthful creations not as "print-outs" of a child's mind. She sees them, rather, as exemplars of particular visual representational schemata that are generally available to and employed by young children. And although she regards these schemata as universal, she acknowledges that they are clearly subject to a wide range of individual variability. Over all, the value of Golomb's work lies in her extensive, descriptive research. Acknowledging her intellectual debt to her mentor, Rudolph Arnheim, Golomb reminds her readers that representation is never mimesis pure and simple. Representation is never, she tells us, the result of an "intention to copy nature." Therefore, when young children do otherwise, they ought not to be seen as failing. Their drawings ought not to be viewed as unsuccessful attempts to imitate nature or to depict with faithful realism what appears before their eyes. Rather, as Golomb states and attempts to demonstrate throughout the pages of her well-illustrated volume, children employ graphic schemata that develop over time in terms of shape, color, content, and composition. Ever seeking meaning, children create pictorial worlds that, while they have no one-to-one correlation with the perceptual world, are tied to it, importantly, nonetheless.Golomb assiduously describes and illustrates each of her studies so that her readers are treated to a panorama of this "orderly progression," as she puts it, this evolution of children's graphic work. Her book, moreover, is characterized by a certain social scientific aura; that is to say, she proffers statistics and quantifies her data to prove her points. She takes pains to argue, for example, from research conducted in tandem, apparently, with her daughter, that it is extremely difficult to differentiate, prima facie, the drawings of children who have been diagnosed as disturbed from those who are considered normal. Having worked for a couple of years in a residential treatment center for schizophrenic children, I would aver that this claim might be debatable. However, were one to be [End Page 120] able to so differentiate, this might constitute a challenge to Golomb's theory that the representational schemata are, as she puts it, "robust." According to her findings, they remain more or less in tact. Likewise with regard to the issue of cultural variables. Here Golomb argues, gently and respectfully, against positions taken by two other well-known scholars in the field, Brent and Marjory Wilson, who accord a higher priority than she does to cultural differences. According to the Wilsons, children's drawings are importantly influenced by whatever graphic models are made available to them in a given culture. For Golomb, however, these variables, while significant, do not interfere substantially with the universal classifications she proposes. As she writes, "The drawings of young children are as different one from another as fingerprints, yet they can be classified" (357).In general, then, the body of work Golomb offers in this second edition of her first volume published under the same title in 1992 by the University of California Press importantly contributes, as it initially did, to ongoing research in numerous fields, including art education, early childhood studies, art history, developmental psychology, anthropology, and art... (shrink)

Child abuse is an underreported phenomenon despite its high global prevalence. This study investigated how child abuse is perceived by children and adolescents as manifested in their drawings and narratives, based on the well-established notion that drawings serve as a window into children’s mental states. A sample of 97 Israeli children and adolescents aged 6–17 were asked to draw and narrate what child abuse meant to them. The drawings and narratives were coded quantitatively. The results indicated that (...) participants did not perceive a distinction between abuse and violence and referred to them interchangeably. Almost half of the participants focused on emotional abuse. The most frequent type of abuse within the family was between parents and children, and the most frequent abuse outside the family was peer victimization. Most of the drawings were figurative and realistic and half of the drawings included words suggestive of the participants’ attempts to be heard and fully understood. The vast majority of drawings did not include the figure of the artist, about a third of the drawings employed dissociative techniques, and almost half of the narratives were dissociative or characterized by negative resolution, describing feelings such as sadness, humiliation, and loneliness. These findings suggest the emotional pain associated with the abuse or violence and the use of dissociative mechanisms to bypass the pain. The findings are discussed in light of the literature on children’s disclosure. (shrink)

The hanging of the mobile aloft was annually performed with a solemnity and care suited to so important a matter. For each year, as it was resurrected from its storage place, it hung foolishly askew, demoralized by vicissitude, like a drunkard's hat crushed out of shape. Not that it had not still an equilibrium, a static balance, which it would assume and, if disturbed, would assume again, as if to declare idiocy alone immortal. It did not wait, in order to (...) have an equilibrium, for an artful hand to give it one. Such equilibrium as it had, from the accidental concert of its parts, it had with the indifferent equanimity of all things merely physical. Beauty was its accident, as idiocy also was its accident. It was as innocent of virtue as it was innocent of sin: it knew no propriety, therefore deserted none. I admired in it only what I demanded of it, a virtue of which it knew nothing. Yet, for my part, I permitted myself no such egotist reflection. I regarded it all as the contrivance of the hand which adjusted it. In my child's world, that was the secret of my mother's hand, which no other sought to compete with, much less to penetrate. She knew, at least her hand knew, that of all of the possible equilibria which were available equally for choice, there was one special equilibrium needed, only one which was alive, resonant, essential to the production of that effect to which it intricately ministered. That equilibrium was indispensable to the music which the mobile gave forth, its beginning and its end, the poise from which its movement issued, the cadence in which it came with perfect finality to rest. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethos in Steig’s and Sendak’s Picture Books: The Connected and the Lonely ChildEllen Handler SpitzThere was the child, listening to everything...—Yasunari Kawabata1IntroductionPicture-book characters spring to life in both verbal and visual registers. Moving about the page before our eyes as well as speaking and acting in their respective stories, they often make a long-lasting impact on children. Pictures and words, moreover, may overlap but are never commensurate; like (...) the words and notes of a song, they mean and evoke differently even while being experienced together. This brief essay considers a small selection of works by two distinguished twentieth-century American authors-artists: William Steig (1907–2003) and Maurice Sendak (b. 1928). It argues that, with their artful words and pictures, Steig and Sendak construct very different—even contrasting—visions of childhood. By “ethos” in this context I mean to suggest a vision of what a child is, a sense of what it means both to be a child and to address one. Such visions differ not only through the ages and from one culture and locale to another but also from one author-artist of the same period and locale to another. Invited to speak on Sendak’s and Steig’s respective works at meetings scheduled just a week apart in New York City during the winter of 2007, I found in these paired invitations a fortuitous opportunity to juxtapose several of their works and thereby discover some arresting contrasts and formulate the following readings.2First, a word on the topic of methodology. Nearly one hundred years have elapsed since Freud published his celebrated-cum-notorious foray into psychobiography with Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,3 wherein shards of circumstantial biographical evidence were laid out in seductive mosaic patterns secured with a grout of ingenious speculation. Despite subsequent decades of critical reflection, Freud’s method soldiers on nonetheless as a modus operandi in the psychological interpretation of art and literature.4 By bracketing a small selection of Steig’s and Sendak’s works here and limiting myself to extracting a tentative underlying ethos from them, I am [End Page 64] taking the position that to write psychologically one need not mention or exploit a creator’s personal life. This essay points gently toward psychological approaches that ask what we can see when we look carefully at the pages of works. What can we find when we share children’s books with children? Why, for example, has Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are sold over seventeen million copies (and its Amazon rank last time I checked was around 145, which means that only 144 other books in the United States were selling more copies at that particular moment), whereas his later work Outside Over There—a book that apparently figures prominently in his personal life—comes nowhere close?5 While market figures do not correlate flawlessly with children’s actual preferences (adults, not children, are the buyers), I would aver that, in this case, they do reflect the success and beloved status of Where the Wild Things Are, since the figures tally with additional facts: the book continues to appeal in its fifth decade post publication; it is known and has been translated worldwide, dramatized, and set to music6; and its characters have been fashioned into ubiquitous stuffed toys. On the other hand, in my (limited) experience, young children seem to find Outside Over There unsettling, unintelligible, even “creepy” and often have trouble sitting still through a full rendition. Some adults, on the other hand, praise that book as poetic and admire its more complex art. Such discrepancies in reception deserve our attention; they hint at fallow fertile fields lying over the rainbow, far beyond the much-plowed tracts of authorial psychobiography. This essay gestures casually toward those fields.The Connected Child“My dear Deborah,” said Doctor De Soto, “you must have been reading my mind.7Let’s begin with William Steig, who is best known for his New Yorker cartoons. His work for children extends back to 1968,8 however, when he was already a man in his sixties. Setting aside the... (shrink)

This article, corresponding to a part of the restitution of a financed international research project between France, Brazil, Canada, Italy and Belgium, aims to offer a modelisation and qualitative evaluation of mediation care settings based on an original methodological tool that involves identifying the typical games at the foundations of creativity, following a multidisciplinary perspective. Therapeutic mediations are settings or devices organised around a “pliable medium”, often artistic, like painting, modeling, writing, ​and theatre, which are very widespread in institutional practices, (...) both in France and abroad. The scientific objectives of this research consist in a multi-disciplinary exploration (anthropology, criminology, neuroscience, clinical psychology) of the process of creative symbolisation understood as a process of transformation involving play. According to this orientation, play can be defined as a psychic process whereby a subjective experience can be explored with pleasure, and consequently symbolised and appropriated. Our fundamental and original hypothesis is that play is at the source of the creative process, conceived as a work of metabolisation by the psyche of playful experiences during the different stages of life. The review of the understanding of play in psychoanalysis, anthropology, criminology and neuroscience emphasises the richness of this model and the importance of reflecting on the typical games in the field of psychic care. A clinical example of treatment in a pictorial therapeutic mediation setting of a child with psychotic disorders makes it possible to identify a number of typical games as well as the modalities of interpretation of the therapists through play. These multidisciplinary studies lead to the presentation of a general table of typical games, and these first results highlight the richness of identifying typical games in clinical settings. Ultimately, the multidisciplinary approach shows the interest of the model of play in the evaluation of therapeutic mediation settings, with a convergence of the different disciplines emphasising the pertinence of this model. The scientific impact of this research overlaps with its societal impact, through the development of innovative tools for evaluating therapeutic mediations, in order to take account of the evolution of the different forms of social expression of psychic suffering. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhere do a child’s morals come from? Interactions with other human beings provide arguably the primary contexts for moral development: family, friends, teachers and other people. It is the artistic products of human activity that this essay considers: literature, film, art, music. Specifically, I will consider some philosophical issues concerning the influence of folk and fairy tales on moral development. I will discuss issues of representation and reduction: in particular, how far should stories for children elide the complexities inherent (...) to many folk and fairy tales? Drawing on a distinction between a problematic reductionism and an appropriate pedagogical reduction, I suggest that pedagogical issues of representation require us to think about how to represent complexity in ways that are reductive without being reductionist, that can delight and engage without being horrifying or tedious. While there is a place for horror and for boredom, it is primarily a matter of timing... (shrink)

This is an artist's book on illness and dying. Elisabeth Zahnd, artist and photographer, had to experience and bear the fatal illness and death of her child, who was diagnosed of an incurable brain tumour at the age of five. Zahnd soon started not only t.

