Translation of the author's thesis written in Portuguese (doctoral)--University of São Paulo, Brazil, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [163]-177) and index.

Zugl.: Berlin, TU, Diss.

Ueberarb. Thesis Univ. of Chicago, 1978. / Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral)--University of Chicago, 1978. Includes bibliographical references (p. 231-260).

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This dissertation argues that early modern writers such as William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, George Herbert, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell played a critical role in the transition from the Neoplatonic philosophy of beauty to Enlightenment aesthetics. I demonstrate how the Protestant Reformation, with its special emphasis on the depravity of human nature, prompted writers to critique models of aesthetic judgment and experience that depended on high faith in human goodness and rationality. These writers in turn used their literary works to popularize skepticism about the human mind's ability to perceive and appreciate beauty accurately. In doing so, early modern writers helped create an intellectual culture in which aesthetics would emerge as a distinct branch of philosophy.

This research addresses the effect of pedagogical ways-of-knowing in higher education design programmes such as Graphic Design, Interior Design, Fashion, and Industrial Design. One problematic aspect of design studio pedagogy is communication between teachers and students about the aesthetic visual meaning of the students’ designed objects. This problematic issue involves ambiguous and divergent ways-of-knowing the design meaning of these objects. The research focus is on the design teacher role in design studio interactions, and regards pedagogical ways-of-knowing as the ways in which teachers expect students to know visual design meaning. This pedagogical issue is complicated by the fact that there is no agreed-upon corpus of domain knowledge in design, so visual meaning depends greatly on the social knowledge retained by students and teachers. The thesis pursues an explanation of pedagogical ways-of-knowing that is approached through the philosophy of critical realism. How it is that particular events and experiences come to occur in a particular way is the general focus of critical realist philosophy. A critical realist approach to explanation is the use of abductive inference, or inference as to how it is that puzzling empirical circumstances emerge. An abductive strategy aims to explain how such circumstances emerge by considering them in a new light. This is done in this study by applying Luhmann’s theory of the emergence of cognition in communication to teacher ways-of-knowing in the design studio. Through the substantive use of Luhmann’s theory, an abductive conjecture of pedagogical ways-of-knowing is mounted. This conjecture is brought to bear on an examination of research data, in order to explain how pedagogical ways of-knowing constrain or enable the emergence of shared visual design meaning in the design studio. The abductive analysis explains three design pedagogical ways-of-knowing: design inquiry, design representation and design intent. These operate as macro relational mechanisms that either enable or constrain the emergence of shared visual design meaning in the design studio. The mechanism of relation is between design inquiry, design representation and design intent as historical knowing structures, and ways-of-knowing in respect of each of these knowing structures. For example, design inquiry as an historical knowing structure has over time moved from ways-of-knowing such as rationalistic problem solving to direct social observation and later to interpretive cultural analysis. The antecedence of these ways-of-knowing is important because communication about visual meaning depends upon prior knowledge, and teachers may then reproduce past ways-of-knowing. The many ways-of-knowing that respectively relate to design inquiry, design representation and design intent are shown to be communicatively formed and recursive over time. From a Luhmannian perspective, these ways-of-knowing operate as variational distinctions that indicate or relate to the knowing structures of design inquiry, design representation and design intent. This is the micro-level operation of pedagogical ways-of-knowing as relational mechanisms in design studio communication. Design teachers’ own ways-of-knowing may then embrace implicit way-of-knowing distinctions that indicate the knowledge structures of design inquiry, design representation and design intent. This implicit indication by distinction is the relational mechanism that may bring design teachers’ expectation that this and not that visual design meaning should apply in communication about any student’s designed object. Such an expectation influences communication between teachers and students about the potential future meaning of students’ designs. Consequently, shared visual design meaning may or may not emerge. The research explanation brings the opportunity for design teachers to make explicit the often implicit way-of-knowing distinctions they use, and to relate these distinctions to the knowing structures thus indicated. The study then offers a new perspective on the old design pedagogical problem of design studio conflict over the meaning of students’ designs. Options for applying this research explanation in design studio interactions between students and teachers are therefore suggested.

