Contemporary aesthetics includes a project directed at understanding the nature of pictorial representation. Three types of theories enjoy recent favor. One explains pictorial representation by way of resemblance or experienced resemblance between the picture and what it represents. A second employs interpretation: the spectator looks at a picture and interprets conventionally determined symbols found therein to mean what it represents. The third describes pictorial representation as a matter of experience. On this approach, when the spectator looks at a picture she has a visual experience of the thing represented. Key components of representation include the representation bearing artifact and the human activity that produces it. An adequate account of pictorial representation must neglect neither. Theories focusing on resemblance fail to account for the human role in representation so that a picture may represent only what it can resemble. Theories making interpretation of conventional symbols the key fail to account for the role visible properties play in grounding representation. Wollheim's experience based theory, however, unifies the visible properties of the artifact and the intentions of the artist in a single experience, called seeing-in, whereby a spectator sees in a picture what an artist intends to represent. Wollheim fails to specify just how visible properties of the artifact ground seeing-in. His account of seeing-in raises other curiosities as well. These issues can be dealt with if we apply phenomenological concepts developed by Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception to our experience of pictures as a method of enriching Wollheim's account of seeing-in. / Master of Arts

With the rise of the Popular Front during the 1930s, the American Left came together under the symbols of the “people” and “America,” and as its ranks swelled with modernity’s disenfranchised, radicals utilized the structures and discourses of modernity in the name of political struggle against exploitive American capitalism and fascism abroad. Science fiction and its devoted fan community were among these structures and discourses. Though both were largely conservative, entwined with American corporate capitalism, one group of fans embraced Communism and hoped to politicize science fiction and its fandom. The Michelists, as they called themselves, worked through the established channels of science fiction and fandom advocating a unique Marxist understanding of science fiction. This report situates them within the Popular Front, particularly its discourses of science and popular culture, and highlights how the particularities of the genre and its fandom shaped their political beliefs and actions. / text

O presente trabalho trata do tema da representação pictórica no contexto da representação artística e se concentra sobre as teses desenvolvidas sobre o tema nas teorias de Ernst Gombrich, Nelson Goodman, e Richard Wollheim. Procura evidenciar que, no panorama conceitual desses autores, é possível encontrar subsídios para o desenvolvimento de uma teoria da representação pictórica que suponha a dualidade entre a consciência da forma material e a consciência do conteúdo da representação de modo compatível com o tratamento do conceito em termos estruturais. O desenvolvimento do tema em Gombrich explica porque Wollheim desenvolve uma teoria da dualidade, e a hipótese interpretativa exposta no capítulo sobre o tema em Goodman visa a mostrar que uma abordagem estrutural da representação como sistema simbólico não implica em um convencionalismo estrito, na medida em que a percepção de semelhanças em um quadro relativo a aspectos estabelecidos comparativamente entre os objetos da representação e a própria representação é importante para o entendimento das imagens, de sua interpretação em um quadro aberto a convencionalizações que não sejam estabelecidas arbitrariamente, mas que atendam a uma linha de desenvolvimento compatível com o princípio de definição estabelecido pela prática artística. / This study deals with the issue of depiction in the context of artistic representation and focuses in the basic concepts developed on the subject by Ernst Gombrich, Nelson Goodman e Richard Wollheim. It focuses on the search for evidence in the conceptual framework of these authors for the support for the development of a theory of depiction that assumes twofoldness in a way that is compatible with the treatment of the concept in structural terms. Some specific drawbacks in relation to aspects of Gombrich's theory sets the ground for the explanation why Wollheim develops a twofoldness theory of depiction, and the interpretative hypothesis offered on this topic in relation to Goodman's theory aims to show that a structural approach of depiction as a symbolic system does not entail a strict or full blown conventionalism, insofar as the perception of similarities in relation to aspects in the comparison between the objects of representation and representations themselves are important for establishing the understanding of images, in an open framework of conventionalization that are no to be set arbitrarily, but that are compatible with the development with a principle of definition established by the artistic practice.

