Papers by Maria Ana Tupan
ncursiuni în imaginar 15. Magical Realism in Literature. Vol. 15. Nr. 1.
Associated with German post-expressionism, new objectivity,
French surrealism and dadaism, magic ... more Associated with German post-expressionism, new objectivity,
French surrealism and dadaism, magic realism is regarded as an
ontological scandal, a violation of the logic of identity through
the invention of a third level of reality. The name was coined by a
German critic and art historian, Franz Roh, in his book Nach-
Expressionismus. Magischer Realismus. Probleme der neuesten
europäischen Malerei, published in 1925, and employed again in
Foto-Auge, a book on the new phtography jointly published by
Roh with Jan Tschichold which served as a catalogue for the
avant-garde Film und Foto exhibition (FiFo) held in Stuttgart
between May and June 1929. By then, however, Roh’s essay had
already been translated into Italian and Spanish and promoted by
prominent thinkers of the day, such as Jose Ortega y Gasset, who
published it in the influential Revista de Occidente in Madrid in
1927, and by Massimo Bonterupelli, who translated it for the
Italian journal, 900 [Novecento].
The prompt and resonant international echo generated by
Roh’s new art can hardly be understood otherwise than on the
assumption that it was striking a familiar ring in the rapidly
changing and polyphonous score of European modernism.
Reputed for its international and heterogeneous character,
modernism is thus revealed to have been crossed by some
common currents of poetic matter and energy. The present essay
sets out to dig up the roots of a hybrid, literary and plastic
artistic mode in the earlier half of the last century, and to identify
legacies in the aftermath of Roh’s celebrated manifesto.
Incursiuni în imaginar 15. Magical Realism in Literature. Vol. 15. Nr. 1. pp. 27-44, 2024
Associated with German post-expressionism, new objectivity,
French surrealism and dadaism, magic ... more Associated with German post-expressionism, new objectivity,
French surrealism and dadaism, magic realism is regarded as an
ontological scandal, a violation of the logic of identity through
the invention of a third level of reality. The name was coined by a
German critic and art historian, Franz Roh, in his book Nach-
Expressionismus. Magischer Realismus. Probleme der neuesten
europäischen Malerei, published in 1925, and employed again in
Foto-Auge, a book on the new phtography jointly published by
Roh with Jan Tschichold which served as a catalogue for the
avant-garde Film und Foto exhibition (FiFo) held in Stuttgart
between May and June 1929. By then, however, Roh’s essay had
already been translated into Italian and Spanish and promoted by
prominent thinkers of the day, such as Jose Ortega y Gasset, who
published it in the influential Revista de Occidente in Madrid in
1927, and by Massimo Bonterupelli, who translated it for the
Italian journal, 900 [Novecento].
The prompt and resonant international echo generated by
Roh’s new art can hardly be understood otherwise than on the
assumption that it was striking a familiar ring in the rapidly
changing and polyphonous score of European modernism.
Reputed for its international and heterogeneous character,
modernism is thus revealed to have been crossed by some
common currents of poetic matter and energy. The present essay
sets out to dig up the roots of a hybrid, literary and plastic
artistic mode in the earlier half of the last century, and to identify
legacies in the aftermath of Roh’s celebrated manifesto.
Self-Construal in Post-colonial Literature, 2024
The Introductory Study to "Self-Construal in Post-colonial Literature" is an analysis of the con... more The Introductory Study to "Self-Construal in Post-colonial Literature" is an analysis of the concept of self-construal from Renė Descartes and Immanuel Kant to the beginning of the new millennium in light of changing epistemological paradigms.
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, Dec 27, 2023
Incursiuni în imaginar, Aug 19, 2023
Reality and fiction build a binary which shared the fate of dualist thinking in general in the po... more Reality and fiction build a binary which shared the fate of dualist thinking in general in the postmodernist age, dominated by deconstruction. The climactic point was probably reached by the fabrication of lens which magnify reality. The fabrication of virtual reality lens was meant to augment reality, virtual reality meaning less or a deformed reality show. Science and technology have thus reified the philosophical battle over positivist taxonomies and classifications that first came under the philosophical onslaught of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. The "either/ or" dichotomy of the former ended up in the latter's "beyond", which, in quantum language, is a superposition of opposite states. Although the bulk of fantasy and science-fiction still capitalizes on the distinct ontologies of reality and fiction, the literature of late modernity (modernism and postmodernism) speculated on an ontological hybrid bridging the ontological gap between the two of them. Such are the modernist novel, "Isabel and the Devil's Waters" by Mircea Eliade, and the postmodernist story, "Schrödinger's Cat," by Ursula K. Le Guin read in the key of an ontological poetics in the present paper.
