An evaluation of the formal and emotional effects of the poetry of Robert Browning considered from the humanistic viewpoint

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

10. Starting from Scratch

This 2019 article celebrates UCI Law\u27s accomplishments in its first 10 years, featuring quotes from the school\u27s current dean and founding dean

The Aesthetic Society and Its Gatekeepers

The current study draws on Saito’s (2007) application to western context of the Japanese practice of appreciating the aesthetic and ethical aspects of everyday objects, examined through the complexity of aesthetic evaluation. Bourdieu’s (1984a) moderating variable cultural capital is used to advance an understanding of perceptual and linguistic complexity in daily aesthetic consumption. By engaging participants in a quasi-experiment of multi-sensory trials of everyday products (lemon squeezers), an examination was made of how language use reveals embodied knowledge of daily consumption practice. As the participants’ volumes of cultural capital increased, there was a greater tendency to categorize the stimuli according to their formal aspects and use more complex language derived from decorative, ethical and artistic schema. Thus, the logic of everyday aesthetic practice appears to be contingent on contextualized interaction. This research is followed with a discussion of how such inclinations relate to Japanese aesthetic practices in everyday life, by considering the influence of intercultural exchanges and the actions of cultural gatekeepers in Japan and abroad during the development of aestheticized Japanese cultural metonymy in the post-Meiji Restoration era. Further, some discussion is made of the parallel development of the aestheticization of daily practices in Japan and European contexts, and how this likely influenced the cultural context of the research is made. Finally, some of the challenges of instituting an everyday aesthetic as an antidote to the problems generated by mass-consumption society are discussed

Pathetic Beauty: Mono no Aware in Hollywood Cinema –To Family and Friends in These Estranged Times–

Mono no aware is considered to be one of the central-most Japanese aesthetics and distinctive to Japanese identity (Keene 1995; Miller 2011). This aesthetic standpoint finds wistful beauty in the transient, and is most often translated to ‘beauty in pathos’ or ‘the ah-ness of things’ (Hume 1995), as exemplified in the Heian-era classic, The Tale of Genji (Murasaki 1981). To the outside world, mono no aware is most commonly associated with cherry-blossom viewing, where the short-lived existence of the falling cherry blossom is seen as a metonym for contemplation of the beauty in the transience of life itself. Although this mode of aestheticization shares disinterested and contemplative characteristics with the Kantian pure aesthetic gaze (Hughes 2010), its focus on pathos would seem to be at odds with commonly understood platonic Western ideals of beauty and art (c.f. Clark 1972; Saito 2007). However, the current paper aims to elucidate how perceptions of beauty of the pathetic have also been an aspect of Western thought and aestheticization practices, since early Christian times, more prominently in the Romantic era and even in Hollywood cinema. This is of particular significance to the current paper as Hollywood is often seen as a global metonym for glamour–the apparent antithesis of Japanese traditional aesthetics, such as mono no aware. To this end, an examination will be made of expressions of pathetic beauty in Tom Ford’s (2009) award-winning Hollywood film, A Single Man, and how this relates to parallels in the development of aesthetic thought in the occident and Japan