Wonder

Recent studies have shown how cycles of illumination provide a "reading" or interpretation of the text; the present piece sets forth the hypothesis that the planner of Ars. 5218 (probably Pieratt dou Tielt) "read" the Queste del saint Graal in the context of church history and in the light of topics of current ecclesiastical debate.

What is it like to be an earthly, worldly, “secular” creature? Is it a blessing or is it a curse? During the last two centuries, this question has generally been answered with an appeal to disengagedness and objectivity, that is, to an indisputable “scientific” representation of the whole of “reality.”  The world then seems to serve as a justification, through the “facts of the matter,” of the superiority of optimism or pessimism. On the contrary, I want in this essay to show that, in order to argue convincingly about our basic attitudes towards the world and the reasons pro or con for them (if we have any reasons at all), we do not have to insist on disinterest; we need, rather, to move toward primary and apparently objectless emotions, of the kind that are called Stimmungen in German. In other words, we need an epistemology of basic existential moods.
In particular, I examine, out of many possible, one basic attitude toward world – the readiness to be surprised or amazed by things or events – on the hypothesis that one of the preconditions for feeling at home in the world has to be sought exactly here.

Children's literature is a playground for experimenting with multiple narratological perspectives on a life with disabilities. Using Raquel J. Palacios's novel "Wonder" (2012) and the sequel "Auggie & Me: Three Wonder Stories" (2015), I analyze two literary texts that exemplify a particularly interesting shift towards multiperspectival narration. In the course of doing so, I will argue that Vera und Ansgar Nünning's account of multiperspectival narration is particularly suited for systematically comparing different disability narratives.

                    GERMAN-LANGUAGE ABSTRACT: Die Kinder- und Jugendliteratur (KJL) ist eine Spielwiese der fiktionalen Erprobung von Perspektiven auf ein Leben mit Behinderung, sie hat unterschiedlichste Erzählstrategien dafür ausgebildet. Am Beispiel von Raquel Palacios "Wonder" (2012, dt. Übers. 2013) und dem Folgeband "Auggie & Me: Three Wonder Stories" (2015, dt. Übers. 2017) stelle ich zwei multiperspektivische Erzähltexte vor, die eine besonders interessante narrative Verschiebung hin zum multiperspektivischen Erzählen veranschaulichen. Dabei werde ich vorschlagen, dass sich ein von Vera und Ansgar Nünning vorgelegter Analyseansatz wunderbar für den systematischen Vergleich verschiedener disability narratives eignet.

                In: interjuli 1/2017, 46-68.

Noch nie war so oft von Faszination die Rede wie heute. Gleichwohl haben sich die Kulturwissenschaften bislang kaum eingehender mit dem Begriff der Faszination und seiner Geschichte auseinandergesetzt. Zu Unrecht, denn im Verlauf des 20. Jahrhunderts erlebt die Faszination einen beispiellosen Aufstieg und läuft verwandten Begriffen wie dem Erhabenen, Interesse, Enthusiasmus oder dem Wunderbaren den Rang ab. Faszination – so die These, die diesem Band zugrunde liegt – ist mehr als nur ein inflationär gebrauchtes Schlagwort der Erlebnisgesellschaft: Sie bildet eine entscheidende Produktivkraft der modernen und postmodernen Kultur. Und sie kann von den Kulturwissenschaften als Schlüsselkategorie für das Verständnis medialer, ökonomischer und künstlerischer Prozesse operationalisierbar gemacht werden.

Spinoza briefly addresses the nature of Wonder in Part III of the Ethics, relegating it to the realm of imagination, while at the same time, using it as a layered affect that produces its own lineage of affects when layered on more common ones, like love, hate, etc.  What results is a conception of wonder that sits uncomfortably within his system, for the object sits ‘alone in the mind’ without a horizon of associations, while at the same time, it appears to function as an important counterpoint of desire. This paper traces the development of the concept wonder in the 17th century from Descartes to Spinoza, both in his early and later work, to deepen the understanding of the nuanced differences that exist between them. While Descartes recognizes the range of implications of wonder as a primary passion, Spinoza does not allow for its inclusion within his system of the affects and places it within the realm of inadequate knowledge. This paper seeks to identify a logical inconsistency within Spinoza’s thought, which results from the uncertain position that wonder occupies, both in 17th century philosophical discourse and specifically within Spinoza’s system of the affects, with a further articulation of Spinoza’s level of knowledge in order to create a place for the productive aspects of Wonder within Spinoza’s overall framework.

