Fowles is constantly trying to highlight the differences between art and reality in order to give his characters independence. Up to Chapter 13’s digression, Fowles’s readers have been allowed to consider that they have been reading a conventional Victorian novel to a certain extent. However, Fowles’s repetition of ‘perhaps’ encourages his readers to view the text in a more fictional way. When Fowles teases the audience by saying; ‘perhaps I live now in one of the houses I have brought into the fiction’ – he humorously says that his fictional characters are ‘perhaps’ an ‘illusion’ therefore stating that the whole novel is an illusion. From the outset we already know that their author controls Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as Shakespeare already writes out their destiny for them.
Entertainment takes us to an altered world of our liking and fulfills our want for fantasy and an escape from real life tedium. Entertainment transfers us to a world of fantasy, and we remain immersed as part of this alternate realism. In Chabon’s article he talks about entertainment being pleasurable which I see being the valuable part of entertainment and as for the useless part there are multiple factors. Chabon mentions in his article that “intelligent people must keep a certain distance from from its productions. They must handle the things that entertain them with gloves of irony and postmodern tongs.
It differentiates them from other life forms in that humans display an awareness and emotional response to life as part of their intrinsic nature, which forms part of the natural rhythms of life. The dystopic stance of the texts warns the audience of the dangers of humans passively accepting and being defined by technological progress and thus, in the words of William Blake, subjecting themselves to "psychic slavery". The composers, through the settings of their texts, offer views of highly technologically progressed societies with spiritual emptiness on one hand; and primitive societies with pre-technological misconceptions and values on the other. Despite the different time periods in which the texts were composed, these binary opposite worlds reveal the composers’ concerns about the social dislocation of humans due to violations of their free will to choose to live between these extremes and exist in a natural state of humanity. The environment of the World State in Huxley's Brave New World illustrates the insanity of technological advancement for the simple reason that "progress is lovely".
This can be seen through the lighting of Norman’s face, half-light, half dark, and the dialogue. “It's not like my mother is a maniac... We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven't you?” These techniques have been cleverly assembled by Hitchcock to subtly hint at the idea of madness and help us to get to know Norman, but is not yet prepared to reveal the extent of Norman’s madness due to Psycho being a horror film. The complex relationship helps us understand Norman as a character and the idea of madness in the fruit cellar scene. The director reveals the situation when Lila, Marion’s sister, goes down to the fruit cellar to hide from the murderer and finds Mother’s corpse.
Because the society in this novel is so controlled and “fake” it gives a new perception on life. Many people may take for granted the
When consciously working with form, many artists feel hostility towards content and form. Often the content refuses to fit the form and therefore the form will alter the meaning of the content. It is said that the real creative achievement occurs when an artist finds a way of relating form and content in such a way that they are no longer opposed but reinforce each other, so that we have a whole image that cannot be disassembled into parts. The aesthetic experience just is the experience of form, felt to be pleasing or beautiful when its object is good form or significant form: “By creating for ourselves an imaginary experience or activity, we express our emotions; and this is what we call art.” (Collingwood, R. G., 1958: pg151) Influential of the early theorists, at the end of the eighteenth century, was formalist Immanuel Kant with his theory of aesthetic response. It alleged that viewers could arrive at similar interpretations of an artwork if they experienced the work in itself.
He is also, in his own way, an artist, whose aim is to create beauty, style, and ingenious fictions that delight both himself and the audience. Because he is an artist, he can be assumed to be close to a stand-in for the author. Algernon’s epigrammatic observations have a satirical edge, as they puncture the hypocrisies of conventional Victorian morality. For instance, his comment, “More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t
Illusions fascinate and excite people because they challenge our understanding of “truth” and “reality”. According to the Merriam-Webster Online Collegiate Dictionary (2010), an illusion is 1. something that deceives or misleads intellectually; 2. a perception of something objectively existing in such a way, as to cause misinterpretation of its actual nature. But although illusions constitute a distortion of the reality, they are experienced by all humans. There are various kinds of illusions which occur with all our senses. However, optical illusions are the most intriguing and well known ones, as they prove wrong our default belief that what we see is real (Bach & Poloschek, 2006).
This movement theme was anti-art. Any Ready-made objects could be works of art, for example Marcel Duchamp drew a moustache on a reproduction print of the famous Mono Lisa. This movement mocked the public art admirers who believed art was good just because it was in a museum. In Paris in about 1922 Dada was overtaken by a world of imagination and the subconscious, Surrealism. The literary movement of surrealism gave the movement its direction experimenting with a new automatic writing (automatism) which was writing down the words that pour into one’s head, Parallel to the painters who commit to canvas the images that spring into mind.
If abstractness, projection of people’s emotions, and uselessness of art create morality in art, then the art itself cannot be moral or immoral, thus proving Wilde’s theory true. There are different examples in the book The Picture of Dorian Gray that shows Dorian’s projection of his own feelings onto art rather than just letting the art be a form of pleasure. Dorian constantly projects meaning and pulls out morals from art, which leaves Dorian feeling poisoned. At one point he even tells Lord Henry that he was never going to forgive him for being poisoned with a book (Wilde 180). Lord Henry responds to this by noting that Dorian was beginning to moralize, and this was a negative thing because he believed that the books and art themselves did not make morals, therefore art could not be poison.