Recent Research Advances in Arts and Social Studies, Apr 6, 2024
Martin Heidegger’s “Dialogue on Language”[1] between himself and a Japanese who visited him at hi... more Martin Heidegger’s “Dialogue on Language”[1] between himself and a Japanese who visited him at his home in Freiburg in March 1954 is the best known but not a singular event of this kind in the last century, either in respect to the topic (the opposition between the East and the West) or setting. The three dialogues of the Platonic kind we are referring to in this paper, involving three major figures of the twentieth century intellectual history – W.B. Yeats, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida -, are all sites of debate on cultural differences. Generally perceived as statements in the unsurpassable distinctions of mental make-up mapped onto geographical frontiers, these European-Japanese encounters seem, at a closer look, to convey quite the opposite meaning, encrypted, however, at a deeper, subconscious, level of a false consciousness, nourished by fashionable ideas of the moment. Lurking beneath Lacanian “letters in the unconscious” inscripted by master narratives of racial and cultural differences in non-empty (embodied) subjects, there are the universal drives of a plural intentional subjectivity that can be interpreted and communicated across cultural barriers.
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, Dec 23, 2023
Rosi Braidotti's theory of "nomadic subject" (2011) has shifted the focus from traveller in the l... more Rosi Braidotti's theory of "nomadic subject" (2011) has shifted the focus from traveller in the literal sense of the word to subject as a process; becoming subject entails a denial of universals in the construction of identity which is redefined as situated embodiment in the world, open to the heteronormativity of changing social codes and accepted modes of living or of conceiving otherness. Nevertheless, travel has always been associated with an explicit ethos, whether as a pious pilgrimage, educational world tour or the grand narrative of civilizing mission. Located on various maps, real or imaginary, civilizations are brought into contact by the huge number of migrants, the problems they raise including the relationship between third worlds and metropolitan cities/ countries, the migrants' othering by mainstream populations, the migrants' desire to be naturalised and the estrangement from their true selves as a result. By building simulation models, speculative fiction probes deeply into underground concerns which well up to the surface in postcolonial literature, being expected to produce cognitive enlightenment. Relieved from the material deprivations of the colonial past, the postcolonial subject is now caught in the process of identitarian reconstruction.
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2023
Rosi Braidotti's theory of "nomadic subject" (2011) has shifted the focus from traveller in the l... more Rosi Braidotti's theory of "nomadic subject" (2011) has shifted the focus from traveller in the literal sense of the word to subject as a process; becoming subject entails a denial of universals in the construction of identity which is redefined as situated embodiment in the world, open to the heteronormativity of changing social codes and accepted modes of living or of conceiving otherness. Nevertheless, travel has always been associated with an explicit ethos, whether as a pious pilgrimage, educational world tour or the grand narrative of civilizing mission. Located on various maps, real or imaginary, civilizations are brought into contact by the huge number of migrants, the problems they raise including the relationship between third worlds and metropolitan cities/ countries, the migrants' othering by mainstream populations, the migrants' desire to be naturalised and the estrangement from their true selves as a result. By building simulation models, speculative fiction probes deeply into underground concerns which well up to the surface in postcolonial literature, being expected to produce cognitive enlightenment. Relieved from the material deprivations of the colonial past, the postcolonial subject is now caught in the process of identitarian reconstruction.
Born at the intersection of literary analysis and cultural history, the present study has collec... more Born at the intersection of literary analysis and cultural history, the present study has collected evidence in support of the idea that, far from being decadent, in the sense of perverse pursuit of gratuitous refinement and aesthetic relief from historical apathy, the art at the turn of the twentieth century was energized by a will to meaningful form grounded in current epistemology, especially in the science maîtresse of the time, psychology, and other kindred disciplines – psychological phenomenology and phenomenological existentialism.