Throughout his work, Heidegger makes the repeated attempt to retrieve the Greek experience of Being as φύσις. This is necessary because Western metaphysics has ‘restricted’ Being as φύσις to the idea of beings as a whole as ‘nature.’ Understanding the distinction between φύσις and nature is fundamental to understanding Heidegger’s interpretation of the pre-Socratics, yet it remains problematically opaque in his work. In this article, I examine the way in which Heidegger’s account of affectedness affords this distinction some clarity. Specifically, I argue that whilst the ‘fundamental’ attunement of wonder disposes one toward Being as φύσις, the ‘fallen’ attunements of amazement, marveling, and curiosity dispose one toward beings as a whole, as nature. By grounding the restriction of φύσις to nature, in the restriction of wonder to amazement, marveling, and curiosity, this article brings a unique vantage point from which to understand this important yet difficult distinction in Heidegger’s work.

The Introduction presents the argument that aesthetic judgment in classical Arabic literary theory came to depend on the ability of poetry or eloquent speech to produce an experience of wonder in the listener. This experience of wonder is not merely a reaction of amazement and bedazzlement, but it also entails a process of discovery. After presenting an account of the nature of classical Arabic literary theory, its various approaches to literary assessment, its topics and historical development, the Introduction highlights that the main aspects of literary expression Arabic criticism was concerned with lay in rhetorical figures (badīʿ), simile (tashbīh), figurative speech (majāz), metaphor (istiʿāra), metonymy (kināya), and sentence construction (naẓm). It is in these aspects of linguistic expression that an aesthetic theory of wonder can be uncovered in the classical Arabic critical tradition, including in discussions of poetry proper, engagements with Aristotelian Poetics, and works on eloquence and the miraculousness (iʿjāz) of the Quran, culminating by the thirteenth century in the formalized study of eloquence in ʿilm al-balāgha (the science of eloquence).

WONDER WOMEN: SOFONISBA ANGUISSOLA, LAVINIA FONTANA AND ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI
A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF RENAISSANCE AND BAROQUE SELF-PORTRAIT PAINTING BY FEMALE ARTISTS

by Rosa Lena Reed Robinson

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Master of Arts in Art History at
Studio Art Centers International
Florence, Italy

2017


This  thesis is focused on the self-portrait painting practice by three female artists from the Renaissance and the Baroque periods: Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, and Artemisia Gentileschi. Chapter I introduces the self-portrait as it developed specific to the Renaissance and in relation to a Greco-Roman classical ideal. The chapter focuses on Renaissance concepts of art and the very role of the artist. Chapter II studies the numerous self-portraits of Sofonisba Anguissola, the first great Renaissance female artist to have an international career. The artist’s self-portraits both became a foundation for those of later female artists and self-consciously expressed the new elite status achieved by this Lombard artist of noble lineage who worked as court portraitist for the Spanish monarchy. Chapter III examines the self-portraits and innovative identity self-portraiture of Lavinia Fontana of Bologna. It is demonstrated how her two early self-portraits built on the precedent established by Sofonisba, and yet, are of somewhat greater iconographic complexity. While in her maturity the artist developed self-portraiture into the identity self-portrait through the subject of Judith and Holofernes. Within her treatments of the theme in some examples she put herself into the figure of Judith and in others into Judith’s maid Abra. Lavinia Fontana’s final masterpiece, the improbable painting Minerva Dressing done at the end of her extensive career was likewise arguably an identity self-portrait. Minerva Dressing constitutes the first female fully nude figure painted by a female artist. Chapter IV focuses on Artemisia Gentileschi. This thesis designates the artist’s Pommersfelden Susanna and the Elders as both Artemisia’s first exact self-portrait and the first female full-length nude self-portrait painted by a female artist. The work is also an identity self-portrait. This chapter continues with a discussion of both versions of Artemisia’s infamous Judith and Holofernes (Capodimonte/Uffizi). Both works are arguably exact self-portrait paintings and identity self-portraits. Artemisia’s Allegory of Painting in London, often referred to as a self-portrait in scholarship, is suggested a perhaps better understood as an ideal identity self-portrait rather than a literal self-representation. The Allegory of Painting is considered together with other attributed self-portraits and portraits of the artist. A major theme in Chapter IV is the transition from literal self-representation to allegorical and ideal portrayal of the self. This thesis suggests that, as the artist’s career advanced, Artemisia Gentileschi did continue to paint both the exact and the ideal self-portrait. Finally, in the Conclusion, the legacy of the self-portraits of the Wonder Women, to adopt a phrase from Giorgio Vasari, is considered in reference to future female artists such as Elisabetta Sirani, Angelica Kauffmann, Elisabeth Vigée Le-Brun and Paula Modersohn-Becker.

