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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, Aug., 2009. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

The dissertation A Broad Aesthetic: beauty, truth, and goodness , takes into consideration three distinct but related aspects of aesthetics: perception, appreciation, and evaluation (beauty, truth, and goodness respectively). A central concern in an avowedly broad aesthetics is to attend, equally, to the bounds of the experiences or activities under consideration. Hence, this dissertation is a exploration of the breadth, but also of the limits, of certain aesthetic experiences and art-based activities (e.g., the appreciation and evaluation of artworks). It is a consideration of what shapes these experiences, and, also of the delimitation of these experiences and activities. Section one (beauty) considers the nature of aesthetic perception, and the limits of its reach. Section two (truth), looks at the role of style, both its scope and limit, in the classification and appreciation of a certain genre of fine writing (philosophy), as well as a certain genre of filmmaking (the documentary). Section three (goodness) looks at the role and relevance of moral values and interests in the evaluation, as well as in the curation, of artworks.

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Transformations of the Beautiful reexamines a problem that emerges during the mid-eighteenth century: the devaluation of the aesthetic category of the beautiful. In opposition to accounts that identify this problem with the rediscovery of the sublime, this dissertation emphasizes the crucial yet underexamined role that historicization played in the destabilization of beauty’s normative status in German aesthetic discourse. Additionally, I demonstrate that literary discourse became a key mode through which the beautiful’s problematic status was negotiated. Assembling literary texts from 1759-1817 that thematize beautiful objects or phenomena in terms of their historicity or instability, and transform them, I argue that these moments constitute discrete instances in which literature responds to the precarious position of beauty in modernity. With recourse to texts by Winckelmann, Schiller, Jean Paul, Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann and Eichendorff, I focus on the specific literary techniques employed by different genres—description, elegy, and narrative fiction—and how they reconfigure the relationship between the modern subject and the beautiful. In so doing I demonstrate how literary texts intervene in aesthetic discourse to reevaluate and generate alternative conceptions of the beautiful.

The present study was an attempt to discover what relationship exists between an arrangement of coordinated laboratory experiences in art, music, and modern dance at the college freshman level and the development of four factors related to aesthetic experience. These factors were: (1) aesthetic perception as measured by A Test Aesthetic Perception; (2) aesthetic attitude as measured by A Test of Aesthetic Attitude; (3) physiological responsiveness to perceptual stimuli as measured by the Galvanometer; and (4) level of freedom from restraint as measured by a portion of the Guilford-Zimmerman Temperament Survey. An additional purpose of the study was to determine the persistence of significant changes in the experimental group, as measured over a period of five months.

<p>The artists and writers of my dissertation -- Robert Smithson, Ed Roberson, Rodolfo Kusch, Alejandra Pizarnik, Nancy Holt, Lygia Clark, and Clarice Lispector -- teach us to feel the ground on which we stand as an earth that quakes, and this feeling implies a radical reconfiguration of our relation to the world, one which makes perception, language, art, and world otherwise. Against an aesthetics of representation, predicated on a regime of pleasurable feeling and form which neutralizes the world into an empty space filled with objects, and which I argue lingers as the hegemonic framework for the study of American literature, they offer an understanding art and literature as an embodied engagement with the weight of a world that presses in and pulls down. I call this feeling an aeisthesis of ground and offer it as a way to rethink the ethics of our relation to the world. From this trembling ground, these artists and writers struggle to make the world and our relation to it otherwise. In so doing, they contribute to the project of decolonizing the aesthetic imaginary of the Americas. They propose a different point of departure for the study of American literature, one which allows us to cultivate unlikely lines of kinship between authors and texts on both sides of the Rio Grande. Engaging the work of these authors and artists contributes to current work in the humanities which has turned to aesthetics as a way to rethink our human relation to the world in the face of our global ecological crisis. It, however, also radically departs from these efforts precisely in its point of departure, remaking this relation from the more unsteady ground of American art, letters, and life that these artists help us unfold.</p> / Dissertation

In this research project I examine art making as a supportive intervention towards creating a safe environment for the caregivers in order for them to identify with the social worlds in which they inhabit. I have focused on the role of art making within a community of volunteer caregivers on the East Rand in Johannesburg. The dual tenets of dialogical and relational aesthetics are acknowledged in the elaboration of concepts to establish wider contexts. Whilst art therapy modalities and literature have been used, this research project does not embrace the scope of art therapy as a discipline. At times I have used lexis from art therapy to draw on certain terms. My subject position as an artist and facilitator in this project has given me the agency for the discourse of dialogue to take place. The inquiry for this research dissertation is concerned with whether the participants in the project were able to achieve some amelioration from their circumstances through the relational exchange so that art as the mediator for conversational exchange is seen to facilitate constructive models for engagement. My contention is that these conditions have allowed the caregivers to achieve this outcome.

Vita. / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries