scholarly journals Marilynne Robinson, Wallace Stevens, and Louis Althusser in the Post/Secular Wilderness: Generosity, Jérémiade, and the Aesthetic Effect

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
Daniel Muhlestein
Keyword(s):  
Religious Faith ◽  
Christian Right ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Social Injustice ◽  
Marilynne Robinson ◽  
Louis Althusser ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Secular Life

In Restless Secularism (2017), Matthew Mutter points out that Wallace Stevens described three related techniques that could be used to attempt to purge secular life of its religious residue: adaptation, substitution, and elimination. Marilynne Robinson pushes back against such secularizing strategies by employing three related techniques of her own: negotiation, grafting, and invitation. She does so to attempt to bridge the gap between religious and humanistic perspectives and—in the process—mounts a spirited defense of religious faith and practice. Robinson uses a fourth technique as well: jérémiade. In its usual sacred form, jérémiade is a lamentation that denounces self-righteousness, religious hypocrisy, and social injustice. Much of what Robinson says about the Christian Right is essentially jérémiade. Robinson’s critique of parascientists is jérémiade as well, although its grounding assumptions are secular rather than sacred. While Robinson’s jérémiades against the Christian Right and against parascientists are effective in isolation, in aggregate they sometimes undercut her more generous and inclusive attempts at negotiation, grafting, and invitation. This may be because Robinson’s essays do not undergo the moderating influence of what Louis Althusser called the aesthetic effect of art, which in Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), Home (2008), and Lila (2014) helps counterbalance the flashes of anger and tendencies toward judgement that periodically surface elsewhere in Robinson’s work. Taking into account the presence—or absence—of the aesthetic effect in Robinson’s work helps explain the sometimes startling differences between Robinson’s fiction and nonfiction and helps provides a new perspective from which to rethink two of the most influential postsecular readings of Robinson’s work to date: Amy Hungerford’s Postmodern Belief (2010) and Christopher Douglas’s If God Meant to Interfere (2016).

Whither democracy? Religion, politics and Islam

2011 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 437-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Dallmayr
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Christian Right ◽  
Political Islam ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Democratic Character

The question raised by the article is: can democracy be religious and, if so, how? Can religious faith be reconciled with modern democratic political institutions? The article takes its departure from the biblical admonition to believers to be ‘the salt of the earth’ — a phrase that militates against both world dominion and world denial. In its long history, Islam (like Christianity) has been sorely tempted by the lure of worldly power and domination. Nor is this temptation entirely a matter of the past (witness the rise of the Christian right and of ‘political Islam’ in our time). Focusing on contemporary Iran, the article makes a constitutional proposal which would strengthen the democratic character of the Iranian Republic without canceling religious faith. If adopted, the proposal would reinvigorate the ‘salt’ of Muslim faith thus enabling believers to live up to the Qur‘anic summons for freedom, justice and service in the world.

Stanisław Kowalczyk. Elementy filozofii i teologii sportu [The elements of philosophy and theology of sport]

1970 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 293-294
Author(s):  
Stanisław Kowalczyk ◽  
Jan Kłos
Keyword(s):  
Social Integration ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Art Philosophy ◽  
The Aesthetic

Sport plays today an eminent role in man's life and in societies. Various sciences have made it the subject-matter of their reflection, i.e. psychology, sociology, the natural and humanistic sciences, art, philosophy, and theology. The present work seeks to answer some fundamental questions connected with the phenomenon of sport: what is it for man (part one)? whether and when does it serve the social integration of a community (part two)? what are the premises and principles of the ethics of sportive activity (part three)? what is the aesthetic dimension of sport (part four)? what are the relations between sport and religious faith (part five)? The philosophical profile is dominant in the book, taking into consideration various aspects of sport: anthropological, social, axiological, and theological.

“A Radiant and Productive Atmosphere”: Encounters of Wallace Stevens and Stanley Cavell

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 681-694
Author(s):  
ÁINE KELLY
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
King Lear ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Marianne Moore ◽  
Sunday Morning ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Aesthetic

Writing on such diverse works as Shakespeare'sKing Lear, Wallace Stevens's “Sunday Morning” and Vincente Minnelli'sThe Bandwagon, Stanley Cavell is a philosopher consistently moved to philosophize in the realm of the aesthetic. Cavell invokes Stevens, particularly, at moments of hisoeuvreboth casual and constructive. In a commemorative address of the “Pontigny-en-Amérique” encounters at Mount Holyoke College in 2006, Cavell takes Stevens as his direct subject. During the original Pontigny colloquia, held during the wartime summers of 1942–44, some of the leading European figures in the arts and sciences (among them Hannah Arendt and Claude Lévi-Strauss) gathered at Mount Holyoke with their American peers (Stevens, John Peale Bishop and Marianne Moore) for conversations about the future of human civilization and the place of philosophy in a precarious world. Stevens suggested at the Pontigny meeting that the philosopher, compared unfavourably to the poet, “fails to discover.” As it is precisely Cavell's acknowledgement of the accidental or the unexpected as displaced from philosophy that draws him to the writings of Stevens, the Mount Holyoke encounters promise an illuminating dialogue between the two. The affinity between such central champions of the poetic dimension of American philosophy is sometimes obvious, more times in question.