Oggetto del saggio è l’indagine della relazione tra la rappresentazione di creature mostruose nell’Inferno dantesco alla luce del concetto di meraviglia codificato nella ricezione tomista della filosofia aristotelica, in rapporto al peculiare legame che esso intrattiene con la passio del timore. L’obiettivo è quello di dimostrare, attraverso la definizione di un percorso costituito dagli incontri di Dante personaggio con i monstra infernali (Gerione e Lucifero) o mirabilia (la distorsione della figura umana nella pena degli indovini), l’essenziale funzione svolta dall’intreccio di meraviglia e timore all’interno dell’iter penitenziale dantesco.

The main theme of the article is the investigation of the connection between the representation of monstra in Dante’s Inferno in light of the concept of wonder codified in Thomas Aquinas’ reception of the Aristotelian philosophy, in relation to its bond with the passio of fear. The goal is to demonstrate, through the definition of a path made of the meetings of Dante as a character with infernal monstra (Geryon and Satan) or mirabilia (the deformation of soothsayers’ figures), the essential function of the twist of wonder and fear into Dante’s penance itinerary.

in: Nous, Polis, Nomos... (Berlin, Academia Verlag, 2016). I examine the reading given by commentators and critics of the XVIth c. to a few lines of Aristotle’s Poetics (whose princeps is dated 1508), in which the text requires that epic plot should be more marvellous and wonderful than the tragic (1460a11-18). My intention is, first of all, (a) to look at the ecdotic problems in this passage, which was literally (re)invented by the editors and commentators of Aristotle’s Poetics; (b) to analyse the change of the reading analogon into alogon in 1570, and (c) to clarify, on the basis of this reading, the intellectual genealogy of wonder as one of the founding ideas of modern literary theory.

What makes language beautiful? Arabic Poetics offers an answer to what this pertinent question looked like at the height of the Islamic civilization. In this novel argument, Lara Harb suggests that literary quality depended on the ability of linguistic expression to produce an experience of discovery and wonder in the listener. Analyzing theories of how rhetorical figures, simile, metaphor, and sentence construction are able to achieve this effect of wonder, Harb shows how this aesthetic theory, first articulated at the turn of the eleventh century CE, represented a major paradigm shift from earlier Arabic criticism which based its judgement on criteria of truthfulness and naturalness. In doing so, this study poses a major challenge to the misconception in modern scholarship that Arabic criticism was 'traditionalist' or 'static', exposing an elegant widespread conceptual framework of literary beauty in the post-eleventh-century Islamicate world which is central to poetic criticism, the interpretation of Aristotle's Poetics in Arabic philosophy and the rationale underlying discussions about the inimitability of the Quran.

I will begin with trying to portrait Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein’s approach to language in a book called the Tractactus Logico-Philosophicus and the tension between his picture theory conception of language and the acceptance of wonder as something that we cannot put into words. Then, I’ll move on to the aim of reading Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics and understanding the ethical meaning of the acceptance of wonder, as an individual openness to the unsolvable mystery of the world. Thirdly, I’ll argue that the wittgensteinian theme of the limits between what can be said and what can only be lived as wonder is shared by Martin Buber, who nonetheless approaches it in a relational manner. Finally, I will try to sketch some educational questions that can arise from these philosophical thoughts.

This paper articulates wonder as an ontological orientation that is active between objects. Here I argue for an active material world that disrupts dualistic philosophies. I do so by appeal to Merleau-Ponty's relational ontology, found in both the Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible. I read these insights through work on new materialism and object oriented ontology utilizing what Karen Barad has called diffractive reading to constitute an ontological reframing of the concept of wonder. This is the beginning chapter of a much larger project that ultimately argues that wonder extends to the material world to the extent that the world is both wonderful and wondering.

Hannah Arendt disavowed the title of “philosopher,” and is known above all as a political theorist. But the relationship between philosophy and politics animates her entire oeuvre. We find her addressing the topic in The Human Condition (1958), in Between Past and Future (a collection of essays written in the early 1960s), and in Men in Dark Times (another collection of essays, this one from the late sixties). It is treated in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, composed during the seventies, and also in the posthumous Life of the Mind, two of three projected volumes of which were complete when she died in 1975. Certainly, Arendt’s thought cannot be understood without taking into account her deep suspicion of and equally deep commitment to philosophy in the context of political reflection. For all that, her writings on this abiding preoccupation do not gel into a systematically articulated theory or programmatic statement. Instead, they reflect Arendt’s appreciation of what remained for her a “vital tension” – an enigma.