The article proposes to sketch an analogy between, on the one hand, linguistic learning and sound dialogue in humanist music therapy and, on the other hand, certain reflections of Maurice Merleau-Ponty: in particular, the centrality of corporeality in the learning, treated in the Phenomenology of Perception and in the courses on the psychology and pedagogy of the child, and the status of inter-corporeality developed through reflections on passivity and the metaphor of flesh. We will trace an analysis of the (...) music therapy of Giulia Cremaschi Trovesi, with reference to the linguistic and musical gesture, through the Merleau-Pontian notion of praktognosia, and of the sound dialogue with reference to institution and intercorporeity. Through an interpretation of music in the terms adopted by Stéphanie Ménasé and in reference to Merleau-Pontian passivity in artistic creation, our objective is to define the musical institution of the vibrating body in music therapy in terms analogous to the institution of the subject according to Merleau-Ponty and, consequently, to find, in the sound dialogue, the intercorporeity which anticipates the individuation of the subject, by describing the communicative authenticity of the musical-therapeutic encounter. (shrink)

Starting from two paintings by Salvador Dalì (The Enigma of William Tell and Autumnal Cannibalism), the article explores Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung’s idea of erotic cannibalism. The fear of being eaten is an archetype of the collective unconscious, as fairy tales clearly reveal. Following Jacques Derrida’s reflections, the author suggests that the fear of being eaten is not limited to anthropophagic cultures, because there is a sort of symbolic cannibalism which has to do with the capacity for annihilation. (...) The petrifying gaze of Medusa, described by Jean Paul Sartre, is a good example of this symbolic cannibalism. On the opposite side of the spectrum, compared to the petrifying gaze, we find the recognizing look of a mother toward her child. For the child, the mother embodies the good subject, which is reassuring and nonthreatening (the fairy who stands in contrast to the devouring ogre in fairy tales). Sara Ruddick explicitly refers to this motherhood model in her book Maternal Thinking, where she lays out the methodology for the ethics of care. The maternal, or recognizing gaze, as the opposite of Medusa’s gaze portrayed by Sartre, is well described in a compelling text by the Italian novelist Luigi Pirandello. At the same time, it plays an important role in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s The Phenomenology of the Spirit. Finally, the article returns to Salvador Dalì, showing how in his life, the artist experienced the Other’s gaze in both forms: the objectifying one, represented by the artist’s father (portrayed in The Enigma of William Tell), and the recognizing one, embodied by his partner Gala (portrayed in Autumnal Cannibalism). (shrink)

A Black Forest Walden is a work of philosophical reflection, nature description, and sly humor. In brief chapters, or aphorisms, the American philosopher David Farrell Krell recounts his experiences in a cabin located in the mountains of southern Germany's Black Forest, where he has lived for several decades. Insofar as Krell compares his experiences with those of Henry David Thoreau, who serves as both inspiration and irritation, the book could be described as a critical commentary on Thoreau's Walden. Yet it (...) equally reads as a rigorous yet playful and profoundly literary manifestation of where and how the mind wanders. Hence, the "Marlonbrando" of the subtitle is not the late actor but a feral cat who frequents the cabin and comes to be an important interlocutor, as if playing the role of analyst to the author. The subjects Krell treats are wide-ranging: the changing seasons, environmental issues, romantic love, parent-child relations, European versus American "values," higher education, artistic creativity, solitude, and the contrast between lifestyles in a quiet Black Forest village and in a noisy contemporary United States. Forty-one black-and-white photographs taken by the author accompany and enliven the text. (shrink)

[Time, the fundamental dimension of our existence, has fascinated artists, philosophers, and scientists of every culture and every century. All of us can remember a moment as a child when time became a personal reality, when we realized what a "year" was, or asked ourselves when "now" happened. Common sense says time moves forward, never backward, from cradle to grave. Nevertheless, Einstein said that time is an illusion. Nature's laws, as he and Newton defined them, describe a timeless, (...) deterministic universe within which we can make predictions with complete certainty. In effect, these great physicists contended that time is reversible and thus meaningless. (shrink)

The essay provides a critical assessment of the objections raised, especially by P. Destrée, against the cognitivistic interpretation of the pleasure of tragedy. It is pointed out that in the Poetics, chapter 4, it is unsound to distinguish between the pleasure of artistic imitation and the child’s pleasure for learning through imitation or the pleasure of the philosopher engaged in theoria. Moreover, the reference to children and philosophers proves that it is uncorrect to distinguish in the verb manthanein between (...) the meaning “to understand” and “to learn” and to say that the latter does not fit the example of painting. Consequently, this example cannot mean that contemplating the picture has as its only out-come a trivial recognition of the identity of the real object and the painted subject-matter. Actually, the tragedy’s audience sees in the plot a case which is exemplary (because it is universal) for particular actions and states of affair already known; and of these situations the audience understands and learns the causes with pleasure. Also the position of chapter 4 in the opening section of the book (chapters 1-5), which is entirely devoted to a general treatment of mimesis, confirms that all is said there of the pleasure must be a general premise for the treatment of all particular kind of pleasure recorded in the book: consequently, for the treatment of tragic pleasure in chapter 14 as well. (shrink)

A number of recent works in the metaethics of practical rationality have suggested that features of a person’s character, commitments, projects, practical identities and social roles have important normative consequences. For instance, I might commit to caring for a loved one, or I might become an artist, or take on the role of father to a child. In each case, it seems right to say that the normative landscape I face has been altered by this new fact – to (...) put them under one general heading, the new fact about my self. In this paper, I explore the normative significance of self and how best it is to be understood. Typically, views that posit the normative significance of self hold that the content of one’s self can create practical reasons to behave in particular ways. For instance, if I become a father, this means that there are additional reasons to care for my child than there were prior to this fact of self. I argue, however, that this suggestion cannot be plausibly sustained – facts of self do not give rise to practical reasons. I show that, while there are two ways that facts of self might give rise to or create new practical reasons, both succumb to very serious problems. However, or so I also argue, we can salvage the normative significance of self via an alternative mechanism. Facts of self, such as the fact that one is an artist or a father, do not create new reasons. Rather, they strengthen certain pre-existing reasons, viz., those reasons to which I am especially susceptible given this fact of self. (shrink)

Children's vulnerability gives rise to duties of justice towards children and determines when authority over them is legitimately exercised. I argue for two claims. First, children's general vulnerability to objectionable dependency on their caregivers entails that they have a right not to be subject to monopolies of care, and therefore determines the structure of legitimate authority over them. Second, children's vulnerability to the loss of some special goods of childhood determines the content of legitimate authority over them. My interest is (...) in the so-far little-discussed goods of engaging in world discovery, artistic creation, philosophical pursuits and experimentation with one's self. I call these ‘special goods of childhood’ because individuals, in general, only have full access to them during childhood and they make a distinctive and weighty contribution to wellbeing. Therefore, they are part of the metric of justice towards children. The overall conclusion is that we ought to make good institutional care part of every child's upbringing. (shrink)

In his pioneering study of Grande Dame Guignol (also referred to as hag horror or psycho-biddy), a female-centric 1960s subgenre of horror film, Peter Shelley explains that the grande dame, a stock character in this form of cinematic expression, “may pine for a lost youth and glory, or she may be trapped by idealized memories of childhood, with a trauma that haunts her past” (8). Indeed, a typical Grande Dame Guignol female protagonist/antagonist (as these two roles often merge) usually deals (...) with various kinds of traumatic experiences: loss of a child, domestic violence, childhood abuse, family conflicts or sudden end of career in the fickle artistic industry, etc. Unable to cope with her problems, but also incapable of facing the inevitable process of aging and dying, she gradually yields to mental and physical illnesses that further strengthen the trauma and lead to her social exclusion, making her life even more unbearable. Unsurprisingly, scholars such as Charles Derry choose to name psycho-biddies horrors of personality, drawing attention to the insightful psychological portrayal of their characters. Thus, it would be relevant and illuminating to discuss films such as Die! Die! My Darling! (1965) and Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971) as narratives of trauma. This will be the main concern of my article. (shrink)

Medicine is a science, and healing, an art. The right mix of a scientist and an artist is essential in a good physician. Clinical detachment is the balance between the scientist and the human. Good physicians are born; however, it is possible to cultivate the qualities. Gaining the patient's confidence is an art; a sense of humor can greatly help. Give a child respect and he becomes your friend. Death is inevitable, but a physician can help make it less (...) agonizing. A good physician is a philosopher, aware of the beauty of life, of his limitations and conscious of the power that controls us. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE PARTY'S OVER (ALMOST): TERMINAL CELEBRATION IN CONTEMPORARY FILM Tony Bartlett Syracuse University Movies are a universal language, and as we approach more and more integrated levels of global economy and communication they increasingly become a universal symbol system. At these levels a modern movie from China orNigeria will display swiftly recognizable sensibilities and situations to any viewer in Europe or the USA, and vice versa. But should we (...) not, therefore, also feel prompted to indicate a universal de-symbolization, if movies along with the modern world reflect constitutive elements of decomposition and collapse. For I would like to suggest in this essay that not only do movies constitute a kind ofplanetary envelope, literally a "film" of collective imaginai references wrapped around the world, but that this "film" is peculiarly apt to dismemberment, to breaking up before our eyes even as it still holds together, to abuilt-in "crisis" that is part ofits very nature. The two films that form a background to these remarks, Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction, are, I suggest, movies that set out actively to represent this cinematic crisis. In Adam Smith's The Wealth ofNations (Bk. 2, Vol. 5, 795-97), the grandfather ofmodern capitalism discusses the fate ofthe laborer who leaves arural village in which he is known and his life observed, or "attended to," by others. He moves to a great city where promptly "he is sunk in obscurity and darkness." Smith's concern is not directly to remedy this misery ofthe worker forced to seek employment in the anonymity ofthe city, but to avoid a possible course ofaction he might take. He wishes to divert him from the possibility of joining "a small religious sect," in whose company the newly depersonalized worker will achieve "a degree of consideration which he never had before." 2 Tony Bartlett Adam Smith does not relish the prospect ofthe mushroom growth ofclosed, "unsocial" religious factions within the heart of industrialized political economies, and he proposes two remedies by which the state, "without violence," might correct these tendencies. His proposals are remarkable both for their conjunction ofcertain themes and their prescience. The first is a plan for the imposition of the study of science and philosophy on the middle ranks ofthe poor, for science is "the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition." Next to this classic Enlightenment nostrum comes the following: The second ofthose remedies is the frequency and gaiety of publick diversions. The state, by encouraging, that is by giving entire liberty to all those who for their own interest would attempt, without scandal or indecency, to amuse and divert the people by painting, poetry, musick, dancing; by all sorts ofdramatic representations and exhibitions, would easily dissipate, in the greater part of them, that melancholy and gloomy humour which is almost always the nurse ofpopular superstition and enthusiasm. Publick diversions have always been the object of dread and hatred, to all the fanatical promoters ofthose popular frenzies. Here are the movies before the fact. Adam Smith in his charter for emergent industrial capitalism sketches an alliance between education and entertainment that together will prevent any reversion to the darkness ofsmallscale society and its ready excrescence of religious fanaticism. All of the components of cinema aesthetic are assembled in Smith's prophetic vision: cinematography, script, score, choreography, plot, spectacle. The only thing lacking was the technology to capture them together on film, and with the release ofinventive energies attending division oflabor that would only be a matter of time. Cinema is the born ally ofrational modernity, and is in itself the child of industrial alienation and the need to find a mass aesthetic to substitute for the control exercised by the sacred in a traditionally local setting. But, ofcourse, there are several levels ofirony that are not lost on us here. First, Smith says explicitly that the state has a direct interest in such mass entertainment. What then is the relationship between the much prized freedom ofthe creative artist and the very concrete concern for self-preservation on the part ofthe state? He specifies that the people's entertainment must be without scandal or indecency: what now should be said when political leaders... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Elementary Students Quilting through Social StudiesLinda Bennett (bio)IntroductionIt is enchanting when over twenty students' quilt squares make a quilt. The common yet diverse techniques for making a quilt transform the students' quilt squares into a shared quilting experience. A quilt made by students in one classroom can demonstrate a unique characteristic of each student by combining their squares into a quilt about a common theme in the social studies (...) curriculum. The quilts become a lasting record of the students' depictions of the theme under study and contributions to a class project. The six quilts described in this article demonstrate how to make class quilts using social studies themes. The lessons learned by the students and teachers are shared and additional resources are provided to extend the experiences of elementary students quilting through social studies.The Elementary CurriculumOne of the first decisions when making a quilt in elementary school is how the quilt connects to the curriculum. Each year I ask my child's classroom teacher what social studies themes are in the curriculum, and with the help of the classroom teacher, the students design a quilt that matches the curriculum. The teacher determines how much class time to use for discussion of the theme and the best quilting technique for the students.The typical elementary social studies curriculum centers around self, family, school, and community in kindergarten through third grades, and the local state (in this case, Missouri) and the United States in fourth and fifth grades. Quilts can depict social studies strands such as culture, history, [End Page 90] geography, psychology, sociology, or political science. Families, friends, the school, local or national history, state or national symbols, and social issues are among the themes of quilts made by first through fifth grade students. As a parent who is also a social studies educator, I contribute to my children's elementary education by making quilts about the social studies curriculum with the students in their classrooms. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1."Rights of the Child" quilt.Quilting can integrate many curricula in elementary school. When elementary students make a class quilt based on a theme in the social studies curriculum, they are integrating content and skills from literacy, mathematics, science, or art into the social studies expectations. Within language arts, students read, write, and research the social studies theme and the art of quilt making. Students use mathematical skills when measuring, cutting, and stitching. Science is integrated into social studies through themes such nature, global issues, or changes in the environment.Visual arts objectives for elementary students are intertwined into the quilting lessons. The artistic design of the quilt is the result of each student's fabric selection, design, and applications to the squares. The students use their hands, hearts, and minds as they make the quilt squares, and they learn the purpose and value of the art of quilting through the connections to the social studies curriculum.Sharing the QuiltsMy desire is for the students' enthusiasm for quilting to inspire other elementary school teachers to quilt with students. Several specific quilts are discussed below; first through third grade students have made quilts depicting the themes of families, friends, and the Rights of the Child, while older students (in fourth and fifth grade) made the pioneer quilt and the freedom quilt. [End Page 91] Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2."Families" quilt with hearts.For the "Rights of the Child" quilt (see figure 1), made by first and second graders, the students considered the rights of children while the teacher read A Children's Chorus and For Every Child a Better World.1 Each student made a quilt square about a right using fabric crayons. The quilt hung in the local public library to celebrate the rights of the child. Next to the quilt was a diagram with the first name of the student and the theme of his or her square.2Learning the names of friends and sharing friendships in the classroom can be the focus of social studies for young students. To make the quilt squares in the friendship quilt, the students traced their hand... (shrink)

