GERST 6450 - [Aesthetic Phenomena and Art: 1900 - 1970]

(crosslisted)
(also ARTH 6565, COML 6565, ENGL 6541, PHIL 6950)

Fall. 4 credits.

Next offered 2014-2015.

P. Gilgen.

The traditional identification of aesthetics and the philosophy of art that had persisted since around 1800 and was codified in the “speculative theory of Art” (Jean-Marie Schaeffer) became increasingly problematic with the onset of modernist artistic practices and avant-garde attempts to erase the boundaries between art and life. For large parts of the 20^th century the questions of what art is and how it relates to aesthetic experience became central concerns for aesthetic theory and the philosophy of art, precisely because they had become unanswerable. In this course, we will try to track some of the most important theoretical positions that react to the challenge of modernist art and the ubiquity of manufactured aesthetic experiences in late capitalism. The course will range, approximately, from Benedetto Croce to Theodor Adorno and may also include writings by Roland Barthes, Monroe Beardsley, Clive Bell, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Peter Bürger, Noël Carroll, R. G. Collingwood, Arthur Danto, John Dewey, George Dickie, Marcel Duchamp, Roger Fry, Clement Greenberg, Martin Heidegger, Georg Lukács, Andy Warhol, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others.