Definitions of art generally attempt to provide necessary and/or sufficient conditions to distinguish objects that qualify as artworks from objects that do not qualify as artworks. In order to decide whether the question “Is this object an artwork” is sensible, we must first ask “Is it possible to provide necessary and/or sufficient conditions that include everything that is an artwork and nothing that is not an artwork?” For the sake of clarification let me point out that a “definition of art should be distinguished from a philosophical theory of art, which is invariably a broader project 1 Paul Ziff’s article “The Task of Defining a Work of Art” in the January 1953 issue of The Philosophical Review argues for similar anti-essentialist conclusions and predates Weitz’s article by three years. Ziff’s article, however, has been less influential and so I am not directly concerned with its arguments in this essay. 2 with vaguer boundaries”.1 That is, philosophical theories of art,
Seduced by Death. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 1998. The author of this book is a medical director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and he is a professor in New York Medical College. This book mainly talks about the politics and culture of euthanasia. Herbert personally objects euthanasia.
We will limit our analysis to the field of literary art, including literature, theatre, and film (the latter is considered a literary art, as its etymology suggests, the word cinematography being derived from the Greek kinema, movement, and graphein, to write). The first, immediate effect of the liberalization process in Czechoslovakia was the depolitization of culture, and literature in particular. After being such a force under Communism, Czech writers experienced a rapid and substantial loss in influence. 1989, as Jiri Holy puts it, marks the “end of a whole era of Czech culture
Museums have responded by taking on the role of memory keepers, to preserve and tell the story of this terrible period. Alison Landsberg in her book Prosthetic Memory – the Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, responds to the challenges of modernity and Churchill's concerns by providing a new theory as to how the utilisation of modern technologies, mass media and experiential museums allows viewers to absorb other memories as their own, despite never having directly lived through them as individuals. In this essay I will introduce Landsberg's concept and explain its position within the larger memory debate. I will offer opposing critiques to her theory of 'prosthetic memory' and refer to a specific 'Memory Museum' - The Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem, Israel's definitive museum and memorial to the six million victims of the Holocaust. I will explore the various techniques that Yad Vashem utilises in order to convey its message, particularly regarding how it mobilises Landsberg's concept to create empathy, to what extent it is effective and whether these methods can lead to a positive outcome reflecting Landsberg's ideals about the potential power of memory- making within the visitor.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold Response Chronicle of a Death Foretold tells the murder of Santiago Nasar by using personal accounts of residents living in a small Columbian town. The author, Gabriel García Márquez, uses an uknown character to recount the murder of Santiago Nasar via a first person interview-type narrative. The nararator tells the narrative through his personal interviews with the townspeople. Although this type of narration initially came off as miss jumbled and confusing, once I discovered the rhythm of the book I came to find pleasure in trying to connect the pieces of the novel; as if I were playing a mental jig saw puzzle. This style of narration was extremely entertaining and at times took on the feeling of a detective interviewing his suspects.
The statement: “Modern art movements challenge conventional ways of looking at the world”, is made clear when the development of abstraction in European painting is researched and analysed further. Abstract art uses a visual language of form, colour and line to create an arrangement which may exist with independence from visual references in the world. Respectable artists whom contributed to the development of the morden art style included Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock. Western art had been underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would incorporate the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy.
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. - Lord Acton. Was the Wave experiment a success? Discuss. The novel The Wave by Morton Rhue follows the story of a history class in Palo Alto, California during 1969, conducting a classroom experiment which goes terribly wrong.
This essay will investigate the application of post-modernist and post-colonialist characteristics within Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber. Post-modernist literature can only be understood in relation to modernist literature. According to, Edward Arnorld (Barry 2009) both modernist and post-modernist literature emphasized the importance of the rejection of traditional realism in favour of various experimental forms. However, they do so in very different moods. While the modernist registers a deep sense of nostalgia for an earlier age when “faith was full and authority intact” (Barry 2009), the post-modernist embraced this escape from the claustrophobia of fixed systems of belief.
Contrariwise, ‘ordinary - language philosophers’ argued that verbal communication is a powerful tool for creating new states of affairs. J. L. Austin (1962) rejected formal semantics and claimed that speech can function in a performative way (Clark, 2007). Undoubtedly, this innovative concept has transformed modern linguistics, particularly pragmatics. This essay aims to examine Austin’s revolutionary speech act theory in relation to our everyday conversational interaction and explain how it has influenced our comprehension of language and verbal communication. In order to gain insight into Austinian account of the speech act theory, it is necessary to trace its history originated by the philosopher in the 1950s thorough to its importance for contemporary understanding of language.
Jessica Burger HUM 240: Final Project Postmodernism Postmodernism is weird. It seeks to refuse definition by nature, although many have tried and more have argued over those attempts. It’s noted as having influence in many different mediums such as art, architecture, music, film, literature, photography, and so on. At safest, we can take postmodernism to be a movement within society, or as Frederic Jameson says in his book: POSTMODERNISM, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, “It seems to me essential to grasp postmodernism not as a style but rather as a cultural dominent: a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate features.” For our final project we decided to create a postmodernist short film. We soon realized the first thing we needed to do in order to grasp and appropriately apply the concept of postmodernism, was to understand what it is not: modernism.