No matter how rebellious modernists might appear to us nowadays, they did not create in the teeth of what their contemporaries launched on the market of ideas; it was only that their loans were from non-literary sources. Of such transparadigmatic interaction, TS Eliot, the master mind of the age, was well aware. Pondering on “the nature and the function of a literary review” in the first issue of The New Criterion (VOL. IV, No. I, 1926), he considers that “the purest literature is alimented from non-literary sources, and has non-literary consequences”.
Phenomenology is probably the first that comes to mind when speaking about the generative depth models of modernist art, which rendered notions such as aesthetic taste, imagination and genre irrelevant, demanding instead recourse to exploration of perception, phenomenological constitution, and reasoning through images as sources of its favourite tropes: metaphor and metonymy.
The rise of phenomenological aesthetics in the early twentieth century and its relevance to modernist poetics is not a new idea, but the referential frames are commonly borrowed from the present canon instead of those thinkers in whom verbal echoes are identified that testify to a deliberate loan.
A historicist approach looking for the authors who were influential back then will broaden the circle to include figures of the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth (Washington Allston, H. L. Mansel, Wilhelm Wundt, Alexander Bain, Alfred Binet, Alfred Adler, Sándor Ferenczi, a.o.), whose shadows are looming behind modernist texts by T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, Wallace Stevens, T. E. Hulme, Flann O’Brien, Mircea Eliade, et al. Wilhelm Wundt’s Elements de Psychologie physiologique (1886), for instance, contains in a concise form the conceptual array of modernist philosophy which offered a ground to modernist poetics: phenomenological constitution of subject and object, imagistic poetics, Bergson’s philosophy of the immediate data of consciousness and duration, the poetics of symbolist synaesthesia, Pound’s images, T.S. Eliot’s objective correlatives, a.o.
Concepts, such as Arthur George Tansley’s “Combustion Chambers,” Alfred Adler’s “Web of Connectivity”, or Sándor Ferenczi's “Dialogues of the Unconscious,” are deemed to have served as simulation models of character construction in Virginia Woolf.
Less popular today than Worringer’s “Abstraction and Empathy”, the 1905 Psychologische Forschungen by Theodor Lipps earned him a huge international reputation at the time due to his theory of empathetic aesthetics which offered epistemological support to fictionists for doubling up the plot according to different generic conventions (such as real and imaginary) - an occasion for the redefinition of genre, reputedly absent from modernists‘ concern.
The modernist password, art for art’s sake, receives an ontological meaning in F. H. Bradley’s 1893 Appearance and Reality. Appearances are defined in a way which allows them to pass for realities, receiving an ontological rather than psychological status. Why not allow each appearance to be real as an independent state in a time-series, generated from the Absolute by a permutation operator (like those generating wave functions, AN)? he wonders, building a model similar to quantum decoherence.
The intentional subject becomes its own object of a specular abyss (Paul Valery: ne cessez de me voir). Identity - racial social, textual– is not felt as given or biologically-grounded but as constituted by an intentional subject. Phenomenology was a way out of essentialism, From cult object, art enters into a probabilistic regime open to phenomenological variation.
International journal of research - granthaalayah, Nov 30, 2022
How to cite this article (APA): Tupan, M. A. (2022). Back to the Elements"? Postmodernity's Colla... more How to cite this article (APA): Tupan, M. A. (2022). Back to the Elements"? Postmodernity's Collapse of Ontological Categories.
International Journal of Research in Academic World (IJRAW)https://academicjournal.ijraw.com/articles?year=2022&month=August&vol=1&issue=12, 2022
The artist figure of late modernity is commonly seen either as the constructivist self-reflexive ... more The artist figure of late modernity is commonly seen either as the constructivist self-reflexive subject of modernism (Valéry: "je me voyais me voir") or as an open series of subject positions in language in the post-deconstructionist age. The artist as agent of enlightenment, as shepherd figure, guru or other spiritual guide sounds like an outdated legacy confined to premodernity. Nevertheless, despite tropical heterogeneity and ontological hybridity, the most celebrated epic of the earlier twentieth century, T S Eliot's The Waste Land, and an emblematic movie of 1991, The Fisher King, directed by Terry Gilliam and written by Richard LaGravenese, revive the figure of the artist as sage and teacher of mankind modelled on the hero of the Grail romances whose roots are shown to reach back in time to Hindu and Buddhist mythology.
