Art and Literature. Art: a human feature 1. present in all human societies 2. requires high investment of time and energy 3. produces strong pleasure.

Art and Literature

Art: a human feature• 1. present in all human societies• 2. requires high investment of time and energy • 3. produces strong pleasure and other emotions • 4. associated with biologically significant

activities (sexuality, feeding, learning)• 5. develops in all humans without special

training (Ellen Dissanayeke: Homo Aestheticus (1988)

Prehistoric art

Lascaux cave paintings

Art as (evolutionary) luxury• Art seems to exceed the functional → we need

an explanation. • „We don’t marvel at a creature doggedly

grubbing in the earth with its nose, for we figure it is seeking its food; if, however, it regularly interrupts its rooting with somersaults, we want to know why. What benefits are presumed (rightly or wrongly) to accrue to this excess activity.” (Daniel Dennett)

Biological (evoltionary) anthropology on why art is ‘useful’

• 1. art is a „cheesecake of the mind” (a luxury; S. Pinker)

• 2. art is a peacock’s tail - rooted in sexual selection (G. Miller); males competing to attract the attention of the female

• 3. art is play(ing), rehearsal for serious life • 4. art is about the sharing of attention creates

social cohesion (Brian Boyd)

Art as sharing attention

• Colour contrast between pupil and sclera

• Babies focus their eyes at 8 inches

• Eye contact • Evoking absent, distant,

unreal things

• “All intelligent animals can focus on the immediate present, have expectations of the immediate future, and perhaps some recollections of their personal past. But we alone, because of our special capacity to share and sharpen attention, can focus our minds together on particular events of the past as experienced or witnessed by ourselves or others, living or dead, on possibilities and impossibilities, and on events hypothetical, counterfactual, and fictional. Most animals cannot afford not to attend to their immediate environment and cannot easily reason beyond it. But the human capacity to think beyond the immediate allows us an extraordinary power to test ideas and to turn them through the vast space of possibility.” (Brian Boyd: Evolutionary Theories of Art)

• E. Dissanayake: • art comes from proto-conversations in the

first six months of life • multimedia entertainment package: hands,

face, gestures, eyes, repetition, noises, mimicry

Art and arts

• Original meaning of the word: arte = skill, techné

• Art or arts? (How many arts?)

Muses: daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne

What is common between the arts?

• Clio:• history

• Urania:• Astronomy

• Erato:• love poetry • No muse for ‘literature’, ‘painting’ or ‘sculpture’

Aesthetics(1750, Alexander Baumgarten)

aisthesis (anaesthesiologist)The senses – sensual ‘pleasure’

Aesthetics: a branch of philosophy

The place of aesthetics

ethicsethics logiclogic aestheticsaesthetics

goodgood truetrue BeautifulBeautiful

will (action)will (action) thinking, thinking, reasonreason

imagination, imagination, feelingsfeelings

• „érdek nélkül tetszik” (pleases us disinterestedly)

• „a szellem átsugárzik az anyagon” (spirit shining through matter)

• Dulce et utile• Delectare et prodesse (Horace)

This is ‘not enough’

„primitive art”

Wells cathedral

Örkény: „Mi mindent kell tudnunk” John Cage: „4’33”Ready-mades

Marcel Duchamp: Fountain (1917)

Duchamp’s „Fountain”

• Objet trouvé (‘found object’) • a urinal• Duchamp’s strategy: • Inserts the object into museum space • Give it a ‘symbolic’ title • Rotates it 90 degrees • Provides it with a mock signature (R. Mutt)

„R. Mutt”

• Érvényes két díjszabási övezet beutazására, egy órán belül, legföljebb négyszeri átszállással, a felszállóhelytől az utazás céljához vezető legrövidebb útvonalon. Átszállni csak keresztezéseknél, elágazásoknál és végállomásokon lehet, de csak olyan kocsira, melynek útvonala az előzően igénybe vett kocsik útvonalától eltér. Egy utazás során csak egy Duna-híd és minden útvonal csak egyszer érinthető. Kerülő utazás és útmegszakítás tilos!

Örkény István: „Mi mindent kell tudni”

THE THINGS ONE NEEDS TO KNOW

• Valid for travelling in two tariff zones, for not longer than sixty minutes, including a maximum of four transfers, for the shortest route from the stop where the passenger has entered the vehicle to the destination of the journey. Transfers are allowed only at crossroads, thoroughfares and destinations, only to a vehicle the route of which is different from that of the vehicles used previously. In the course of one journey, it is prohibited to travel on more than one bridge over the Danube may be travelled on by the passenger, as well as to reenter the same circuit.

• Taking a longer route and interruption of travelling are prohibited.

• “I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family.”

• “I was born in the city of Bombay … once upon a time.” (Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children)

Art (lit.) as context

• Terry Eagleton: “Anything can be literature”; • “One can think of literature less as some

inherent quality or set of qualities displayed by certain kinds of writing all the way from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, than as a number of ways in which people relate themselves to writing.”