Waking, Dreaming, Being is an unusual book in many ways. I mention two. First, in some ways it is a memoir. Few philosophers started as a child doing the sort of philosophy that they did as a grown-up. Evan did. Evan grew up in the intellectually fertile world of the Lindisfarne Association, the collaborative of scientists, artists, ecologists, and contemplatives founded by his father, William Irwin Thompson, a polymath, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in 2004 at (...) the Crestone Zen Monastery in Colorado.Evan’s dad taught him Raja Yoga as a boy—when he was seven!—and read him Upanishadic children’s stories. Lindisfarne was the antithesis of a C. P. Snow–style Two Cultures environment where the sciences and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Out of an Old Toy ChestMarina Warner (bio)The Soul of the ToyIn Baudelaire’s essay “La Morale du joujou,” written in l853, he remembers how the toyshop owner Madame Pancoucke, all wrapped in velvet and furs, beckoned the young Charles to choose something from her “treasure store for children.” Looking back down the years, the poet still sees in his mind’s eye the magic room overflowing with toys from floor (...) to ceiling that this “Fée du joujou” (Toy Fairy) opened to him. Without a second thought, he picked out “the most beautiful, the most expensive, the most garish, the freshest and the most bizarre of the playthings.” But his horrified mother insisted he choose another, less extravagant present, and the little Baudelaire had to resign himself and relinquish his toy.The word joujou (not jouet, the usual word for toy) is almost a pet name with a nursery ring like a “teddy” or a “dolly”; its repetition hints at baby talk and hence at playing, as when a child exchanges endearments and questions with a toy in imaginary conversations and elaborate scenarios. The toy in so many children’s games becomes part of an ongoing story and in this way initiates the first invented narratives in the child’s life.That scene of seduction, pleasure, and frustration with Mme. Pancoucke and his own mother catches Baudelaire’s lasting affection and reasoned admiration for toys. He called them “cette statuaire singulière” (this singular statuary); he was first a poet and then an art critic rather than a novelist, and as a flâneur of the boulevards and the galleries, he adopted a language of aesthetics, treating toys as an unusual form of sculpture. He recalls in pleasurable detail the miniature worlds conjured by Victorian nursery games and child’s play—from tiny “diligences” or mail coaches to detailed model furniture. But above all he muses in wonder at children’s ability to play without props or models, creating narratives, dialogue, and dramas [End Page 3] through fantasy alone: “All children talk to their toys; toys become actors in the great drama of life, reduced by the camera obscura of their small brains. Children bear witness through their games to their great faculty of abstraction and their high imaginative power. They play without playthings.”1Significantly, Baudelaire goes on to make the connection to creativity in general: “[The child’s] facility to satisfy the imagination shows the spirituality of childhood in its artistic conceptions. The plaything is the first initiation of a child to art.” Nothing will ever attain again, he says, the same degree of liveliness, or, crucially, the same intensity of presence or belief. For Baudelaire, the realization of childish make-believe cannot be regained: “Isn’t all of life found there in miniature, and much more vivid in colour, cleaner and shinier than real life?”2Yet Baudelaire’s essay lingers on the frustration that dims these vivid, shiny colors, for children, he says, also want to see the soul of a toy. He describes how they will turn about their playthings and shake them, hurl them to the ground, and often break them in their bafflement and even rage at their stubborn refusal to awaken into life. His meditation hints that at the point when make-believe fails, the vitality of toys vanishes and produces a primal encounter with mortality: “But where is the soul? It’s here that bewilderment and sadness begin.”3 The beginning of imagining stories brings with it frustration that the story is not powerful enough—it is not the real thing. In a connected prose poem entitled “Le Joujou du pauvre,” published nine years later, Baudelaire pursues this thought, as he observes an exchange between a beautiful, pampered child inside the exclusive railed park of a chateau. He has “a splendid toy, as fresh as its master, varnished, gilded, clothed in a purple dress and covered with plumes and glitter.”4 But the rich child is not interested in his doll, for on the other side of the railings a ragged street urchin shows him, in a little cage which he shakes about, a living rat—”drawn... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:OSCAR WILDE AND POSTSTRUCTURALISM by Guy Willoughby Towards the beginning ofthe hugely entertaining and provocative manifesto called "The Critic as Artist" (1890),1 Oscar Wilde causes the well-named discipulus Ernest to inquire of the suave magister, Gilbert: "But what are the two supreme and highest arts?" The prompt answer takes us to the heart ofWilde's aesthetic priorities: "Life and Literature," says Gilbert: "Life and the perfect expression of life" (p. (...) 1016). The aim of this discussion is, first, to consider the terms of Oscar Wilde's aesthetics; second, to relate them to tendencies in contemporary theory. I will be arguing, in sum, that the ideas entertained in his essays, and demonstrated in his fictions, have suggestive implications for our practices today—particularly in die light of a gathering rapprochement across the range of cultural study. The abiding theme ofOscar Wilde's writings is his insistence throughout not merely on art's primacy, but on the vital importance ofaesthetic criteria to life itself. In de Profundü (1897), that extraordinary attempt at self-definition, the author claims that it is only by conceiving of one's existence as an art-statement, as a dynamic convergence of forces extending in time and place, that trial, humiliation, and reversal—the shocks the flesh is heir to—can be imaginatively subsumed into a composite whole. He summed up the argument of the apologia thus to André Gide: "My life is like a work of art; an artist never starts the 316 Guy Willoughby317 same thing twice... or if he does, it's that he hasn't succeeded. My life before prison was as successful as possible. Now it's something that's over."2 Accordingly, he ascribes in de Profundis the greatest value to the frank acceptance of all one's deeds and susceptibilities, no matter how vicious or unlovely: "to reject one's experiences is to arrest one's development," he writes. "Whatever is realised is right" (p. 916). It is noteworthy, furthermore, that Wilde oudines this same argument under varying conditions throughout his work as essayist, story-teller, and playwright. In his wry but delicately tuned fairy tales, the most successful heroes and heroines are those who—like the litde Nightingale, the young King, or the Star-Child—manage to transform their lives into images of complex, artistic unity, suggestive of the radical power of the imagination. As the author ofde Profundis was to remark: "every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image. Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy" (p. 928). Likewise, the elegant rhetorical strategies of Wilde's two critical dialogues announce art's power to starde and provoke its spectators into new attitudes, and—in particular—to suggest a transference ofaesthetic criteria to life itself. Artistic appreciation develops "that sense of form which is the basis of creative no less than of critical achievement," which may then be profitably applied to one's disparate experience: "it is form that creates not merely the critical temperament, but also the aesthetic instinct, that unerring instinct that reveals to one all things under their conditions of beauty" ("The Critic as Artist," p. 1052). It is only by cultivating a flexible, formalist oudook that a cramping and static Weltanschauung may be avoided; ethical distinctions too must be recast, if a successful life-as-artwork is to be sustained. Thus, writes Wilde, "Ethics, like natural selection, makes existence possible. Aesthetics, like sexual selection, makes life lovely and wonderful, fills it with new forms, and gives it progress, variety and change" (p. 1058). Moreover, the critical or aesthetic impulse—and the point of Wilde's essay is that the terms are interchangeable—has overall a vital cosmopolitan function; it will heal all human divisions, "by insisting on the unity of the human mind in the variety of its forms" (p. 1057). If we transfer aesthetic criteria from art to life, therefore, we will discover a new raison d'être in a skeptical age; we will understand that our apprehension of symmetry in art offers a motive for restoring a novel order to our own lives, singly and together. So it will be that "form [will... (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 242—252. Introduction The following two works were produced by visual artist Jonas Staal and writer Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei during a visit as artists in residence at The Bag Factory, Johannesburg, South Africa during the summer of 2010. Both works were produced in situ and comprised in both cases a public intervention conceived by Staal and a textual work conceived by Van Gerven Oei. It was their aim, in both cases, to produce complementary works that (...) could be read “through each other,” in which the movement of artistic construction would be imitated by textual deconstruction and vice versa. Both works deal with the way in which capital, apartheid, and monumentality are interwoven in South-African society. The Missing Link addresses a monument for democracy, erected on the premises of a private corporation running both an amusement park and the Apartheid Museum franchise. The textual intervention accompanying this public intervention investigates the limits of the inclusiveness of the anti-discrimination section in the South-African constitution, itself a monumental work of democracy. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth deals with the history and eventual dissolution of a monumental square, commemorating the Soweto Uprising, in one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The history accompanying this public dismemberment of memory is equally fragmented, which is expressed by the many voices recounting uncertain and perhaps even irrelevant “facts” about the genius loci, the way in which the memorial space has actually entered into the memory of the inhabitants surrounding it. Next to their individual practices, Staal and Van Gerven Oei have worked together on a number of projects ever since 2007, including several art residencies. Their work involves an investigation of the different interfaces between art, politics, and public space in media ranging from theater and public interventions, to video installations and (co-authored) textual works. The Missing Link Missing Link (1) Missing Link (2) Missing Link (3) Intervention on the monument entitled The Seven Pillars of the Constitution , part of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Seven Pillars represent the constitutional values propagated in South Africa since the abolition of the apartheid regime. The monument and museum were built by the Gold Reef Resorts corporation, which is also responsible for the theme park and casino next to it. By placing the word “capitalism” on the wall surrounding the museum, the capitalist system and the constant social divisions that it implies are interpreted as sophistic continuations of apartheid politics. Through the capitalist system, apartheid is still operational within South African society. Whereas during the apartheid regime, the separation clearly ran along race divisions, in the current, “democratic” system, the same actual separation is sustained without it being an explicit element of the foundations of the country, i.e. the constitution. This intervention foregrounds the constant role of capitalism is both periods. At the same time the intervention acknowledges that contemporary Western artisthood is a mirror of the privileges that are offered by the capitalist system, and the type of artist that it produces. The intervention initiates a critical discourse concerning the capitalist system situated within the disaster of capitalism itself, in other words: through the desire to break with the presumption that art would be able to operate outside the capitalist system and to confirm that art—and the artist himself—is in fact modeled on this system. The public intervention by Staal was supplemented by a textual intervention by Van Gerven Oei: a proposition to alter the seventeenth amendment of the South African constitution. Even though the anti-discrimination legislation in South-Africa is one of the most stringent and inclusive in the world, one factor—wealth—remains outside its scope, thus continuing the schisms along racial lines produced during the apartheid regime: §9.3. The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language, birth, and wealth. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth Intervention concerning the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The monument comprises a park on which different are placed recalling an important protest the black population against the former apartheid regime. In 1976, from a school adjacent to the park, they started a massive protest against the introduction of Afrikaans in the school curriculum. The police reacted violently, and shot several hundreds of students. The construction of the June 16 Memorial Acre was started in 2005, and from the start was the paragon of corruption. Coordinated by local politicians, some family members of the protest leader from 1976 gained control of the realization of the monument, outside the regulation through external institutions. The available budget of 41 million rand (at that time well over 5 million euro) was largely embezzled. In the meantime, the monument has become fully dilapidated and defaced. The park has become overgrown with weeds and covered in a layer of dirt, and the local population is slowly plundering the square to use the material for the construction and decoration of their own houses. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth develops the dynamics already existent around the June 16 Memorial Acre. Without obtaining official permission in advance, several local inhabitants were hired to break down the monument, sort the materials, and offer it to the neighborhood. Thus, the redistribution of wealth after the fall of the apartheid regime is finally taking place, albeit from the mere remains of the capital that was once invested in the community. The words “monument” and “for free” are spray-painted on the stacks of material, both in English and Zulu, as these are locally the most common languages. Van Gerven Oei supplemented Staal’s public intervention with an account of the history of the monument based on a series of interviews. The account clarifies how the different interests within the protest 1976 are reflected in the exceeding decay of the park, and how in the end those interests were represented by the June 16 Memorial Acre. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 1: Removing stones Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 3: Pulling down statues Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 4: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 5: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 6 The next day A Fragmentary History of the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth, Formerly Known as the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei The following text, based on interviews and online research aims to provide parts of a history of the park in front of Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto. The idea for the transformation of the park into a memorial site has its source in the events of June 16, 1976: the start of the the student uprising in Soweto. The development of the park was started in the early 1980s, and the actual transformation into a memorial site, the June 16 Memorial Acre, was initiated in 2005. Over the last few years, several monumental additions have been made to the park: A marble monument with three pillars was revealed on June 16, 2006. A sculpture of a book and several billboards on June 16, 2008. A sculpture of student leader Tsietsi Mashinini on June 16, 2010. The park was transformed into the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth on August 3, 2010. According to the entry “Youth Struggle” on the website South African History Online, the Bantu Education Act was introduced in 1953 . In 1954 , Dr Verwoerd, Minister of Native Affairs, stated: “What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd.” According to the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, the Afrikaans Medium Decree was issued in 1974 , forcing all black schools to use Afrikaans and English in a 50-50 mix as languages of instruction. The Regional Director of Bantu Education (Northern Transvaal Region), J.G. Erasmus, told Circuit Inspectors and Principals of Schools that from January 1, 1975 , Afrikaans had to be used for mathematics, arithmetic, and social studies from standard five (7th grade). English would be the medium for general science and practical subjects. Indigenous languages would be used for religion instruction, music, and physical culture. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on April 30, 1976 , students from the Orlando West Junior School in Soweto went on strike, refusing to go to school. Their example was followed by other schools in Soweto. A student from Morris Isaacson High School, Toboho “Tsietsi” Mashinini, proposed a meeting on June 13, 1976 to discuss further action. According to Weizmann Hamilton’s article “The Soweto Uprising 1976,” which appeared in the September 1986 edition of Inqaba Ya Basebenzi (Fortress of the Revolution), on June 13, 1976 , the South African Students’ Movement called a meeting at the Donaldson Community Center in Orlando. 300-400 Students representing 55 schools decided to hold a mass demonstration on June 16. According to Brian Mokhele, member of the Joint Community Safety Forum, Dr Edelstein was the first victim of the Soweto uprising and killed the day before the march on June 15, 1976 . Edelstein was an administrator at the pass office in Jabavu and gave golf courses to the local community. Edelstein was put in a garbage bin and pierced by pickaxes. The garbage bin was left at the very spot of the murder for many years. A few years ago, a child was beheaded at the same spot, and the basketball court next to it has been abandoned since. According to Marcus Neustetter, founder of the Trinity Session, this story is untrue. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on June 16 , Tsietsi Mashinini led students from Morris Isaacson High School to join up with others who walked from Naledi High School. A crowd of between 3,000 and 10,000 eventually ended up near Orlando High School. According to Raymond Marlowe, a local photographer, Tsietsi Mashinini was heading the march. According to the entry “Hector Pieterson” on Wikipedia, Dr Edelstein died on June 16, 1976 , stoned to death by mob and left with a sign around his neck proclaiming “Beware Afrikaaners.” The first child to die that day was called Hastings Ndlovu. According to Pat Motsiri, Orlando West is claiming struggle heritage through the Hector Pieterson Museum, while Hector Pieterson was from Jabavu. According to Pat Motsiri, his generation effectively struggled between 1980 and 1991, forcing the release of Nelson Mandela and negotiations with the apartheid regime while the 1976-generation was safely in exile. Nevertheless, this has not been recognized in any monument. After the abolition of apartheid, the generation from 1976 returned from exile, occupied important government and ANC positions, creating an abundance of 1976 memorials and refusing to acknowledge that this was only possible because of the younger generation’s struggle. He calls this a generational conflict. According to Archibald Dlamini, the park officer responsible for the Memorial Acre, he started working for the municipality in 1978. In 1981/82 , Isaac Makhele from Pimville, who used to work in the cemetery business, was the first developer of the park. It used to be just a normal park until City Parks decided to develop the Memorial Acre in 2006. In 2007 the work was stopped by the community. According to Brian Mokhele, he left the country in 1989 after he participated in the riots of 1986. But when he returned in 1999 he found that nothing had changed. He says that they were promised to be protected by the Constitution, but that reality is different. The police uses fear to suppress them so that they don’t come out to talk openly. He has been arrested twice, both times harassed and tortured by the police, but in the end always released without indictment. He says that this is their way to threaten communities to back off from politics. According to Moses, who is sitting outside rolling a joint, Brian knows everything. He tells Brian to tell me everything he knows. According to Brian Mokhele, Tsietsi Mashinini was possibly murdered in 1990 during his exile in New York. Two weeks before he was supposed to return to South Africa, his papers in order, he was found dead under mysterious circumstances. His coffin was sealed when he was buried. According to Pat Motsiri, he came up with the idea for the Memorial Acre in 2003 . He submitted the documents for the proposal to the council, which sidelined him as soon as the budget came out in 2005 . According to Brian Mokhele, there was on estimation R 41,000,000 spent to redesign the park and turn it into the Memorial Acre. The millions were divided by Amos Masondo, the mayor of Soweto, the local councilor Bongani D. Zondi, and the director of the city of Johannesburg, Pat Lephunya. They were dividing the money between several contractors: Tsietsi Mashinini’s brothers were involved in the development of the park, they got the tender to do the green areas, the landscaping. Construction was done by other companies, some did the paving, the toilets, etc. EMBA, a private company appointed by the municipality was in control of the money flow, but the money was quickly gone. According to Raymond Marlowe, the contractor bought a BMW with the money. According to Archibald Dlamini, the Mashinini brothers got the tender, so the space would look more like the other places around in Soweto. It was agreed that after they were done, they would return the property to the municipality. They did whatever they could do. According to Mafaisa, a member of the Jabavu business community, he was one of the contractors for the landscaping and the pavement under Mpho Mashinini, one of the brothers. He says that I should contact Mavi for information on Mpho. According to Poi Stuurman, a local youth worker, Mafaisa is one of the guys who ran away with the money. According to Mavi, Mpho Mashinini was never a contractor. The contracts were organized by Sbu Butelezi, the former head of the Gauteng Department for Public Works. The June 16 Foundation and the Mashinini brothers will be the beneficiaries of the park when it is finished. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks did not accept the Memorial Acre because it was not finished. The rest of the year, the unfinished park is not maintained, as should have happened. This was done deliberately so that in the end they can just clean the whole thing up and have a reason to redo the whole park. According to Brian Mokhele, the Mashinini brothers now work for the government. People that manipulate for money purposes always come from the government’s side. Because the park was left unfinished, the people from the neighborhood are taking away the stones to decorate their own homes with. According to Archibald Dlamini, because City Parks doesn’t accept responsibility of the park, he officially has nothing the guard, except for his cottage, which is municipal property. The thieves come at night and destroy the park, but he cannot do anything because he is sleeping. According to the website of the Thanda Foundation on June 16, 2006 a bronze statue of Hector Pieterson, the first child to die in the 1976 protests, made by Kobus Hattingh and Jacob Maponyane was unveiled in the Maponya Mall in Soweto. The statue is sculpted after the famous image shot by Sam Nzima of Mbuyisa Makhubo carrying the dead body of the boy. The sculpture was sponsored by the Thanda Foundation, founded by the Swedish entrepreneur Dan Olofsson and South-African entrepreneur Matthews Phosa. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, the Memorial Acre and Artwork were unveiled in 2006. According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre was still under development on July 24, 2006. According to Archibald Dlamini, City Parks only cleans up the park once a year just before the June 16 celebrations. Everybody is waiting for the Mashinini brothers to finish their job. The last time he talked with them was in 2007 . According to a sign on the school grounds of the Morris Isaacson High School, the June 16 Trail will be finished in 2008 . According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre contains another monument erected in Tsietsi’s honor. The monument was created as part of the Sunday Times Heritage Public Art program. Its physical form resembles a giant book which symbolizes the crisis in education experienced in 1976. On the face of the book is the map of the route taken by the students from Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu to Phefeni Junior Secondary in Orlando West (currently the site of the Hector Pieterson Museum), while the back cover of the ‘book’ is inscribed with a tribute to Tsietsi Mashinini. The monument was revealed on June 16, 2008 . According to Marcus Neustetter, the billboards on the Memorial Acre were part of a school project realized in 2008. Following several workshops, the students from different high schools along the June 16 Trail were invited to work with artists on the billboards, while the neighborhood community was invited to watch the process during the festivities on June 15 and 16, 2008 . The billboards were supposed to be removed because of construction works on the Memorial Acre, which never ended up happening. According to Brian Mokhele, the former toilet facilities were converted into a house for the park officer. This park officer has been working for city parks for more than 12-15 years, but does nothing here, because the park, including the new toilet buildings, is not finished. The government is now moving around looking for people to take this job because they stopped it. They confronted everybody who was going in and chased them away. According to John, in 2009 , some girls, around 16 or 17 years old, were raped by four men who had been drinking in a local shebeen. When the bar quit they said that they would go home by car, but instead raped the girls on the Memorial Acre nearby. This happened in the unfinished toilets, because the doors couldn’t be closed. According to Brian Mokhele, there used to be some fences around the park because of the construction work that was eventually stopped, but these were also stolen. According to Archibald Dlamini, people from the neighborhood started about two and a half years ago, and the last piece was stolen near the end of 2009 . Sometimes he would catch someone with a roll of fence, and then use it for his own cottage. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, a statue of Tsietsi Mashinini by Johannes Pokhela was revealed on June 16, 2010 , “Youth Day.” According to Shirley Makutoane, deputy principal of Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini, funded by the June 16 Foundation, has temporarily been placed within the school perimeter. The statue will be moved to the Memorial Acre when it will be finished, in 2011 . According to Brian Mokhele, beside the June 16 Foundation, there is also a June 16 Memorial Acre Foundation. Both foundations are quarreling about the money involved in the Memorial Acre project. Nobody knows who’s involved in them. According to Marcus Neustetter, the June 16 Foundation consists of people that were part of 1976 protest movement, local government officials, representatives of the Hector Pieterson Museum, and the council. According to students from the Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini is on the school ground because on the Memorial Acre it would be vandalized by youths from White City, an adjacent neighborhood. Accorcing to Brian Mokhele, the statue of Tsietsi should eventually be mounted on the Memorial Acre. It is wrong that the statue is in the school at the moment, because it is not a public school. He wants the statues to depict the massiveness of the force that was coming into Soweto after the protests. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks, City of Jo’burg, City Lights, and SAPS are making some sort of plan to take the plan back. They want to remove the trees from the Memorial Acre, and redesign the Memorial Acre into a relaxing park, without political content. They want to depoliticize the square. In doing so,they will have their own employment and not use local workforces. According to Brian Mokhele, the community wants to remove the monuments, amphitheater, and sculptures from the Memorial Acre because they do not resemble anything. The sculptures should be depicting the truth of what happened, because the Memorial Acre is a political heritage site. He wants to involve the people that actually participated in the struggle to make the monument so that everyone can enjoy it and get a better understanding of the struggle heritage. Therefore, he proposes collective ideology in which everyone has a say. This would prevent future vandalization of the monument. According to Pat Motsiri, the sculptures must depict the event around June 16, 1976. Like the story of Dr Edelstein, who was pierced by pickaxes, forced into a garbage bin and burned alive. According to Jonas Staal, the Memorial Acre should be destroyed, its elements stacked on pallets, thus forming the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth . According to Mafaisa, his men can do the work quickly. He has about twenty men working under him. (shrink)