International Journal of Research -GRANTHAALAYAH
Martin Heidegger’s Dialogie on Language between himself and a Japanese who visited him at his hom... more Martin Heidegger’s Dialogie on Language between himself and a Japanese who visited him at his home in Freiburg in March 1954 is the best known but not a singular event of this kind in the last century, either in respect to the topic (the opposition between the East and the West) or setting. The three cases we are referring to in this paper are all communications of the Platonic kind, that is, sites of debate on cultural differences. Generally perceived as statements in the unsurpassable distinctions of mental make-up mapped onto geographical frontiers, these European-Japanese encounters seem, at a closer look, to convey quite the opposite meaning encrypted, however, at a deeper, subconscious level of a false consciousenss nourished by fashionable ideas of the moment.
The Australasian journal of Irish studies, 2016
Review(s) of: Irish science fiction, by Jack Fennell, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014... more Review(s) of: Irish science fiction, by Jack Fennell, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014, 224pp. 75 pounds, ISBN 9781781381199.
The present paper addresses a question that was born simultaneously with the emergence of a non-o... more The present paper addresses a question that was born simultaneously with the emergence of a non-organic factor in the generation and utopian projection of human beings. The organicist view of romanticism perceived the animating effect of Luigi Galvani’s experiment, according to Mary Shelley’s ground-breaking scientific romance Frankenstein (1818), as disquieting as humanist Horatio’s response to Old Hamlet’s ghost in Shakespeare’s 1600 tragedy. Horatio’s qualification of the ghost as “a mole in the eye” renders exactly the sense of an impurity that does not fit among the familiar phenomena of the known world. Mary Shelley too envisioned the role of technology in the future projects of biologically and intellectually enhanced human beings, leaving behind humanistic notions of natura naturans , or projects of improvement of the biological given through education or acculturation creating a second nature. Looking at several rival versions of utopianism, the present paper has opted for ...
The attempt to locate representative literary works within the whole social semiosis, including t... more The attempt to locate representative literary works within the whole social semiosis, including the scientific and philosophical ideas pervasive in a phase of culture, owes much to the field concept of quantum physics. From N. Katherine Hayles's seminal approach to the mutual interaction between the cultural matrix and individual works in The Cosmic Web. Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (1984) to recent contributions by C.
Journal of Arts and Humanities, 2016
T.S. Eliot’s query in The Waste Land , “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” may be sai... more T.S. Eliot’s query in The Waste Land , “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” may be said to sum up the hermeneutic situation of any language act, whether of sign production or interpretation. Whereas traditional topoi of expressionist aesthetics, such as the artist’s subjectivity, empirical psychology, truthfulness, intentionality, etc. have become irrelevant in the heteroglottic discourse of the most famous dirge on the decaying West, Eliot’s awareness of the matrical role of cultural semiosis allows us to place him among the founding fathers of semiotic aesthetics. The anagnorisis episode in The Waste Land is one of appropriate reading of the body of Christ through knowledge of the crucifixion scene and associated symbolism.Rooted in the insights of Charles Peirce Sanders and Charles Morris, and enlarged by post-war contributors, such as Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Michael B. Hardt, Richard Rudner, Foucault, Vattimo, Baudrillard and Deleuze, the semiotic, cultural mater...
"The Key to Change" is a book of essays on the mechanism generating transformations fro... more "The Key to Change" is a book of essays on the mechanism generating transformations from one cultural phase to another. In “The Age of the World Picture”, Heidegger is probing into the factors leading up to the onset of a new order in light of which phenomena make themselves “modern and up to date”: “What understanding of what is, what interpretation of truth, lies at the foundation of these phenomena?” A world picture - or rather a whole range of epistemological attractors - functions as a sign of recognition as well as a conceptual model articulation. Without common features, art objects could not be aligned under period terms. The history of their making can only be understood against the broader background of phase change. Each of the following essays is dedicated to some operator of change: the construction of a new identitarian narrative, transformative transmission, consistent matching of political views and narrative modes, evolution of genres, defamiliarization of precedents, dissemination of cultural models, the rewriting of tradition (through some differential operator which effects permutations on a previous domain of thematic and rhetorical elements), etc.
International Journal of Research -GRANTHAALAYAH, 2021
Is space relevant in a debate over the ethical dimension of a literary work? If we understand it ... more Is space relevant in a debate over the ethical dimension of a literary work? If we understand it as Foucault[1], Lefebvre[2], Soja[3] or Marc Auger[4] do, it is. In Andre Norton’s The Crossroads of Time[5], many worlds coexist as versions of an original earth, ruined by wars whose memories set agents under cover travelling across in order to defend what had remained of humanity besieged by monsters against a universal murderer, Kmoat Vo Pranj. The characters’ psychic powers depend on their interference with the environment – an idea probably originating with quantum experiments whose results depend on the interference of the measuring equipment with the system. An agent talks about alternative histories in an ecological version which relates individuals’ growth or success to favourable conditions in the world out there, to their or society’s benefit
Selected Topics in Humanities and Social Sciences Vol. 6, 2021
T.S. Eliot’s query in The Waste Land, “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” may be said... more T.S. Eliot’s query in The Waste Land, “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” may be said to sum up the hermeneutic situation of any language act, whether of sign production or interpretation. Whereas traditional topoi of expressionist aesthetics, such as the artist’s subjectivity, empirical psychology, truthfulness, intentionality, etc. have become irrelevant in the heteroglot discourse of the most famous dirge on the decaying West, Eliot’s awareness of the matrical role of cultural semiosis allows us to place him among the founding fathers of semiotic aesthetics. Rooted in the insights of Charles Sanders Peirce and Martin Heidegger (“Destruktion”, 1920), and enlarged by post-war contributors, such as Roland Barthes (Mythologies, 1957, [1], Umberto Eco (Trattato di semiotica generale, 1975) Michel Foucault (L’archeologie du savoir,1969), Rene Girard (Mensonge romantique et verite Romanesque, 1961), and Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari (Mille plateaux, 1980), the semiotic approach to art makes interpretation dependent on a mediating third (Peirce: the Interpretant), which is variously related to context, regime of signification, episteme, schemata, triangulation of desire. Our archaeology of T.S. Eliot’s contextual knowledge allows us to complete the poet’s own hypertext, which functions as a key to interpretation, and to fill in the meaning structure of The Waste Land, whose fragmentation and abrupt shifts in space and time make it look like a puzzle. In this essay, we are interested in digging up the innermost circle of reference, which is the historical context of the poet’s conversation with Marie Larisch, a cousin of Bavarian King Ludwig II, in the opening of the poem. In our attempt to retrieve the land under erasure, surfacing through allusions in the fictional “Waste Land”, we are taking a journey through Neuschwanstein and environs.
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Papers by Maria Ana Tupan
French surrealism and dadaism, magic realism is regarded as an
ontological scandal, a violation of the logic of identity through
the invention of a third level of reality. The name was coined by a
German critic and art historian, Franz Roh, in his book Nach-
Expressionismus. Magischer Realismus. Probleme der neuesten
europäischen Malerei, published in 1925, and employed again in
Foto-Auge, a book on the new phtography jointly published by
Roh with Jan Tschichold which served as a catalogue for the
avant-garde Film und Foto exhibition (FiFo) held in Stuttgart
between May and June 1929. By then, however, Roh’s essay had
already been translated into Italian and Spanish and promoted by
prominent thinkers of the day, such as Jose Ortega y Gasset, who
published it in the influential Revista de Occidente in Madrid in
1927, and by Massimo Bonterupelli, who translated it for the
Italian journal, 900 [Novecento].
The prompt and resonant international echo generated by
Roh’s new art can hardly be understood otherwise than on the
assumption that it was striking a familiar ring in the rapidly
changing and polyphonous score of European modernism.
Reputed for its international and heterogeneous character,
modernism is thus revealed to have been crossed by some
common currents of poetic matter and energy. The present essay
sets out to dig up the roots of a hybrid, literary and plastic
artistic mode in the earlier half of the last century, and to identify
legacies in the aftermath of Roh’s celebrated manifesto.