The function of art• “Beauty is the fortuitous encounter of a sewing-

machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table”• Lautréamont

Art „disturbs”, dislocates us

Pieter Brueghel

The grotesque

• Mixture of the terrifying (distorted) and the ridiculous

• Caspar David Friedrich:

• The Wanderer Above a Sea of Clouds

J. M. W. Turner: Snowstorm on the Sea

The sublime

• Sg vast, incomprehensible, aw(e)ful (awesome)

• We are overawed (sense of awe), mixture of defeat and triumph

Aesthetic experience

• CATHARSIS: • Purification through pity and fear

• Purpose: (self-)development (Rilke: „Change your life” – Du muss dein leben ändern)

• Difficult, puzzling, painful, elevating

Literary language

everyday (ordinary) language vs. literary language

Paul Valéry: Walking vs. dancing

Ordinary lang: tool for “use”; transparent, disappearing when it has served its purpose.

Poetry: not for “use”; opaque (opacity) window vs. stained glass window

The language of literature

Russian Formalists (early 20th cent.).

Literary language transforms, distorts, violates ordinary language

habitual, automatised, economical existenceenergy-saving mode of living and communicating we recognise things and people (vs noticing)

Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) “I see everything. That is why I don’t like new places. If I am in a place I know, like home, orschool, or the bus, or the street, I have seen almost everything in it beforehand and all I haveto do is to look at the things that have changed or moved. But most people are lazy. They never look at everything. They do what is called glancing. And the information in their head isreally simple. For example, if they are in the countryside, it might be • 1. I am standing in a field that is full of grass. • 2. There are some cows in the fields. • 3. It is sunny with a few clouds. • 4. There are some flowers in the grass. • 5. There is a village in the distance. And then they would stop noticing anything. But if I am standing in a field in the countryside Inotice everything. For example, I remember standing in a field on Wednesday 15th June 1994because Father and Mother and I were driving to Dover to get a ferry to France and I had to stop to go for a wee, and I went into a field with cows in and after I’d had a wee I stopped and looked at the field and noticed these things. 1. There are 19 cows in the field, 15 of which are black and white and 4 of which are brown and white. 2. There is a village in the distance which has 31 visible houses and a church with a square tower and not

a spire. 3. There is an old plastic bag from Asda in the hedge, and a squashed Coca-Cola can with a snail on, and a

long piece of orange string. 4. I can see two different types of grass and two colours of flowers in the grass. And there were 31 more things in this list of things I noticed but Siobhan said I didn’t need to write them

all down. And it means that it is very tiring if I am in a new place because I see all these things, and if someone asked me afterwards what the cows looked like, I could ask which one, and I could do a drawing of them at home.”

Art:defamiliarisation – making strange

• Revisiting (recognising) the world as a new place

• Viktor Shklovsky:• “Art exists that one may recover the sensation

of life; it exists to make one feel things...The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception.”

Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) “I see everything. That is why I don’t like new places. If I am in a place I know, like home, orschool, or the bus, or the street, I have seen almost everything in it beforehand and all I haveto do is to look at the things that have changed or moved. But most people are lazy. They never look at everything. They do what is called glancing. And the information in their head isreally simple. For example, if they are in the countryside, it might be • 1. I am standing in a field that is full of grass. • 2. There are some cows in the fields. • 3. It is sunny with a few clouds. • 4. There are some flowers in the grass. • 5. There is a village in the distance. And then they would stop noticing anything. But if I am standing in a field in the countryside Inotice everything. For example, I remember standing in a field on Wednesday 15th June 1994because Father and Mother and I were driving to Dover to get a ferry to France and I had to stop to go for a wee, and I went into a field with cows in and after I’d had a wee I stopped and looked at the field and noticed these things. 1. There are 19 cows in the field, 15 of which are black and white and 4 of which are brown and white. 2. There is a village in the distance which has 31 visible houses and a church with a square tower and not

a spire. 3. There is an old plastic bag from Asda in the hedge, and a squashed Coca-Cola can with a snail on, and a

long piece of orange string. 4. I can see two different types of grass and two colours of flowers in the grass. And there were 31 more things in this list of things I noticed but Siobhan said I didn’t need to write them

all down. And it means that it is very tiring if I am in a new place because I see all these things, and if someone asked me afterwards what the cows looked like, I could ask which one, and I could do a drawing of them at home.”

Defamiliarisation – making strange

• Viktor Shklovsky:• “Art exists that one may recover the sensation

of life; it exists to make one feel things...The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception.”

• Form = (de)formation

Art as defamiliarisation

• Form = (de)formation of raw material• E.g. film: focus, perspective, slow-motion,

colour, cuts, soundtrack (or silence), lighting etc

“Thus with the yearSeasons return, but not to mee returnsDay, or the sweet approach of Ev’n or Morn,Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summers Rose,Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine” (John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book Three, lines

40-44)

• When my mother died I was very young,And my father sold me while yet my tongue,Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep,So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

• “Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off”

• Ordinary language is deformed• Rhyme, rhythm, prosody, repetition• Images, metaphors • Point of view, style• Defamiliarisation in fiction

“In the coat-pocket of the Great Man-Mountain we found … a globe, half silver, and half of some transparent metal: for on the transparent side we saw certain strange figures circularly drawn, and thought we could touch them, till we found our fingers stopped with that lucid substance. He put his engine to our ears, which made an incessant noise like that of a water-mill. And we conjecture it is either some unknown animal, or the god that he worships.”

“Dwayne’s waitress at the Burger Chef was a seventeen-year-old white girl named Patty Keene. Her hair was yellow. Her eyes were blue. She was very old for a mammal. Most mammals were senile or dead by the time they were seventeen. But Patty was a sort of mammal which developed very slowly, so the body she rode around in was only now mature.” (Kurt Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions)