published_or_final_version / toc / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts

Introduction: We, i.e. contemporary Western man, live in a society which has increasingly embraced Science and Technology as the ultimum bonum. The Machine, i.e. Science and Technology, has come to be seen as an impersonal force, a New God - omniscient, omnipotent: to be worshipped and, alas, also to be feared. This mythologem has come to pervade almost every sphere of our lives in a paradigmatic way to the extent where it is hardly ever recognized for what it is and hence fails to arouse the concern it merits. While some of the more perceptive minds - such as Erich Fromm, Rufino Tamayo, Carl Gustav Jung, Konrad Lorenz and Arthur Koestler, to mention but a few - have started ringing the alarm bells, the vast majority of our species seem to plunge ahead with their blinkers firmly in place (more or less contented as long as they can persude themselves that these blinkers were manufactured according to latest technological and scientific specifications). Man’s uniquely human powers - his creative intuition, his feelings, his moral and ethical potential, have become sadly neglected and mistrusted. Homo sapiens – “homo maniacus” as Koestler suggests? - is now at a crossroads: he has reached a point where the next step could be the last step and result in the annihilation of man as a species. Alternately, avoiding that, there is the outwardly less drastic but essentially equally alarming possibility of men becoming robots, while a third alternative has yet to be found. While it does appear as if a lot of young people, noticeably among students, have started reacting against the over mechanization of life, these reactions often tend to follow the swing-of-the-pendulum principle and veer towards the other extreme, throwing out the baby with the bathwater and falling prey to freak-out cults in a kind of mass-irrationalism, rejecting science and technology altogether. Artists who by their very nature perhaps are particularly sensitive - in a kind of seismographic way - to the currents and undercurrents of their age, have become aware of the effects of science and technology on our way of living, and many of them have in one way or another taken a stand in relation to the position of man in our highly technological world. Looking at the art produced over the last four decades, it is truly astonishing to what extent our changed world reflects in our art - a world and a Weltbild very different from that of our ancestors even just a few generations ago. The purpose of the present study is to survey some of the observations and commentaries that painters and certain kindred spirits from the sciences over the last few decades have offered, in the hope of, if not answering, at least defining and posing anew some of the questions that confront us with ever-increasing urgency.

One of the most frequently repeated questions of our time is what is art? Since we have become conditioned to the idea that ''significant art - a much overworked modern term - belongs to the revolutionary avant-garde, artists carry their search for the new at all costs into the field of non art. P.1

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李尤猛. / 論文(藝術碩士) -- 香港中文大學硏究院藝術學部, 1995. / 參考文獻: leaves 31-39. / Li Youmeng. / Chapter (一） --- 西方當代藝術走向的啓示 --- p.1 / Chapter (二） --- 在夾縫中求存的本世紀初具象繪畫 --- p.3 / Chapter (三） --- 具象繪畫的回歸機遇和空間 --- p.7 / Chapter (四） --- 在當代具象繪畫中重建藝術的意義和價値 --- p.12 / Chapter (I) --- 具象繪晝´ؤ´ؤ内容的確立 --- p.15 / Chapter (II) --- 具象繪畫一一形式的選定 --- p.20 / Chapter (III) --- 内容與形式表裏相輔相成 --- p.24 / Chapter (五） --- 結語 --- p.26 / Chapter (六） --- 註釋 --- p.28 / Chapter (七） --- 參考書目 --- p.31 / Chapter (I ) --- 期刊 --- p.31 / Chapter (II) --- 書籍 --- p.34 / Chapter (甲） --- 中文參考書目 --- p.34 / Chapter (乙） --- 英文參考畲目 --- p.37 / Chapter (八） --- 附圖 --- p.40

This master's thesis in creative writing is divided into two parts. The first constitutes a critical analysis of "minimalist" writing, a term which has been used to describe the work of certain contemporary American writers but which might equally be applied to a portion of the world literature. This literary form has two fundamental characteristics from an aesthetic point of view: brevity and realism. In fact, it could be defined as the short story taken to its ultimate expression. Furthermore, it represents one of two poles by which we can evaluate all literature. The second part of the thesis is a collection of short stories which embody the minimalist aesthetic with everyday life and relationships between couples as their central theme.

