The Enlightened Eye. Goethe and Visual Culture
2008; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1756-1183
Autores Tópico(s)Art, Aesthetics, and Perception
ResumoMoore, Evelyn K., and Simpson, Patricia Anne, eds. Enlightened Eye. Goethe and Visual Culture. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007.322 pp. euro66.00 hardcover. Perspectival diversity marks this collection of thirteen essays edited and introduced by Evelyn K. Moore and Patricia Anne Simpson. At the center of the book is the relationship between the aesthetics of visual and verbal arts in the age of Goethe. book examines a range of themes (gender, consumerism, nationalisms, questions of identity formation, theories of color and seeing, technological changes), probes different media (from painting and the decorative arts to sculpture, theater, literary, aesthetic, and proto-scientific texts), and employs different approaches, supplementing biographical, feminist, historical and psychoanalytic concerns with cultural and media studies considerations. first part of the book, Visions/Revisions of the Neoclassical Aesthetic, contains essays by Melissa Dabakis, Catriona MacLeod, Beate Allert, Margaretmary Daley, Mary Helen Dupree, and Patricia Anne Simpson. It focuses on tensions within the neoclassical aesthetic primarily as created by female artists and on representations of femininity. Thus, resistance to neoclassical constructions of femininity and masculinity are found not only within the works of artists like Angelika Kauffmann and Elise Hahn or those of the Jena Romantics, but also in Goethe's writings. Simpson, for example, argues in her elegantly written analysis of shifting gender boundaries in the emerging nationalistic discourses of the early 19th century that Goethe's Des Epimenides Erwachen reasserts, but also destabilizes, bourgeois gender dichotomies by accessing the feminine as a figure of boldness in the affirmation of German identity. MacLeod's essay challenges the contours of the neoclassical aesthetic and its emphasis on authenticity and naturalness from a different angle. She argues that the popularity of mass-produced porcelain figures reveals the consumerism as well as the political and social aspirations of this early age of reproduction. MacLeod's essay raises questions which are in tune with the contributions in the second part of the book, entitled The Violence of Vision: Science, Technology, and the Stage of Language. articles by Evelyn Moore, Elliott Schreiber, Clark Muenzer, Eric Hadley Denton, Astrida Orle Tantillo, Heide Crawford, and Richard Block investigate various intersections between the sciences, technology, and art in and around Goethe's literary and scientific writings, offering some of the more innovative approaches to Goethe scholarship in recent years. Moore returns to the interaction between the visual and the verbal and, drawing on Lacan, sees their relationship as central for the formation of the subject. …
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