What Is Literature? What Is Art? Integrating Essence and History

On Not Betraying Poetry

“…Recognizing this interaction will leave us with a useful, but still fairly crude, understanding of what goes on in poetry. To understand more fully how the physical medium-whether it be oil paint or wood or language or human bodies in motion-functions in art, we need to understand the kind of response that I have termed "aesthetic resonance," in which a color, for example, or a musical phrase, or a poetic image can evoke a shifting, complex blend of experiential quality that derives from past experience but that is not, as it deepens our response in the present, linked to any particular memory or concept, and that, in poetry, is likely to be evoked and shaped by both material and semiotic elements (Farber 1994).…”

Reorienting Ozu

“…4 However, rather than continuing the insistence of aesthetics as related to the construction of beauty, recent work has developed and nuanced the debate. Rather than an examination on beauty per se, aesthetics have become a "specific kind of human experience" 5 , one that allows you challenge ' our intellects as well as our perceptual and emotional capacities. To meet all these challenges simultaneously is to experience aesthetically."…”