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A writer may choose many points of view in considering works of art. Frequently the work of an artist is regarded purely for its own merit. Or it may be considered in relation to the work of other artists or periods. Here, the writer has chosen to consider certain sculptural works of the English artist Henry Moore in relation to the cityscape and landscape settings in which they have been placed. In order to more fully understand the works, how they relate or do not relate to their settings and what effects the settings have upon them, the thesis has been broken into several major sections which in turn have been further divided. A section dealing with Henry Moore as a man and an artist, the pattern of development which his work has taken, and a clarification of the meaning of his work is placed first in order that the reader may more fully understand the specific pieces when they are considered. This section is followed by a chapter devoted to a generalized discussion of the development of sculpture from earliest times to the present day and its various uses within cities and landscape both in the past and in the 20th century. Continuing the thesis, a number of Henry Moore's major works are discussed. The pieces are considered for their significance within the 'oeuvre' of Moore. They are also considered for their function in relationship to their setting -- cityscape or landscape. Certain of Moore's bronzes have been placed in both landscape and cityscape locations and in these cases it has been possible to consider the relative impact of the works within each type of setting. The pieces are not discussed in chronological order, but rather in the order which best suits both the subject and its setting. Those sculptures which have as their setting, the city, have been discussed first as it is in this environment that sculpture is most frequently found. Several of the pieces have both landscape and cityscape sites and thus provide the transition to the setting of pure natural landscape in which are placed other works of sculptor Henry Moore. Finally, a number of works having the exhibition space in the museum or gallery as their setting are given consideration. In a few cases the pieces are not permanently located. However, most of the works considered are in permanent collections and the landscape or cityscape settings in which they are found today are their permanent sites. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

Though the notion of absent-centred structure enjoys a current fashionableness in a number of contemporary theoretical discussions, the variety of interpretations, some of them implicitly contradictory, and most of them excessively abstract, prevents "absent-centredness" from being the useful critical category it might be. By surveying the history of the term in my Introduction, and by describing the textual realizations of absent-centredness in a number of modern novels, my thesis attempts to define the term as a special strategy of narrative structure. That strategy is identifiable by such formal devices as indirect narration, anti-climax, cancellation, and negation; and by structuring images of spatial and temporal distortion, especially the anarchist explosion and the urban labyrinth. The introductory discussion of works which might or might not be considered absent-centred fiction demarcates the category more clearly, though my choice of novels for more detailed discussion is exemplary rather than exhaustive. My discussion begins with Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (Chapter II) because, in its use of anarchism, the Dickensian labyrinthine city, and anti-climax, that novel represents, albeit uncertainly, the late-Victorian beginnings of absent-centred structure which James's literary descendents shape more consistently. Hence, Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (Chapter III) is governed, paradoxically, by a prominent absence, the unseen and indirectly narrated bomb explosion which operates as a narrative mataphor, for the temporal and spatial distortions of the text are both the logical result of the bomb's blast and a means of circumscribing the absent centre. Andrei Bely's Petersburg (Chapter IV) illustrates best the High-Modernist use of the absent centre, though it relies on the same devices of anarchist plot and foiled explosion which Conrad exploits. And while Bely's Symbolism has a particular Russian coloration, it co-opts, like Conrad's, the same fragmentary features of the bomb-threatened city as images for narrative structure. And whereas Conrad shows us that absent-centredness is an apt description of the moral vacancy which he sees as characteristic of the early twentieth-century West, Bely shows us that it is also an apt description of his mystical and metaphysical view of the early twentieth-century East. Like Petersburg,whose narrative is fragmented more literally than The Secret Agent's, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (Chapter V) exploits the chronological and spatial disruptions which result from explosion. Fragmentation in this work is mimetic of Yossarian's consciousness which, shattered by the realization of Snowden's "exploded" secret, prefers to, but cannot, forget the horror of his comrade's death. As in other works of absent-centred fiction, the hero's hyperbolic fear of his own death is transformed into the fear of apocalyptic nullity. The military establishment which prevents Yossarian's escape from that fear occasions an exploration of the blackly humorous and absurdist nature of a world with no sane centre of control. Most, if not all, of these themes, images, and strategies are gathered together encyclopedically in the most ambitious of these absent-centred works, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Here, the anarchist bomb, metaphor for absence, finds its sophisticated contemporary counterpart in the rocket which, in a rainbow arc from "point to no point," transports apocalyptic absence. Under the shadow of that trajectory moves Slothrop, a failed quester whose grail eludes him and who wanders directionless in the labyrinthine and centreless post-war "Zone" until he disappears from both landscape and text. More reflexive than earlier absent-centred works, Gravity's Rainbow makes us aware that Slothrop's experience in the Zone is also the reader's, for like Slothrop, he searches for a centre in the "zone" of a fiction too complexly structured and too exploded to reveal its unifying source, which can only be, paradoxically, the absent centre itself. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate