Presently, most aesthetic discourse focusses primarily upon questions of beauty and ugliness. Yet, this rather limited approach to aesthetics overlooks all work that does not belong to either of these two categories. More precisely, most contemporary debate fails to consider the important category of ambivalence. What might it mean to both love and hate a given work of art? The following essay examines the complex emotion of ambivalence as a category of aesthetic experience. Drawing upon the work of British filmmaker Peter Greenaway, it will be argued that ambivalence encourages a new, dynamic approach to the work of art. Ultimately, this new approach will be looked to as a possible means of challenging the hegemony of the Modernist/Postmodernist divide.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.30179 |
| Date | January 2000 |
| Creators | Jenkins, Brad. |
| Contributors | Cope, Karin (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001764868, proquestno: MQ64161, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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