Class Notes on Aesthetic theories

(Originally written February 15, 2007 in Book 16)

Class Notes

I feel so overweight right now. I feel truly disgusting. My pants are too tight, she seems even less interested in intimacy on a physical level then before. I don't know what to do. Anyway, but now its time for the wonderful topic "Aesthetics". What a joy! (Sarcasm)

Aristotle

- Art is about "mimesis". Plato and Aristotle agreed on this point.
- Mimesis - imitation
- Aristotle held that art uses imitation and that different types of art imitate different things and how they imitate and imitation methodologies
- Comedy - a dramatic imitation of people who are worse than average
- Comedy is the species of art dealing with the ugly
- Tragedy - a dramatic imitation used to arouse pity, to invoke a catharsis (purging/cleansing)
- Poetry vs. History
Poet - attends to what is possible, deals with universals
History - attends to what has happened, deals with particulars

Spiegelism:
-History - deals with what is particular and unique
-Poetry - deals with what is universal and unique
-Science - deals with what is particular and regular
-Mathematics, Geometry & Theology - what is universal and routine

Nietzsche
- 19th Century German Philosopher
- Born Lutheran but gave up Christian faith in his late teens

Birth of Tragedy

2 Unique Characters of Art:
1) Apollo - order, symmetry, balance, proportion, etc.
2) Dionysus - freedom, wild emotion, indulgence, ecstasy, etc.

Some art forms are more or less Apollonian or Dionysian. Sculpture is paradigmatic of Apollonian, whereas music is paradigmatically Dionysian.

Greek tragedy is the child of Apollonian and Dionysian art. The tragedy has the Dionysian fall from exuberant and opulent behavior and the Apollonian sense of Justice

Freud

On Oedipus Rex & Hamlet

Oedipus Complex - a deep repressed urge that all men have to have sex with their mothers and kill their fathers.

He sees the Oedipus complex in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Hamlet's hesitation to kill his father's murderer is due to Hamlet's Oedipus complex.

Creative writing is an extension of one's fantasy life. Every one fantasizes because he or she has unfulfilled desires.

Fantasy is a wish that is becoming conscious when it was once unconscious or subconscious.

The writer devises characters to achieve the wishes he/she cannot fulfill.

Art is extension of one's fantasy life.