French surrealism and dadaism, magic realism is regarded as an
ontological scandal, a violation of the logic of identity through
the invention of a third level of reality. The name was coined by a
German critic and art historian, Franz Roh, in his book Nach-
Expressionismus. Magischer Realismus. Probleme der neuesten
europäischen Malerei, published in 1925, and employed again in
Foto-Auge, a book on the new phtography jointly published by
Roh with Jan Tschichold which served as a catalogue for the
avant-garde Film und Foto exhibition (FiFo) held in Stuttgart
between May and June 1929. By then, however, Roh’s essay had
already been translated into Italian and Spanish and promoted by
prominent thinkers of the day, such as Jose Ortega y Gasset, who
published it in the influential Revista de Occidente in Madrid in
1927, and by Massimo Bonterupelli, who translated it for the
Italian journal, 900 [Novecento].
The prompt and resonant international echo generated by
Roh’s new art can hardly be understood otherwise than on the
assumption that it was striking a familiar ring in the rapidly
changing and polyphonous score of European modernism.
Reputed for its international and heterogeneous character,
modernism is thus revealed to have been crossed by some
common currents of poetic matter and energy. The present essay
sets out to dig up the roots of a hybrid, literary and plastic
artistic mode in the earlier half of the last century, and to identify
legacies in the aftermath of Roh’s celebrated manifesto.
No matter how rebellious modernists might appear to us nowadays, they did not create in the teeth of what their contemporaries launched on the market of ideas; it was only that their loans were from non-literary sources. Of such transparadigmatic interaction, TS Eliot, the master mind of the age, was well aware. Pondering on “the nature and the function of a literary review” in the first issue of The New Criterion (VOL. IV, No. I, 1926), he considers that “the purest literature is alimented from non-literary sources, and has non-literary consequences”.
Phenomenology is probably the first that comes to mind when speaking about the generative depth models of modernist art, which rendered notions such as aesthetic taste, imagination and genre irrelevant, demanding instead recourse to exploration of perception, phenomenological constitution, and reasoning through images as sources of its favourite tropes: metaphor and metonymy.
The rise of phenomenological aesthetics in the early twentieth century and its relevance to modernist poetics is not a new idea, but the referential frames are commonly borrowed from the present canon instead of those thinkers in whom verbal echoes are identified that testify to a deliberate loan.
A historicist approach looking for the authors who were influential back then will broaden the circle to include figures of the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth (Washington Allston, H. L. Mansel, Wilhelm Wundt, Alexander Bain, Alfred Binet, Alfred Adler, Sándor Ferenczi, a.o.), whose shadows are looming behind modernist texts by T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, Wallace Stevens, T. E. Hulme, Flann O’Brien, Mircea Eliade, et al. Wilhelm Wundt’s Elements de Psychologie physiologique (1886), for instance, contains in a concise form the conceptual array of modernist philosophy which offered a ground to modernist poetics: phenomenological constitution of subject and object, imagistic poetics, Bergson’s philosophy of the immediate data of consciousness and duration, the poetics of symbolist synaesthesia, Pound’s images, T.S. Eliot’s objective correlatives, a.o.
Concepts, such as Arthur George Tansley’s “Combustion Chambers,” Alfred Adler’s “Web of Connectivity”, or Sándor Ferenczi's “Dialogues of the Unconscious,” are deemed to have served as simulation models of character construction in Virginia Woolf.
Less popular today than Worringer’s “Abstraction and Empathy”, the 1905 Psychologische Forschungen by Theodor Lipps earned him a huge international reputation at the time due to his theory of empathetic aesthetics which offered epistemological support to fictionists for doubling up the plot according to different generic conventions (such as real and imaginary) - an occasion for the redefinition of genre, reputedly absent from modernists‘ concern.
The modernist password, art for art’s sake, receives an ontological meaning in F. H. Bradley’s 1893 Appearance and Reality. Appearances are defined in a way which allows them to pass for realities, receiving an ontological rather than psychological status. Why not allow each appearance to be real as an independent state in a time-series, generated from the Absolute by a permutation operator (like those generating wave functions, AN)? he wonders, building a model similar to quantum decoherence.
The intentional subject becomes its own object of a specular abyss (Paul Valery: ne cessez de me voir). Identity - racial social, textual– is not felt as given or biologically-grounded but as constituted by an intentional subject. Phenomenology was a way out of essentialism, From cult object, art enters into a probabilistic regime open to phenomenological variation.