‘Salute to Radio’: The self-reflexive artistry of Betty Comden and Adolph Green in Fun with the Revuers

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sahoko Tsuji
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Linguistic Expression ◽  
Verbal Expression ◽  
Sound Recordings ◽  
Artistic Style ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The Aesthetic

Betty Comden and Adolph Green are well-known librettists and lyricists of stage musicals and musical films; their artistic style and verbal expression are considered to bear urban witness to a period understanding of the 1940s and 1950s. Nonetheless, previous studies have scarcely investigated the aesthetic features of their dramaturgy, especially with regard to linguistic expression. This article focuses on the radio comedy Fun with the Revuers, for which they wrote scripts and lyrics. Through a close look at the scripts and sound recordings, it analyses the ‘interruptive sound and voice’ functions that construct the show, and examines how these satirize the conventions of the format, as well as the essential features of the medium. This article will offer a new perspective on the generational dynamics of Comden and Green’s artistry.

A New Perspective on Visual Design within Information Systems

2014 ◽  
pp. 143-161
Author(s):  
Daniel A. Peak ◽  
Victor R. Prybutok ◽  
Chenyan Xu
Keyword(s):  
Information Systems ◽  
Systems Design ◽  
Systems Development ◽  
Theory Building ◽  
Visual Design ◽  
Know How ◽  
Visual Systems ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The Aesthetic

This chapter proposes that the Information Systems (IS) discipline can serve as a reference discipline for the Visual Design discipline and that visual design can reciprocate as a reference discipline for IS. To this end, it offers a pluralistic framework of Visual Systems Design (VSD) where the primary focus is on how the Visual Design discipline utilizes the intellectual know-how of IS concerning systems development. Because visual design is part of the aesthetic paradigm where interpretivism rules and IS is contained in the positivist paradigm, the chapter employs a multi-paradigm, theory-building approach to bridge these two paradigms and their constituent disciplines. The implications of VSD are discussed in the remainder of the chapter.

The Choreography of the Creative process: Drawing in Time and Space

Leonardo ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Amit Raphael Zoran ◽  
Nir Dick ◽  
Naama Glaube
Keyword(s):  
Motor Performance ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Computer Graphic ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Physical Product ◽  
Expressive Performance ◽  
Innovative Potential ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Digital Tracking

This paper provokes a new perspective on the contribution of computers to visual art, questioning how both the aesthetic qualities of the visual product and the making process itself can render a hybrid artistic outcome. We advocate for a medium that unifies the physical product with the spirit of the making process, as a territory with extensive innovative potential for computational artistic practice. The paper demonstrates various techniques to visualize the motor performance of artists in activities such as drawing and carving. We rely on digital tracking of the artists’ movements and computer graphic tools to expose the expressive performance of artists, highlight their working style, and bring the hidden paths of their strokes to the front of the artwork. Furthermore, we discuss the contextual implication of this form of visualization to new domains of visual art.

Wallace Stevens' “Visibility of Thought”

PMLA ◽  
1962 ◽  
Vol 77 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 482-498
Author(s):  
Joseph N. Riddel
Keyword(s):  
Human Experience ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Romantic Poet ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Single Power

Human experience, according to Santayana, may be described as a conflict between the spirit and the imperfections which distract it from the pure and ideal toward which it aspires. And yet, to complete the paradox, there is no spirit without these imperfections, the matrix of flesh and world, space and time, which contains it. This is as much as anything a poet's dramatic vision: it is Yeats's with his passion to preserve the senses in an eternity of time, and it is Wallace Stevens' with his more realistic search for a balance between the antinomies of self and world. For Stevens, the imagination is the single power that can effect the vital unity, in life or in poetry: it alone can provide the aesthetic economy of experience so urgent for the modern romantic sensibility. Stevens is a romantic, or better, a neo-romantic poet who has gone to school to the French Symbolists and post-Symbolists only to conclude that the ends available to the artist are not metaphysical but aesthetic, and thus human. The romantic poet necessarily lives in two worlds: that of his sensual experience and that of his imaginative vision. In those moments when he manages to blend the two, he achieves not only a poem but that singular experience of “truth” from which he draws his spiritual sanctions. And if God is absent from his universe, as he is from Stevens', the moments of reconciliation become increasingly problematical but no less pressing.

“Rituals of the Ordinary”: Marilynne Robinson's Aesthetics of Belief and Finitude

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ray Horton
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Religion And Literature ◽  
Marilynne Robinson ◽  
The Aesthetic

Marilynne Robinson, the author of Housekeeping, Gilead, Home, and Lila, has garnered attention for her sustained engagement with religious themes. Yet for all its robust participation in the theology of a distinctively Calvinist Protestantism, Robinson's fiction is invested in religious forms that are less propositional than phenomenological. It imagines belief as both a perceptual background and a system of thought that activates concentrated aesthetic attention to quotidian moments of temporal contingency and worldly ephemerality. Consequently, Robinson's work intervenes in the burgeoning critical discourse surrounding religion and literature, offering an alternative to methodologies that prioritize the ontology of belief over the aesthetic modes of perception that belief makes available.

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