This round table discussion takes the diversity of discourse and practice shaping modern knowledge about childhood as an opportunity to engage with recent historiographical approaches in the history of science. It draws attention to symmetries and references among scientific, material, literary and artistic cultures and their respective forms of knowledge. The five participating scholars come from various fields in the humanities and social sciences and allude to historiographical and methodological questions through a range of examples. Topics include the emergence of (...) children's rooms in US consumer magazines, research on the unborn in nineteenth-century sciences of development, the framing of autism in nascent child psychiatry, German literary discourses about the child's initiation into writing, and the sociopolitics of racial identity in the photographic depiction of African American infant corpses in the early twentieth century. Throughout the course of the paper, childhood emerges as a topic particularly amenable to interdisciplinary perspectives that take the history of science as part of a broader history of knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.2 (2005) 36-57 [Access article in PDF] "Being With": The Resonant Legacy of Childhood's Creative Aesthetic Lori A. Custodero Teachers College, Columbia University Introduction...enrichment of the present for its own sake is the just heritage of childhood....1In this paper, the qualities of artistic pursuit exemplified in the musical play of children and the compositional processes of adults provide a context for exploring how "being (...) with" influences teaching and learning. Specifically I propose that "being with" music generates a sense of the aesthetic as we both transform musical materials — timbres, pitches, rhythms, phrases, harmonies — and are transformed by our experiences with them, and that "being with" others as we partake in musical activity often broadens and deepens that experience. In many ways, this is an exploration into why childhood matters, how it functions as a mirror for our adult lives as we experience and revel in the seemingly miraculous moments of aesthetic insight, where the familiar is welcomed with fresh perception and the addition of novelty is greeted as the solution to a previously unfathomable problem. It is also about why children matter, as our responses to their ways of being connect and transform us as adults. In this piece, recorded observations of children's musicality are juxtaposed with first-person accounts of adults' creative processes, revealing contributions to our understanding of artistry-in-action as it is manifested in both the musical and the pedagogical. The Aesthetic in Childhood and Adulthood To be "in the moment" is to encounter the aesthetic — fully engaged in an activity for which one's individual contributions are perceived as vital, aware of surprise relationships between seemingly disparate phenomena, and enveloped by sensory messages of color, sound, and movement meeting personal criteria for beauty. Such experiences exemplify features of artistry, an approach defined by openness to possibility and orientation toward discovery, where cues emanating from involvement in activity are clearly interpreted and utilized, and reflection is an ongoing process informing action. Characterized by a sense of wonder and ability to imagine and invent, the creative worlds of young children have provided a source of artistic genesis cited by composers, performers, psychologists, and educators.2Edith Cobb's thoughtful, groundbreaking account of the relationship between childhood and artistry, The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, was introduced by Margaret Mead, who highlighted the work's thesis: "that in the imaginative experiences of childhood could be found the essential kernels of the highest forms of human thought."3 The legacy of childhood is universal to our existence; in acknowledging its contributions to ontological and cultural artistry, we can both connect personal histories across the [End Page 36] lifespan and identify characteristic trends across a spectrum of aesthetic rendering.4One trait common to both the child and the creative adult is a focused attentiveness to perceived affordances, that is, materials and human resources accessible in the environment. Acting upon and with these resources,children and artists become aesthetic agents as sensitivity to both experience and milieu combine to produce relevant and innovative outcomes.5 These two interactive dimensions have been described in interviews with composers I have interviewed as "being with the moment" and "being with yourself and at the same time with another" and are operating in the musical play of children, as noted in this description recorded by a mother/student: On Thanksgiving Day, we had a family gathering of sixteen people, five of whom are under the age of eight years. Three-year-old Louise is thrilled to be with her female cousins, who all dress up in ballet-type frilly costumes in order to put on a "show" for the family. Cousin Lily, now eight years old, assumes the role of pianist, while Louise, and five-year-old cousin Amy creatively dance to Lily's improvised accompaniment. Their movements are directly related to Lily's playing, in her fluidity and well as "jumps!" Here, family members serve as catalysts for creative activity — costumes and musical instruments in the environment... (shrink)

We are discussing the interpretation of Nietzsche about Heraclitus as the most Greek and anti-Platonic of the pre-Platonic philosophers, from the statement of opposites in the agonic game of becoming. Representative of an attitude originally Hellenistic, Heraclitus is interpreted as a true philosopher, as he intuitively captured the flow of becoming as a process of internalization of knowledge, translated by an investigation of himself. Accordingly, the Nietzschean interpretation goes against the tradition that had described Heraclitus as tearful and dark and (...) re-invents the character as the solitude, tragic joy and innocence of becoming, items for which Nietzsche ordering the metaphors of the game, the artist and child. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Thomas G. Pavel INCOMPLETE WORLDS, RITUAL EMOTIONS' IN recent years, the notion of "fictional world" has enjoyed a considerable rise in fortune. The expression, however, is not entirely new. To refer to the world of a literary work, of a novel or of a play, has always been a favorite way of speaking for literary critics and aestheticians. In most cases, these were informal worlds. A discussion of the (...) world of Balzac, Dostoyevsky, HenryJames, or Proust often amounts to a description of each author's preferences in die selection and rearrangement of his material. Such discussion primarily fits authors who purposefully attempt to build comprehensive representational artifacts. One speaks quite naturally about l'univers balzacien, or about the universe of Musil. But is one entitled to refer with equal ease to the world ofBenjamin Constant, meagerly perceptible in his Adolphe, a short novel built in the spirit of economy, displaying just a few characters and a minimum of worldly information? Perhaps density and comprehensiveness are not indispensable characteristics of literary worlds. Aestheticians and narratologists using the "fictional worlds" terminology seem to believe mat any kind of artistic text projects a world, be it rich or poor. Such worlds are imagined in the fashion of modern philosophy of logic as states of affairs, more or less comprehensive. Some writers believe that the states of affairs comprised in fictional worlds must be fairly sizable, since diey should include "not only what the author indicates, but also whatever is required (entailed) by that which he indicates." 1 The laws of nature which are not specifically contradicted by the text would belong to its world. Thus, a few notorious cases aside, there is no reason to doubt that every child born in fiction has been engendered by a human fadier as long as the text does not report an exception. And if it does? Then, assuming that the laws of logic still govern if not fiction itself at least our understanding of it, we may appeal to what "possible world" philosophers have called "small miracles." * Editor's note: This article, as well as the contributions by Gerald Prince, Peter van Inwagen, and Kendall Walton which follow it, grew out ofa symposium on "Styles ofFictionality," organized by Professor Pavel and held at Harvard University in 1981. The Fall, 1983 issue of PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE will contain additional papers presented at the symposium. 48 Thomas G. Pavel49 Imagine, for instance, the world in which Notre Dame de Paris would be covered with blue paint. While everything else would preserve the properties it possesses in the actual world, with the laws of nature and the caused chains maintained, a small local change, somewhat miraculous, would modify only the color of the venerable building. Similarly, the world of Balzac may be understood as the world of early and mid-nineteenth-century France, slightly modified by the addition of a few hundred imagined characters. That diese conform surprisingly well to the general laws of French society of the time is so much the goal of Balzac's successful project, that for the sociologically-minded reader die' actual nonexistence of Rastignac, Rubempré, Vautrin, or Birotteau may appear a mere accident. These characters, one may surmise, display every trait that actual counterparts of theirs would possess, except existence. Hence, why would Rastignac's or Vautrin's emergence in a world omerwise identical to nineteenth-century France amount to anydiing more than a "small miracle"? On the other hand, Balzac's world being blessed wim hundreds of such miracles, the very magnitude of the project vindicates the attribute of "visionary," ascribed to Balzac by Béguin, or, if metaphorically undercut, mat of"God the Father" given him by Thibaudet. For, would not such magnitude entail more than just local changes in an otherwise faithful representation of the "actual" nineteenthcentury France? Similarly, would we interpret a fictional world in which a child has been engendered not by a human father, but by a divinity, as identical in all respects to the actual world, except for the limited modification attributed to a small miracle? 2 If we grant for a moment the improbable assumption that nineteenth-century France was a given and that Balzac... (shrink)

Andrey Bely's autobiographical novel Kotik Letaev and Terrence Malick's film The Tree of Life do not share a common subtext. Nevertheless, they have strikingly similar themes. They each deal with an adult's confrontation of his past through memory, a memory that extends back before birth. Coming to terms with the past prepares the adult protagonist of each work for his destiny. The essay discusses Malick's use of William Blake's mysticism and Bely's dependence on the religious-philosophical ideas of Rudolf Steiner. Memory (...) plays an important role in both works as it touches on the recapitulation of cosmic origins in the development of the individual human being. What the quester discovers through memory enables him to find the way back to Eternity from which he has descended. Both artists invoke the World Tree uniting heaven and earth and its association with the Cross of Christ. In both the novel and the film the world is seen first through a child's eyes, then through growing understanding of the adult. Malick illustrates with cinematography what Bely describes in words. Malick uses music in a way that fleshes out what Bely attempted to create through using musical tropes in language. (shrink)