French surrealism and dadaism, magic realism is regarded as an
ontological scandal, a violation of the logic of identity through
the invention of a third level of reality. The name was coined by a
German critic and art historian, Franz Roh, in his book Nach-
Expressionismus. Magischer Realismus. Probleme der neuesten
europäischen Malerei, published in 1925, and employed again in
Foto-Auge, a book on the new phtography jointly published by
Roh with Jan Tschichold which served as a catalogue for the
avant-garde Film und Foto exhibition (FiFo) held in Stuttgart
between May and June 1929. By then, however, Roh’s essay had
already been translated into Italian and Spanish and promoted by
prominent thinkers of the day, such as Jose Ortega y Gasset, who
published it in the influential Revista de Occidente in Madrid in
1927, and by Massimo Bonterupelli, who translated it for the
Italian journal, 900 [Novecento].
The prompt and resonant international echo generated by
Roh’s new art can hardly be understood otherwise than on the
assumption that it was striking a familiar ring in the rapidly
changing and polyphonous score of European modernism.
Reputed for its international and heterogeneous character,
modernism is thus revealed to have been crossed by some
common currents of poetic matter and energy. The present essay
sets out to dig up the roots of a hybrid, literary and plastic
artistic mode in the earlier half of the last century, and to identify
legacies in the aftermath of Roh’s celebrated manifesto.
French surrealism and dadaism, magic realism is regarded as an
ontological scandal, a violation of the logic of identity through
the invention of a third level of reality. The name was coined by a
German critic and art historian, Franz Roh, in his book Nach-
Expressionismus. Magischer Realismus. Probleme der neuesten
europäischen Malerei, published in 1925, and employed again in
Foto-Auge, a book on the new phtography jointly published by
Roh with Jan Tschichold which served as a catalogue for the
avant-garde Film und Foto exhibition (FiFo) held in Stuttgart
between May and June 1929. By then, however, Roh’s essay had
already been translated into Italian and Spanish and promoted by
prominent thinkers of the day, such as Jose Ortega y Gasset, who
published it in the influential Revista de Occidente in Madrid in
1927, and by Massimo Bonterupelli, who translated it for the
Italian journal, 900 [Novecento].
The prompt and resonant international echo generated by
Roh’s new art can hardly be understood otherwise than on the
assumption that it was striking a familiar ring in the rapidly
changing and polyphonous score of European modernism.
Reputed for its international and heterogeneous character,
modernism is thus revealed to have been crossed by some
common currents of poetic matter and energy. The present essay
sets out to dig up the roots of a hybrid, literary and plastic
artistic mode in the earlier half of the last century, and to identify
legacies in the aftermath of Roh’s celebrated manifesto.
No matter how rebellious modernists might appear to us nowadays, they did not create in the teeth of what their contemporaries launched on the market of ideas; it was only that their loans were from non-literary sources. Of such transparadigmatic interaction, TS Eliot, the master mind of the age, was well aware. Pondering on “the nature and the function of a literary review” in the first issue of The New Criterion (VOL. IV, No. I, 1926), he considers that “the purest literature is alimented from non-literary sources, and has non-literary consequences”.
Phenomenology is probably the first that comes to mind when speaking about the generative depth models of modernist art, which rendered notions such as aesthetic taste, imagination and genre irrelevant, demanding instead recourse to exploration of perception, phenomenological constitution, and reasoning through images as sources of its favourite tropes: metaphor and metonymy.
The rise of phenomenological aesthetics in the early twentieth century and its relevance to modernist poetics is not a new idea, but the referential frames are commonly borrowed from the present canon instead of those thinkers in whom verbal echoes are identified that testify to a deliberate loan.
A historicist approach looking for the authors who were influential back then will broaden the circle to include figures of the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth (Washington Allston, H. L. Mansel, Wilhelm Wundt, Alexander Bain, Alfred Binet, Alfred Adler, Sándor Ferenczi, a.o.), whose shadows are looming behind modernist texts by T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, Wallace Stevens, T. E. Hulme, Flann O’Brien, Mircea Eliade, et al. Wilhelm Wundt’s Elements de Psychologie physiologique (1886), for instance, contains in a concise form the conceptual array of modernist philosophy which offered a ground to modernist poetics: phenomenological constitution of subject and object, imagistic poetics, Bergson’s philosophy of the immediate data of consciousness and duration, the poetics of symbolist synaesthesia, Pound’s images, T.S. Eliot’s objective correlatives, a.o.