“Cinematic Theatricality” is the combination of conventionally “cinematic” and “theatrical” styles. It occurs on both screen and stage, and in intermedial performances. Despite their entwined histories, cinema and theater often define their aesthetics against each other. This dissertation posits that “cinematic theatricality,” in combining these allegedly “oppositional” aesthetic codes, actually intensifies the effects of both media. It is a dynamic that prompts explorations of relationship between intellectual and affective spectatorship in each medium. My definition of “cinematic theatricality” moves beyond dominant Brechtian conceptions of theatricality in cinema, and incorporates theater and performance scholarship that develops different understandings of theatricality as dynamic and affective. These other definitions of theatricality enable more sympathetic and mutually enhancing dialogues with cinema. I locate this cinematic theatricality in the work of four queer directors—Luchino Visconti, Patrice Chéreau, Werner Schroeter and Ivo van Hove—who were active in both European film and theater from the 1950s to the present. These directors’ works are often dismissed as “excessive” because they go “over-the-top” of realist aesthetic norms. The plenitude arising from the combination of cinematic and theatrical effects produces these aesthetic “excess,” styles of surplus that foreground the links between intellectual and emotional experiences of a medium. Different theatricalities produce different variants of excesses, each of which has its own aims and is rooted in these directors’ theatrical careers and their participation in the Regietheater (Director’s Theater) movement in post-war European theater. Nietzsche’s characterization of the “gestural,” decadentist excesses of Wagner’s theater suggests how editing can theatricalize the norms of cinematic continuity editing, creating simultaneous narcotic absorption in and critical distance from historical narratives. Opera’s tension between mimetic representation and “over-the-top” bodily and vocal expressivity leads to rhythmic, melodramatic relationships between the moving camera and the expressive performing body in the transmission of meaning. The queer traditions of camp theatricality, combining both ironic theatrical references and the sincerity and sensual intensity of performances, tie the signifying and sensorial aspects of cinematic spectatorship. In contemporary theater, screen-to-stage adaptations and productions with video and projection are often dismissed as overblown spectacles, too distracting to be meaningful or valuable. Cinematic theatricality on the stage makes video and projection intentional distractions. It forces the spectator to choose where to (not) look, to experience complex phenomena of intermedial “absence” and “presence,” in ways that challenge the norms and ethics of different mediated modes of showing and not showing. Cinema and theater have long expanded their senses of themselves beyond strict ontological characteristics, and our contemporary mediascape further encourages more dynamic understandings of both the cinematic and the theatrical. Cinematic theatricality, in its doubled entwinings, opens a way to combine formalist with affective readings of each medium, thus providing a richer understanding of each medium’s powers and effects. Cinematic theatricality’s permutations—the decadent, operatic, camp, and spectacular—suggest new ways of taxonomizing the “aesthetic categories” of contemporary intermediality’s ardor for excessive aesthetics, and its embrace of excess as a mode suitable for asking serious questions about history, politics, and identity.

Ce travail s’intéresse au problème de la relativisation de l’expression architecturale liée à la remise en question, durant le XVIIe siècle, de l’origine divine et de la valeur des canons proportionnels qui sous-tendent la tradition classique. Emblématique de la Querelle qui opposa Claude Perrault et François Blondel au sein de l’Académie royale de Paris, ce problème recevra une formulation privilégiée dans la tradition théorique anglaise qui se caractérise par la volonté de préserver une forme d’objectivité à l’expression formelle tout en cherchant à y intégrer la valeur subjective de l’usage. A travers l’étude de textes esthétiques et de théories d’architecture produits en Angleterre durant le XVIIIe siècle et le début du XIXe siècle, nous avons cherché à identifier les différentes solutions proposées par les théoriciens pour parvenir à concilier le sujet et l’objet dans la forme architecturale et ainsi aboutir à une expression qui autorise l’appropriation individuelle tout en satisfaisant à l’impératif du consensus. / Doctorat en Histoire, art et archéologie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Critical Theory, as posited by members of The Frankfurt School, was evaluated with the objective of attaching an implied ethical dimension. This was discovered in their privileging of a particular type of aesthetic, as evinced in their analysis of certain works of autonomous High Modernism. This implied ethic, which is one based around the concept of enlightenment as potential for emancipation, was then applied as a norm for the evaluation of art. This ethic, however, does not seek to impose a particular reading on (specifically) literary production: Rather, it seeks to impart the importance of a commitment by the literary critic in the use of an ethically based norm, an ethic, what is more, that is based and supported by a discussion of the concepts 'freedom' and Enlightenment. Finally, with this ethic firmly established, the discussion then attempted to distinguish between modernism and post-modernism, using this implied ethic as a guide to separation. / Afrikaans & Theory of Literature / M.A. (Theory of Literature)

Critical Theory, as posited by members of The Frankfurt School, was evaluated with the objective of attaching an implied ethical dimension. This was discovered in their privileging of a particular type of aesthetic, as evinced in their analysis of certain works of autonomous High Modernism. This implied ethic, which is one based around the concept of enlightenment as potential for emancipation, was then applied as a norm for the evaluation of art. This ethic, however, does not seek to impose a particular reading on (specifically) literary production: Rather, it seeks to impart the importance of a commitment by the literary critic in the use of an ethically based norm, an ethic, what is more, that is based and supported by a discussion of the concepts 'freedom' and Enlightenment. Finally, with this ethic firmly established, the discussion then attempted to distinguish between modernism and post-modernism, using this implied ethic as a guide to separation. / Afrikaans and Theory of Literature / M.A. (Theory of Literature)