Art, Literature, the Sublime, and Tragic Fear (conclusion)
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Announcements:
(1) Term paper proposals due today
(2) Dead River Rough Cut: another showing today 2:30 pm, Bradfield 101
Student responses: what the question is asking for.
II. Interpretation and aesthetic appreciation
A. “appropriate emotion”
Mulligan, Kevin. 1998. “From Appropriate Emotions to Values.” The Monist 81 (1):161-188.
B. “aesthetic appreciation”
Miller, Richard W. 1998. “Three Versions of Objectivity: Aesthetic, Moral, and Scientific.” In Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, edited by J. Levinson. New York: Cambridge University Press.
“Aesthetic appreciation is the enjoyment of a process of responding to an object that is not directed at learning, but is sufficiently like learning; this learning-like process might have elements of passive reception, surprise, exploration, imaginative construction, discovery, the achievement of coherence, or the perception of underlying normality” (Miller, 38).
C. “the scale of aesthetic response”
“In aesthetic appreciation, the learninglike response one enjoys can be more or less sustained, complex, or surprising. One's enjoyment can be more or less intense or prolonged. Finally, one can enjoy the learninglike response in an emotional way, enjoying it sadly, perhaps, or with pity and terror. In more or less obvious ways, these varieties of aesthetic appreciation correspond to the terms of serious critical appraisal. One can rank these responses in value (leaving much appropriate indeterminacy in the ranking), by asking what specific kinds of aesthetic appreciation an intelligent, morally serious person with relevant background knowledge--that is, someone meeting Hume's prescriptions for critical competence--would care about more if special limits to leisure and energy were no problem and if she did care about aesthetic value. If someone enjoys the richer, more sustained, yet more unpredictable structure of Beethoven's op. 131 quartet as compared with his op. 18, no. 1, but doesn't care more [emph. orig.] about the former response, than either he is too tired for the more strenuous delights or he lacks interest in the solution of large problems, which marks him as intellectually sluggish. Here the cognitive helps to rationalize our aesthetic assessments. Similarly, if an appreciator isn't especially interested in the combination of terror and pity that Aristotle describes, he is not a morally serious person. So the moral also helps to rationalize our aesthetic assessments. The interests that move someone who functions well intellectually and morally organize the specific, autonomous kids of aesthetic appreciation into a kind of normal scale. The highest point on the scale at which a response that someone could have to a work is located determines its aesthetic value” (Miller, 40-41).
Palmer, Richard H. 1992. Tragedy and Tragic Theory: An Analytic Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. [slide]:
* Palmer’s working definition: “Tragedy is a dramatic form that stimulates a response of intense, interdependent, and inseparably balanced attraction and repulsion.”
E. Other sources
Aristotle
Martha Nussbaum
etc.
Burke’s sections on tragedy
Immanuel Kant, in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, makes the connection between tragedy and the sublime explicit.
III. Conclusion: Edmund Burke and the Sublime in Art revisited
IV. Finally, some
Post-lecture food for thought:
NOTA BENE: Consider what Iris Murdoch says about tragedy:
Iris Murdoch (mentioned in lecture Wednesday), in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, comments: “The tragic is not the same as sorrow—sorrow, grief, of course is also in the air we breathe. Tragedy belongs only to art, where it occupies a very small area.” (92)
She also says “The concept of the tragic is obscure, one is tempted to say confused or incoherent. Real life is not tragic. Religion is not tragic. These are [merely] interesting and important borderlines. . . . ‘The tragic’ sometimes makes its appearance as a[n] . . . attitude to life . . . . Newspapers talk about ‘tragic situations’ or ‘tragedies at sea.’ When in real life unhappiness we ‘live the tragic’ or ‘see something as a tragedy’ something false may be involved . . . . Strictly speaking, tragedy belongs to literature. Tragedies are plays written by great poets” (93).
And finally, Murdoch says, “Tragedy belongs to art, and only to great art” (94).