Concepts, such as Arthur George Tansley’s “Combustion Chambers,” Alfred Adler’s “Web of Connectivity”, or Sándor Ferenczi's “Dialogues of the Unconscious,” are deemed to have served as simulation models of character construction in Virginia Woolf.
Less popular today than Worringer’s “Abstraction and Empathy”, the 1905 Psychologische Forschungen by Theodor Lipps earned him a huge international reputation at the time due to his theory of empathetic aesthetics which offered epistemological support to fictionists for doubling up the plot according to different generic conventions (such as real and imaginary) - an occasion for the redefinition of genre, reputedly absent from modernists‘ concern.
The modernist password, art for art’s sake, receives an ontological meaning in F. H. Bradley’s 1893 Appearance and Reality. Appearances are defined in a way which allows them to pass for realities, receiving an ontological rather than psychological status. Why not allow each appearance to be real as an independent state in a time-series, generated from the Absolute by a permutation operator (like those generating wave functions, AN)? he wonders, building a model similar to quantum decoherence.
The intentional subject becomes its own object of a specular abyss (Paul Valery: ne cessez de me voir). Identity - racial social, textual– is not felt as given or biologically-grounded but as constituted by an intentional subject. Phenomenology was a way out of essentialism, From cult object, art enters into a probabilistic regime open to phenomenological variation.
The circle of influencers has been broadened to include figures of the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, such as Washington Allston, H. L. Mansel, Wilhelm Wundt, Alexander Bain, Alfred Binet, Alfred Adler, and Sándor Ferenczi, whose shadows are shown to be looming behind modernist texts by T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, Wallace Stevens, T. E. Hulme, Flann O’Brien, Mircea Eliade, amongst others.
A less-discussed subject, literary genre in modernism, is redefined in light of psychology-based modernist aesthetics
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Born at the intersection of literary analysis and cultural history, the present book collects evidence in support of the idea that, far from being decadent, in the sense of perverse pursuit of gratuitous refinement and aesthetic relief from historical apathy, the art at the turn of the twentieth century was energised by a desire for meaningful form, grounded in current epistemology, especially of the science maîtresse of the time, psychology, and other kindred disciplines – psychological phenomenology and phenomenological existentialism.
The circle of influencers has been broadened to include figures of the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, such as Washington Allston, H. L. Mansel, Wilhelm Wundt, Alexander Bain, Alfred Binet, Alfred Adler, and Sándor Ferenczi, whose shadows are shown to be looming behind modernist texts by T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, Wallace Stevens, T. E. Hulme, Flann O’Brien, Mircea Eliade, amongst others.
A less-discussed subject, literary genre in modernism, is redefined in light of psychology-based modernist aesthetics.
It was one of the favourite issues of essayistic speculation in the later
nineteenth century when it came to be perceived as a more appropriate
epistemic position than Kantian transcendentalism in a post-Nietzschean
world, which had experienced the transvaluation of all values. Walter
Horatio Pater saw in relativity the very spirit of modernity.
In its twentieth-century hypostasis, radicalized by existentialism and
aggravated by the agno sticism of the Copenhagen School of Quantum
Physics, relativism was both lauded, especially by vanguard artists and
subversive social groups, and exposed as an amoral and dangerous
attitude.
Our essay is a revisionary and historicist approach to the issue, which
cuts across the disciplinary borders of science, philosophy, ethics and art.
Earlier versions of current theories in the New Physics, such as relative
time and space, the two (implicate and explicate) orders, the superposition
of states, fractal geometry, or space-time, are traced back to the work of
Kepler, Leibniz or D’Alembert. Such ground-breaking ideas, first
launched in the tentative form of the essay, which acquired a quasi-
canonical status in the French Encyclopaedia, referenced other disciplinary
fields (psychology, ethics, social science), and entered into fertile
negotiations with discursive and formal innovations in literature.