Andrey Bely's autobiographical novel Kotik Letaev and Terrence Malick's film The Tree of Life do not share a common subtext. Nevertheless, they have strikingly similar themes. They each deal with an adult's confrontation of his past through memory, a memory that extends back before birth. Coming to terms with the past prepares the adult protagonist of each work for his destiny. The essay discusses Malick's use of William Blake's mysticism and Bely's dependence on the religious-philosophical ideas of Rudolf Steiner. Memory (...) plays an important role in both works as it touches on the recapitulation of cosmic origins in the development of the individual human being. What the quester discovers through memory enables him to find the way back to Eternity from which he has descended. Both artists invoke the World Tree uniting heaven and earth and its association with the Cross of Christ. In both the novel and the film the world is seen first through a child's eyes, then through growing understanding of the adult. Malick illustrates with cinematography what Bely describes in words. Malick uses music in a way that fleshes out what Bely attempted to create through using musical tropes in language. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dostoevsky and Schiller:National Renewal Through Aesthetic EducationSusan McReynoldsDostoevsky's novels pivot upon scenes of spiritual transformation, moments of revelation that resolve dilemmas for which no logical solution can be found. Raskolnikov, for example, analyzes his crime from philosophical and sociological angles until he almost dies; he is saved by his dream of the plague and by the image of Sonia's face. When insight and progress come to Dostoevsky's fictional characters, (...) they come as dream, memory, and rapture before images of beauty and suffering. The choice between spiritual and logical solutions confronting Dostoevsky's characters is also a choice between Russia and the West. The rationalism and corollary doctrine of egoism that drives characters like Svidrigailov, Stavrogin, and Ivan Karamazov to madness and death are clearly associated in Dostoevsky's novels with Western philosophy. The ability to surrender to the beneficial power of images is associated with characters like Dmitry Karamazov, who is able to accept the primacy of spiritual truth—the truth of his need for expiation—over the fact of his legal innocence of his father's murder. The breadth of spirit that renders Dmitry receptive to the truth revealed in his dream image of the suffering child is clearly identified in The Brothers Karamazov as a distinctively Russian national trait.The contrast between reason, death, and the West, on the one hand, and receptiveness to imagistic truth, salvation, and Russia, on the other, [End Page 353] drives the plots of Dostoevsky's novels. This familiar feature of Dostoevsky's art is first articulated in texts unfamiliar to most readers; the historical essays of the early 1860s that were among his first published works after his return from exile. In 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested as a member of the Petrashevsky Circle, an association dedicated to disseminating the tenets of Western socialism in Russia. For his participation in the Circle, Dostoevsky was initially condemned to death; the sentence was commuted to four years of hard labor in Siberian prison camp, to be followed by an indefinite period of military service in Siberian exile.When Dostoevsky returned to St. Petersburg and public life in 1860, he and his older brother Mikhail launched the journal Time. Mikhail served as editor. Dostoevsky would publish The Insulted and Injured and Notes from the House of the Dead in its pages, in addition to numerous essays dedicated to contemporary literature and events. The essays on Russia and Europe published in Time were a creative workshop in which some basic features of his later novels—most notably the contrast between Western positivism and Russian spirituality, conceived as the capacity to embrace imagistic revelations of the truth—were first developed. The pressure of Dostoevsky's developing artistic craft is clearly apparent in these non-fictional texts from the early 1860s, which narrate modern Russian and European history as a story structured by a dual plot of death and redemption.Before Dostoevsky wrote novels structured around the contrast between characters like Dmitry and Ivan Karamazov, he wrote essays structured around the contrast between Russia and Western nations like France and England. Before Crime and Punishment portrayed Raskolnikov's resurrection as the surrender to images offering glimpses of something that eludes rational analysis, Dostoevsky's essays in Time predicted national renewal for Russia through her embrace of the truths conveyed by the images of fine art. Some essays in Time compose a plot of national rebirth through the effects of artistic images for Russia, but others admonish readers with what Dostoevsky believed would be the terrible consequences of positivism for the West. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, published in Time in 1863, casts France and England as mortally ill victims of a materialist worldview that can only grasp the challenges of modernity as scientific and political problems. The spiritual solutions that will be revealed to Russia through images of beauty, Dostoevsky warns, will elude nations ensnared in rational approaches to their problems. [End Page 354]Throughout his post-exile life, Dostoevsky believed that political improvement results from changes in the moral condition of individuals, inner changes that are catalyzed by images, not reached through rational deliberation. In 1861, he writes of the Imperial edict... (shrink)

Faced by the issue of co-education in his book Opinions, the English philosopher C E M Joad once tried to draw up an intuitive list of the differences between little boys and girls. His list was an intelligent man’s summary of the salient distinguishing features characterised by the non-scientist’s reluctance to invoke behaviouristic factors. He thus opined that boys were more abstract, girls more empirical, boys more inquisitive, girls more obedient, and so on. An analogous account of the relations holding (...) between literature and philosophy will have occurred to people who read widely and credit themselves with a cultured receptivity: their commonest formula is that literature portrays real life while philosophy explains it. At this level of insight come those readers who state as a grave paradox that Dostoievski is ‘really more of a philosopher’ and Plato ‘a creative writer’. Others perceive that though philosophy may achieve the artistic effects of poetry or the novel, it is normally governed by rigour of method; that written philosophy tends to follow Occam’s razor, whereas literature approaches the sublime almost in inverse proportion to the noted rule, since a considerable part of its aesthetic relies on repetition, digression or what the Russian formalist critic Sklovskij termed ‘postponement of the effect’. Perhaps indeed there are some lateral factors, symptoms rather than causes, which do throw light on the parting of company between literary and philosophical writing: there is, for example, no such thing as a child prodigy in philosophy, though such a phenomenon exists in all the arts. Wittgenstein was making his first jottings at the same age when Rimbaud had given up writing poetry. No philosopher has developed a system by the age when most great novelists have formed their style. If personal maturity is a sine qua non of philosophy, it is marginal, even deleterious, to literature, for it may close off and ossify the inspiration, as is thought to be the case with the Wordsworth of 1840 onwards. The writer must in a sense never grow up, not only for the oft-cited reason that he has to remain in touch with the material provided by memory, but also because the disponibilité to experience of youth and early adulthood seems to be the essential initiatory stage of the literary hero. Jacopo Ortis, Julien Sorel, Raskolnikov, Felix Krull and Amory Blaine constitute a perennial type for all of whom adventure, travel, temptation and conflict are items of implicit acceptance. (shrink)

In the year 1842, Thomas Cole (1801-1848) painted a set of four oil paintings entitled THE VOYAGE OF LIFE. As the title indicates, the artist likened life to a voyage. This voyage begins with man emerging as a child from a dark cave into the river of life in a spring setting. As this voyage through the river of life continues, man is seen passing through the stages of youth, manhood, & then finally old age. Likewise, the setting of (...) nature is seen correspondingly passing through the stages of summer, autumn, & then finally winter. Any voyage must have a starting point, destination & duration. Also any voyage is a continuation of some sort of existence, & there is a continuity of existence after the voyage is complete. What is this voyage? Why does it have to exist? What existed before this voyage? What will happen after the destination is reached? Why is it short for some, long for others? Why is it easier for some, harder for others? Daheshism deals with these issues & many others. Daheshism is a revolution in the human approach to philosophy, life & religion. It is a new garment for the body of traditional thought & belief. The aim of Daheshism is to provide a universal belief that encompasses all other beliefs. It accomplishes synthesis rather than fragmentation of religious beliefs & expansion rather than contraction of philosophical thought. To order: P.O. Box 16680-8680, Alexandria, VA 22302. Telephone: 703-845-8223, FAX 703-845-8224 or Baker & Taylor Books. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 19-26 [Access article in PDF] Restriction and Individual Expression in the "Play Activity / Zokei Asobi " Since World War II, art teachers in Japan have wavered between two senses of value. The first issue is whether they should foster children's specific artistic ability (for example, drawing, painting, or sculpture) in art class. Many art teachers believe that there is a standard (...) body of knowledge about art that should be taught, much like chemistry or mathematics. In fact, teachers do set these restrictions by giving teaching materials or subjects of expression to children in art class. On the other hand, art teachers recognize the need to encourage the expression of each child's individual emotions and creativity. So, Japanese art teachers are faced with a contradiction: requiring [End Page 19] each child to express herself "freely" within an environment restricted by a set curriculum.In Japan, when the government guidelines for teaching were revised about 25 years ago, a new domain was instituted in the elementary school art class. The domain is called "Play Activity/Zokei Asobi." The field of expression consists of two domains: the making of works (visual objects) according to a theme or subject and the "Play Activity" using various materials. The former is equivalent to the basic picture, craft, design, and sculpture education. The Play Activity is based on the viewpoint that children's expression naturally comes from within and is expressed as spontaneous play, such as playing in the sand or with blocks. Because children have a natural curiosity, play is not to be directed by someone else, but by their own will. Children's spontaneous play is viewed as the beginning of individual expression. Although the Play Activity has not yet fully permeated into art education of Japan, it has brought some changes to art class. The Play Activity has forced art teachers to think about their role: whether one should emphasize restriction — "shall I teach something to children?" or freedom — "how should I deal with each child's individual expression?" In this essay, I explore teachers' stream of consciousness about children's expression and meanings and subjects of the Play Activity in Japan. Child's Expression and Works of Art The Japanese art class consists of two fields: "expression" and "appreciation." In the past, children's main activity has been expression in art class. In recent years, appreciation has gradually come to be thought of as important as expression. There are historical reasons for this general philosophy about "art".Many Japanese people think that only talented and famous painters or sculptors create "art." In their minds, "art" consists of highly valued "works of art" like those seen in museums and galleries. So, because it is quite different from that of a talented artist's masterpiece, children's expression has not been considered as art.On the other hand, children's expression is considered to be an important part of ego formation. In order to accomplish this, suitable materials and techniques must be part of the various formative experiences in art class. In this way, their inner emotions and thoughts can be communicated through the process and product of their expression. Because art teachers know such intuitive expression is an important part of life, it has been regarded as more important than appreciation. In this art class, children have not made "works of art" but have "expressed" themselves, thus they have been distanced from "Real art" (famous masterpieces). The Restriction Born of Confusion about the Sense of "Art" The Japanese general sense of "art" has brought a contradiction into art class. Because the works of talented and famous artists are highly valued in [End Page 20] many adults' minds, teachers often unrealistically expect young children to express as well as an adult.For example, many Japanese value lifelike pictures as excellent. Consequently, many adults expect children to draw objects exactly as they appear. A college student who grew up surrounded by this value system retains such a sense of value. And if she cannot draw a lifelike... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 19-26 [Access article in PDF] Restriction and Individual Expression in the "Play Activity / Zokei Asobi " Since World War II, art teachers in Japan have wavered between two senses of value. The first issue is whether they should foster children's specific artistic ability (for example, drawing, painting, or sculpture) in art class. Many art teachers believe that there is a standard (...) body of knowledge about art that should be taught, much like chemistry or mathematics. In fact, teachers do set these restrictions by giving teaching materials or subjects of expression to children in art class. On the other hand, art teachers recognize the need to encourage the expression of each child's individual emotions and creativity. So, Japanese art teachers are faced with a contradiction: requiring [End Page 19] each child to express herself "freely" within an environment restricted by a set curriculum.In Japan, when the government guidelines for teaching were revised about 25 years ago, a new domain was instituted in the elementary school art class. The domain is called "Play Activity/Zokei Asobi." The field of expression consists of two domains: the making of works (visual objects) according to a theme or subject and the "Play Activity" using various materials. The former is equivalent to the basic picture, craft, design, and sculpture education. The Play Activity is based on the viewpoint that children's expression naturally comes from within and is expressed as spontaneous play, such as playing in the sand or with blocks. Because children have a natural curiosity, play is not to be directed by someone else, but by their own will. Children's spontaneous play is viewed as the beginning of individual expression. Although the Play Activity has not yet fully permeated into art education of Japan, it has brought some changes to art class. The Play Activity has forced art teachers to think about their role: whether one should emphasize restriction — "shall I teach something to children?" or freedom — "how should I deal with each child's individual expression?" In this essay, I explore teachers' stream of consciousness about children's expression and meanings and subjects of the Play Activity in Japan. Child's Expression and Works of Art The Japanese art class consists of two fields: "expression" and "appreciation." In the past, children's main activity has been expression in art class. In recent years, appreciation has gradually come to be thought of as important as expression. There are historical reasons for this general philosophy about "art".Many Japanese people think that only talented and famous painters or sculptors create "art." In their minds, "art" consists of highly valued "works of art" like those seen in museums and galleries. So, because it is quite different from that of a talented artist's masterpiece, children's expression has not been considered as art.On the other hand, children's expression is considered to be an important part of ego formation. In order to accomplish this, suitable materials and techniques must be part of the various formative experiences in art class. In this way, their inner emotions and thoughts can be communicated through the process and product of their expression. Because art teachers know such intuitive expression is an important part of life, it has been regarded as more important than appreciation. In this art class, children have not made "works of art" but have "expressed" themselves, thus they have been distanced from "Real art" (famous masterpieces). The Restriction Born of Confusion about the Sense of "Art" The Japanese general sense of "art" has brought a contradiction into art class. Because the works of talented and famous artists are highly valued in [End Page 20] many adults' minds, teachers often unrealistically expect young children to express as well as an adult.For example, many Japanese value lifelike pictures as excellent. Consequently, many adults expect children to draw objects exactly as they appear. A college student who grew up surrounded by this value system retains such a sense of value. And if she cannot draw a lifelike... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 124-137 [Access article in PDF] Difference, Visual Narration, and "Point of View" in My Name is Red Feride Çiçekoglu This paper focuses on the difference between Eastern and Western ways of visual narration, taking as its frame of reference the novel My Name is Red, by Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, announced on May (...) 19, 2003 at Dublin Castle. 1This book is particularly important in terms of visual narration because it highlights the critical concept of "point of view" (POV). In his now internationally renowned novel, Pamuk's anachronistically created characters confront each other on ways of seeing and visual narration in the context of sixteenth-century Istanbul, when it was the capital of the Ottoman Empire. The visual narratives of miniature painting are elaborated in comparison with the contemporary Renaissance art, unfolding the differences in the depiction of faces, in particular. Style in visual narration is treated in the novel as a reflection of seeing and imaging the faces in their uniqueness and iscontrasted with the tradition of Islamic book illumination where all faces appear to be the same. Western concerns with individuality and the uniqueness of the POV as revealed in one-point-perspective, suggests it is an indispensable aspect of style. In that sense, My Name is Red highlights portraiture in the visual arts as a reflection of character in visual narration; reflecting both the subject and the artist whose individuality is represented in the style of painting. Pamuk's novel, constructed as a symphony of many different voices, is well-suited in its form to its subject matter since it elaborates the concept of POV in fictional narrative structure. Through his characters, Pamuk's readers enter a world where Renaissance perspectivism — a dominance of vision — confronts the ultimate vision of blindness, presented in the novel as the self-imposed fate of the miniaturists at the peak of their careers. The worry about point of view is thus contrasted with its opposite — the absence of vision as supreme achievement within the Islamic-Turkic tradition. [End Page 124]This essay discusses issues of portraiture and character, movement and time, and story and space with reference to the narrative structure in fiction film. It aims to contribute to the discussion on POV in visual narration, dealing with the narrative structure of film as a continuation and interaction of different traditions in East and West. "Point of View" Revisited As a key concept in the narrative structure of both film and literary fiction, POV has been controversial. As a technical term in film practice, however, it is defined rather clearly: POV is a camera concept which describes what is seen by the camera. Where one puts the camera and what the camera sees defines the frame and the image. When one wants to tell a story with a sequence of images, one has to consider how one will use the camera, both for the whole sequence and for each image. From whose point of view, or from which different points of view will the story be told? Will it originate with a omniscient point of view or with the point of view of one of the characters, diving into the story from the inside? Will the camera be placed at the top of the room, on a crane, or under the table from where a child can see only the legs of the grown-ups? One has to make a series of technical and artisticdecisions relevant to the policy of points of view from which to narrate. This is similar to a comic strip, except that in visual narration with a camera, the frames follow one another in time rather than in space, creating the illusion that the images are moving when projected.We take this premise so much for granted in an age flooded withimages — seeing almost as a camera ourselves — that we tend to overlook the fact that once there were other ways of seeing and narrating. Narratives... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Destruction and Transcendence in W. G. SebaldMark R. McCullohIFor all the Saturnine pessimism of W. G. Sebald's application of Walter Benjamin's view of historical process (an attitude toward history expounded upon at length in an influential work by Susan Sontag), the author's sense of irony about the human predicament is irrepressible. 1 Human beings seem destined to remain prisoners of various paradoxes—they both create and destroy, they are capable (...) of acts of love as well as bitterness and hate, they make efforts to document and communicate, but at the same time they tend to forget and are given to suppressing the truth, they are driven by ideals, yet remain hobbled by imperfection. Art and music, passed on from generation to generation, seem to be the most common way that human beings transcend the strictures of their imperfections, inadequacies, and their finitude. And to the extent that art indeed survives over time, and continues to be perceived and appreciated by beholders, the aesthetic enterprise succeeds. However, ultimately, as the Book of Ecclesiastes and Shelley's "Ozymandias" remind us, all human endeavor is in vain, and, to assume the perspective of physical cosmology for a moment—and in this regard Benjamin's cosmic vision appears painfully accurate—our speck of earth, dwarfed by a vast universe the true immensity of which has been revealed by the Hubble Telescope, will one day be ground to dust and debris like the rings of Saturn, and our sun will exist only as a burned-out hulk. But such a future world, devoid of beholders, and devoid of creators and their artifacts, is not Sebald's primary subject, even though it clearly forms the teleological backdrop for his third novel, The Rings of Saturn (1995, English version 1998). Rather, Sebald pursues his art in spite of a terminal prospect that will ultimately confront our [End Page 395] planet and solar system. His primary subject, the effect of trauma on individual and collective experience, is instead closely linked with the passing of Europe as a tradition, as an idea—as an idiosyncratic and innovative, but inherently corrupt contributor to cultural history. In the course of his narratives he also addresses the redemptive role of art in memorializing the past and attempting to capture the passing present. In both respects he attends to the humane and the sublime as well as the tragic and the grotesque.Paraphrasing the art historian Svetlana Alpers, one early reviewer of Sebald's novel Austerlitz (2001) points out the self-contradictory nature of preserving the transient moment in art:Why create visual art at all when everything on earth must be represented in its inexorable transitoriness; why paint earthly scenes with such incredible care and precision as if they were permanent? 2The care and precision of the painter's craft (in this case, the Dutch still-life painter David Bailly) are devoted to the representation of a scene that is by its very nature transient and even tenuous—like the scenes of sublime beauty in Sebald's fiction, the artist's depiction "courts and admits" its own fragility. What Bailly does visually, Sebald attempts in words. Take, for instance, the following passage from Vertigo, Sebald's first novel, which was titled in German (with considerably more irony) Schwindel. Gefühle 3 :At a hairpin bend I looked out of the turning bus down into the depths below and could see the turquoise surfaces of the Ferstein and Smaranger lakes, which, even when I was a child, on our first excursions into the Tyrol, had seemed to me the essence of all conceivable beauty.(p. 176)The author has already prepared the reader for this moment of awe by remarking on the otherworldly "slow-motion quality" of the waterfalls descending from the mountain cliffs and on the boulders in their screes spreading downwards into the wooded hillsides, "screes which reached from the mountains down into the forests like pale fingers into dark hair..." (p. 176). Examined closely, the passage in question suggests both the enduring power of natural beauty and, especially with its precise reference to an automobile long since out of production and unfamiliar to... (shrink)

The most notorious and celebrated forger of the twentieth century, Han van Meegeren (1889-1947), was born in the Dutch town of Deventer. He was fascinated by drawing as a child, and pursued it despite his father’s disapproval, sometimes spending all his pocket money on art supplies. In high school he was able finally to receive professional instruction, and went on to study architecture, according to his father’s wishes. In 1911 he married Anna de Voogt. His artistic talents were recognized (...) when he soon after won first prize and a gold medal from the General Sciences Section of the Delft Institute of Technology for a drawing of a church interior. He agreed to sell this drawing, but was discovered by his wife making a copy of it to sell as the original. She dissuaded him from carrying out this small swindle, but the incident is the first evidence of an interest in faking, even if in this case the artist was merely forging his own prize-winning work. (shrink)

As is usually the case with what I work on, I read some stuff I liked. I 1 read an article on comics by Greg Hayman and Henry Pratt and some work on 2 videogames,GrantTavinor’sreallyexcellentworkonthattopic. Ifoundthematerial interesting and I thought I had something to say about it. That’s what usually motivates me and that’s what did in these cases. With comics, my interest in the medium played a big role. I was a child collector of Marvel. I got turned (...) on to independent and alternative comics about ten years ago by a good friend who’s a successful comics artist and that played a role in my writing about comics. (shrink)

Literature is recognised as having significantly influenced the development of modern psychoanalytic thought. In recent years psychoanalysis has drawn increasingly on the literary and artistic traditions of western culture and moved away from its original medical–scientific context. Originally published in 1991 _The Chamber of Maiden Thought _ is an original and revealing exploration of the seminal role of literature in forming the modern psychoanalytic model of the mind. The crux of the 'post-Kleinian' psychoanalytic view of personality development lies in the (...) internal relations between the self and the mind's 'objects'. Meg Harris Williams and Margot Waddell show that these relations have their origins in the drama of identifications which we can see played out metaphorically and figuratively in literature, which presents the self-creative process in aesthetic terms. They argue that psychoanalysis is a true child of literature rather than merely the interpreter or explainer of literature, illustrating this with some examples from clinical experience, but drawing above all on close scrutiny of the dynamic mental processes presented in the work of Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantic poets, Emily Bronte and George Eliot. _The Chamber of Maiden Thought_ will encourage psychoanalytic workers to respond to the influence of literature in exploring symbolic mental processes. By bringing psychoanalysis into creative conjunction with the arts, it enables practitioners to tap a cultural potential whose insights into the human mind are of immense value. (shrink)

Literature is recognised as having significantly influenced the development of modern psychoanalytic thought. In recent years psychoanalysis has drawn increasingly on the literary and artistic traditions of western culture and moved away from its original medical–scientific context. Originally published in 1991 _The Chamber of Maiden Thought _ is an original and revealing exploration of the seminal role of literature in forming the modern psychoanalytic model of the mind. The crux of the 'post-Kleinian' psychoanalytic view of personality development lies in the (...) internal relations between the self and the mind's 'objects'. Meg Harris Williams and Margot Waddell show that these relations have their origins in the drama of identifications which we can see played out metaphorically and figuratively in literature, which presents the self-creative process in aesthetic terms. They argue that psychoanalysis is a true child of literature rather than merely the interpreter or explainer of literature, illustrating this with some examples from clinical experience, but drawing above all on close scrutiny of the dynamic mental processes presented in the work of Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantic poets, Emily Bronte and George Eliot. _The Chamber of Maiden Thought_ will encourage psychoanalytic workers to respond to the influence of literature in exploring symbolic mental processes. By bringing psychoanalysis into creative conjunction with the arts, it enables practitioners to tap a cultural potential whose insights into the human mind are of immense value. (shrink)

Volume 19 of _The Annual of Psychoanalysis_ turns to the ever-intriguing relationship between "Psychoanalysis and Art." This introductory section begins with Donald Kuspit's scholarly reflections on the role of analysis in visual art and art criticism, and then proceeds to a series of topical studies on Freud and art introduced by Harry Trosman. Egyptologist Lorelei Corcoran explores the Egypt of Freud's imagination, thereby illuminating our understanding of the archaeological metaphor. Marion Tolpin offers new insights into Freud's analysis of the American (...) writer Hilda Doolittle by focusing on the meaning of the Goddess Athene - whose statue rested on Freud's desk - to both analyst and analysand. Stephen Toulmin examines Freud's artistic sensibility - and places the historical significance of Freud's art collection in bold relief - by looking at the many contemporary art objects Freud chose _not_ to collect. Danielle Knafo identifies key events in the early life of Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele that were "primary determinants" of the content and form of his self-portraits. And Barbara Almond examines the spontaneous healing process depicted in Margaret Drabble's novel _The Needle's Eye _as an analogue to the kind of growth and development mobilized by the psychoanalytic process. Section II, "Psychoanalysis and Development," begins with Barbara Fajardo's appreciation of the contribution of biology to analyzability; she reviews findings from both infant research and biogenetic research that tend toward an understanding of "constitution" as resilience in development and, subsequently, in treatment. Benjamin Garber adds to the psychoanalytic understanding of childhood learning disabilities by presenting the three-and-a-half-year analysis of a learning-disabled child. In a fascinating two-part contribution, "Bridging the Chasm Between Developmental Theory and Clinical Theory," Joseph Palombo sheds light on some of the knottiest problems in contemporary analysis, including the relationship between childhood events and the reconstruction of those events in treatment. In Section III, "Psychoanalysis and Empathy," Mary Newsome presents case material in support of her claim that the analyst's empathic understanding catalyzes the coalescence of the patient's affect and aim, that is, the patient's capacity to believe in and then realize his ambitions. The acquisition of the capacity, she contends, not only betokens a specific kind of structure formation, but is the bedrock of emerging self-cohesion. Her challenging paper is thoughtfully discussed by David Terman and Jerome Winer. Section IV of _The Annual_ offers Jerome Kavka's appreciation of the work of N. Lionel Blitzsten. Blitzsten, the first Chicago psychoanalyst and one of America's most gifted clinicians and teachers, anticipated modern concepts of narcissism in identifying "narcissistic neuroses" with special treatment requirements. Morris Sklansky furthers our understanding of Blitzsten in his discussion of Kavka's essay. Ranging across the analytic canvas with presentations as edifying as they are provocative, volume 19 of _The Annual of Psychoanalysis_ challenges readers to wrestle with issues at the cutting edge of the discipline. It takes a well-deserved place in the preeminent continuing series in the field. (shrink)

Traditional theories of autonomy argue for rational agents who are free to make decisions about the moral law and justice. Adopting these theories entails that children lack of autonomy; they are not fully developed rational agents, and, because of that, they are unable to engage in the complex cognitive capacities required by autonomy, such as critical self-reflection or substantive independence. Amy Mullin who, as part of a new area of philosophy called Philosophy of Childhood, argues for granting children minimal or (...) local autonomy. She argues that children's attachments to those they love can be a source of autonomy in a minimal sense. She claims that it is in the relationship with those the child loves that the child is able to find meaningful activities and is able to care for someone or something. I argue that Jeff Lemire’s Essex County Vol. 1 Tales from the Farm, is a depiction of childhood that illustrates Mullin’s ideas. However, I will argue that through the use of images as a form of language, Lemire offers an insight that is unique to the medium of the graphic novel. Lemire as an artist negotiates the optical physical surfaces and uses these surfaces as a language to bridge the gap between the child and the adult and help us understand the mind of children as autonomous agents. This is an important contribution since it will allow us to understand how children can demonstrate autonomy in some of the ways in which they conduct their lives and how this may be reason enough to grant them a voice when decisions that would affect their lives are made on their behalf, such as custody cases or end of life decisions. (shrink)

"I used to feel guilty at night. I live in, I always used to live in two countries, the diurnal one and the continuous very tempestuous nocturnal one.... What a delight to head off with high hopes to night's court, without any knowledge of what may happen! Where shall I be taken tonight! Into which country? Into which country of countries?" -- Hélène Cixous, from _Dream I Tell You_ For years, Hélène Cixous has been writing down fragments of her dreams (...) immediately after awaking. In _Dream I Tell You_, she collects fifty from the past ten years. Cixous's accounts of her dreamscapes resist standard psychoanalytic interpretations and reflect her lyrical, affecting, and deeply personal style. The dreams, reproduced in what Cixous calls both their "brute and innocent state," are infused with Cixous's humor, wit, and sense of playfulness. Dreams have always been a crucial part of Cixous's writing. They are her archives and it is with them that she writes. Without dreaming, Cixous writes, "I would crumble to dust." As in many of her other texts, Cixous's mother, father, daughter, and friends populate this work, which offers artistic and provocative meditations on the themes of family, death, and resurrection. Scenes of a daily life-getting a haircut, caring for her child, preparing for work-become beautifully and evocatively skewed in Cixous's dreams. She also writes of dreams, both amusing and unsettling, in which she spends an evening with Martin Heidegger, has her lunch quietly interrupted by a young lion, flees the Nazis, and tours Auschwitz. The "you" of the title is fellow philosopher and friend Jacques Derrida, to whom these texts are addressed. The book reflects on many of the subjects the two grappled with in their work and in conversation: the deconstruction of psychoanalysis, literary production, subjectivity, sexual difference, and the question of friendship. (shrink)

"I used to feel guilty at night. I live in, I always used to live in two countries, the diurnal one and the continuous very tempestuous nocturnal one.... What a delight to head off with high hopes to night's court, without any knowledge of what may happen! Where shall I be taken tonight! Into which country? Into which country of countries?" -- Hélène Cixous, from _Dream I Tell You_ For years, Hélène Cixous has been writing down fragments of her dreams (...) immediately after awaking. In _Dream I Tell You_, she collects fifty from the past ten years. Cixous's accounts of her dreamscapes resist standard psychoanalytic interpretations and reflect her lyrical, affecting, and deeply personal style. The dreams, reproduced in what Cixous calls both their "brute and innocent state," are infused with Cixous's humor, wit, and sense of playfulness. Dreams have always been a crucial part of Cixous's writing. They are her archives and it is with them that she writes. Without dreaming, Cixous writes, "I would crumble to dust." As in many of her other texts, Cixous's mother, father, daughter, and friends populate this work, which offers artistic and provocative meditations on the themes of family, death, and resurrection. Scenes of a daily life-getting a haircut, caring for her child, preparing for work-become beautifully and evocatively skewed in Cixous's dreams. She also writes of dreams, both amusing and unsettling, in which she spends an evening with Martin Heidegger, has her lunch quietly interrupted by a young lion, flees the Nazis, and tours Auschwitz. The "you" of the title is fellow philosopher and friend Jacques Derrida, to whom these texts are addressed. The book reflects on many of the subjects the two grappled with in their work and in conversation: the deconstruction of psychoanalysis, literary production, subjectivity, sexual difference, and the question of friendship. (shrink)

We began by…implying a comparison between Duchamp and the swindlers; we lately find ourselves . . . implying a comparison between Duchamp and the child. I believe that in the end both comparisons are essential to a thorough understanding of Duchamp's significance; it is also, however, essential that each comparison temper and qualify the other. The swindlers begin and end as aliens to the community on which they practice their art. Duchamp is as much inside the artworld as is (...) the child inside his community. On the other hand, Duchamp is not disenfranchised, as is the child, though, like the child, he is innocent of certain illusions typical of full enfranchisement. Like the swindlers, and unlike the child, Duchamp is full of guile. He pointedly produces something ambiguous, something which supports diametrically opposed readings, depending on where one's bets are placed. One of the readings amounts to a critique of the other reading as a hoax. But unlike the swindle, whose effectiveness depends on the degree to which the critique remains hidden and the hoax enjoys full rein, Duchamp's gesture is effective, as is the child's unambiguous announcement, to the degree that the critique embarrasses the hoax. It seems, then, that Duchamp embodies some rare and interesting combination of guile and innocence which the fable keeps apart by dividing them between agents whose activities are at cross-purposes. The limitation of the fable as an analogy is that it provides no model for the combination. The fable contains the figures of the swindler, of the gullible mark, and of the observer so innocent as to be incapable of duplicity. What we are confronted with in Duchamp is the figure of the wise guy.Joel Rudinow, a conceptual artist, created a multimedia satire entitled Higher Learnin'; or, The Song and Dance of Socrates: In Which the Love of Wisdom Leads to the Discovery that the Unlived Life is Not Worth Examining. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Justifying the Right to Music EducationMarja HeimonenIn this study I will explore legal philosophical questions related to music education.1 I will begin by asking, "Is there a right to music education?" and move on to consider what constitutes a right and what kind of music education is at issue. My argument is that there is a right to music education and to a certain kind of music education in (...) terms of content.In the Nordic countries, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and Norway, the right to general music education is based on law. All these countries belong to the Nordic legal culture. They are part of the Continental civil-law system consisting of enacted statutes with abstract norms. Case- and judge-centered common law that develops from decision to decision is used in Anglo-American societies such as the United States and England.2 The law usually leaves the contents of education more or less open.This study explores music education in the light of the ideas of Aristotle and some of his modern followers.3 Philosophers of music education significantly influenced this study, in which I argue that the principal aims of education are connected not only to musical skills, but also to virtues, moral philosophy, and the education of the human being as a whole. My objective is to make the differences [End Page 119] between the aims and content of music education in various societies more explicit and understandable.The right to music education is closely connected to its justification. In practice, music education is justified in terms of internal goods (in other words, by self-justifying values emphasizing personal well-being and self-expression) and external goods (favoring the effective training of future professionals, for instance). I will suggest that external goods should be subordinate to internal goods, and that an optional balance between the two is needed. This balance is achieved through continuous debate in a living tradition that focuses on the holistic view of the aims in music education.However, deeper arguments are needed in justifying the right to music education. According to Estelle Jorgensen, a dynamic and dialectic process characterizes music and education, both of which are part of the changing society and the culture that surrounds them: transformation is ongoing all the time.4 I will argue that music education has an important role not only for the individual, but also for society as a whole, since music could be regarded as an instrument in the teaching of virtues.The question that follows is: what kind of virtues? This essay explores the role of music education in developing one of the fundamental virtues in society, the sense of justice. The role of the music teacher could be compared with that of the judge: to build cases in real practical situations in the framework of general principles, which may be both written (such as law and curricula) and unwritten (tradition). Theory and practice have to go hand in hand—general principles always have to be adapted to individual situations (and not vice versa)—when music educators are acting in the present society.The ApproachThe right to music education includes not only the question of the right of every child and adolescent to receive a certain number of music lessons or to attend a music school. It also involves aspects related to values, aims, and contents. To clarify the complexity of rights in this context, we might think of several levels. The first level of ideological options comprises training for a professional career for which the notion of legal philosophy leans on analytical legal positivism. The second level of ideological options refers to artistic self-expression and the notion of law for this is outlined in terms of "law as culture" and natural law philosophy. The third level consists of the maintenance of societal or cultural values through music education and its notion of legal philosophy is given in terms of the historical school of law and natural law philosophy. A child's rights to music might be regarded as a negative freedom right, with protection against illegal interference on the part of the state, a positive welfare right (an [End... (shrink)