O presente trabalho trata do tema da representação pictórica no contexto da representação artística e se concentra sobre as teses desenvolvidas sobre o tema nas teorias de Ernst Gombrich, Nelson Goodman, e Richard Wollheim. Procura evidenciar que, no panorama conceitual desses autores, é possível encontrar subsídios para o desenvolvimento de uma teoria da representação pictórica que suponha a dualidade entre a consciência da forma material e a consciência do conteúdo da representação de modo compatível com o tratamento do conceito em termos estruturais. O desenvolvimento do tema em Gombrich explica porque Wollheim desenvolve uma teoria da dualidade, e a hipótese interpretativa exposta no capítulo sobre o tema em Goodman visa a mostrar que uma abordagem estrutural da representação como sistema simbólico não implica em um convencionalismo estrito, na medida em que a percepção de semelhanças em um quadro relativo a aspectos estabelecidos comparativamente entre os objetos da representação e a própria representação é importante para o entendimento das imagens, de sua interpretação em um quadro aberto a convencionalizações que não sejam estabelecidas arbitrariamente, mas que atendam a uma linha de desenvolvimento compatível com o princípio de definição estabelecido pela prática artística. / This study deals with the issue of depiction in the context of artistic representation and focuses in the basic concepts developed on the subject by Ernst Gombrich, Nelson Goodman e Richard Wollheim. It focuses on the search for evidence in the conceptual framework of these authors for the support for the development of a theory of depiction that assumes twofoldness in a way that is compatible with the treatment of the concept in structural terms. Some specific drawbacks in relation to aspects of Gombrich's theory sets the ground for the explanation why Wollheim develops a twofoldness theory of depiction, and the interpretative hypothesis offered on this topic in relation to Goodman's theory aims to show that a structural approach of depiction as a symbolic system does not entail a strict or full blown conventionalism, insofar as the perception of similarities in relation to aspects in the comparison between the objects of representation and representations themselves are important for establishing the understanding of images, in an open framework of conventionalization that are no to be set arbitrarily, but that are compatible with the development with a principle of definition established by the artistic practice.

O presente trabalho trata do tema da representação pictórica no contexto da representação artística e se concentra sobre as teses desenvolvidas sobre o tema nas teorias de Ernst Gombrich, Nelson Goodman, e Richard Wollheim. Procura evidenciar que, no panorama conceitual desses autores, é possível encontrar subsídios para o desenvolvimento de uma teoria da representação pictórica que suponha a dualidade entre a consciência da forma material e a consciência do conteúdo da representação de modo compatível com o tratamento do conceito em termos estruturais. O desenvolvimento do tema em Gombrich explica porque Wollheim desenvolve uma teoria da dualidade, e a hipótese interpretativa exposta no capítulo sobre o tema em Goodman visa a mostrar que uma abordagem estrutural da representação como sistema simbólico não implica em um convencionalismo estrito, na medida em que a percepção de semelhanças em um quadro relativo a aspectos estabelecidos comparativamente entre os objetos da representação e a própria representação é importante para o entendimento das imagens, de sua interpretação em um quadro aberto a convencionalizações que não sejam estabelecidas arbitrariamente, mas que atendam a uma linha de desenvolvimento compatível com o princípio de definição estabelecido pela prática artística. / This study deals with the issue of depiction in the context of artistic representation and focuses in the basic concepts developed on the subject by Ernst Gombrich, Nelson Goodman e Richard Wollheim. It focuses on the search for evidence in the conceptual framework of these authors for the support for the development of a theory of depiction that assumes twofoldness in a way that is compatible with the treatment of the concept in structural terms. Some specific drawbacks in relation to aspects of Gombrich's theory sets the ground for the explanation why Wollheim develops a twofoldness theory of depiction, and the interpretative hypothesis offered on this topic in relation to Goodman's theory aims to show that a structural approach of depiction as a symbolic system does not entail a strict or full blown conventionalism, insofar as the perception of similarities in relation to aspects in the comparison between the objects of representation and representations themselves are important for establishing the understanding of images, in an open framework of conventionalization that are no to be set arbitrarily, but that are compatible with the development with a principle of definition established by the artistic practice.