In his analysis of the incentives of pure practical reason, Kant refers to the feeling of respect as "a positive feeling which is not of empirical origin." According to commentators such as Wolff, the introduction of such a feeling contradicts the thrust of Kant's entire argument. In this paper, I present an interpretation of Kant's analysis of the feeling of respect which avoids the pitfalls usually associated with this notion. Furthermore, I argue that the feeling of respect is but one of a number of feelings, which here are called transcendental feelings, whose occurrence can only be adequately described and explained through reference to a rational agent and whose justification is that they are necessary conditions of the very possibility in engaging in certain specifically human activities. Additional examples of such feelings, drawn from the work of Husserl and Heidegger, are discussed.  Presented at the Western Division APA, 1983.

The philosophers agree that philosophy begins in wonder. How wonder is understood, however, is not at all clear and has implications for contemporary work in feminist phe-nomenology. Luce Irigaray, for example, has insisted on wonder as the passion that will renew relationships between women and men, provide a foundation for democracy, and launch a new era in history. She calls on women to enact practices of wonder in relation to men. In what follows I briefly review the most significant claims about wonder in the history of philosophy generally, and as related to the phenomenological practice of the epoché particularly. I consider Irigaray's claims about wonder as they arise out of this tradition, and try to spell out both what is promised to women and what is asked of them through affirmations of wonder. I suggest that this prescriptive notion is at the heart of a new conservatism in "feminist" thought that turns on nostalgia for age-old beliefs about women's proper mode of relation toward men and their accomplishments, and is deeply homophobic. I urge readers to adopt a more critical attitude toward wonder as related to sexual difference by historicizing the inquiry in keeping with the phenomenological practice of Simone de Beauvoir. Drawing on Kant, Beauvoir, and contemporary work by Sara Ahmed, I suggest that there is a politics of wonder at work here which feminists have every reason to question. Reflecting on the politics of wonder also discloses some key features of critical feminist phenomenological practice.

In this paper I discuss the reasons for which we may consider wonder an epistemic emotion. I defend the thesis for which a specific type of wonder is aporia-based and that since it is aporia-based, this wonder is epistemic. The epistemic wonder is thus an interrogating wonder which plays the epistemic function of motivation to questioning in processes of inquiry. I first introduce the contemporary debate on epistemic emotions, and then I analyze the characteristics that make of wonder an epistemic emotion, from a data-based, phenomenological, and conceptual perspective.

This is a meta-philosophical essay on the relationship between philosophy and laughter; taking themes from the world of comedy such as wonder, folly and madness, appearance and reality, paradox and nonsense, reversal and the world-upside-down, nothingness and utopia, roguery, leaping and the fall, the essay examines the limits of human thought and reason as understood by philosophers through the ages. The sample chapter focuses on the comedy of nothing and the potential risibility of utopian nowheres.

In this essay, I attempt to address the (mis)educational problem of epistemic totality by reflecting on what I call " wonderment. " The essay is divided into two parts: the first is concerned with epistemic totality, and the second focuses on won-derment as a promising epistemologico-educational framework that can counteract epistemic totality. I base the term " epistemic totality " on Hannah Arendt's standpoint on totalitarianism as well as Michel Foucault's notion of episteme: totalitarianism being a logic that is usually mobilized by one idea and seeks to hold absolute control and authority over thinking, 1 and episteme here being (silent) structures of knowing. 2 In the first part of the essay, I briefly address the contemporary pertinence of epistemic totality and consider a few perspectives on the problem as well as a few suggested antidotes. In this part, I do not intend to exhaust theoretical formulations of totality; rather, I aim to gather certain challenges under the term " epistemic totality " in order to draw attention to the contemporariness and practical consequences of it, as well as to leave room to reflect on the difficulty of effecting antitotalitarian epistemic ruptures. Although the first part of the essay focuses on totality, the main concern of the essay is about wonderment as a counteragent working against this totality, gaining momentum in the second half. In this latter part, through discussing what I call cases of wonderment, I argue that, because wonderment creates epistemic ruptures that are inherently antitotalitarian, it can provide a promising epistemolog-ico-educational framework. EpistEmic totalitarianism and contEmporary timEs Arendt writes that totalitarianism is nourished by a grand and fixated explanation — logic — of reality. Furthermore, it is usually based on one idea that it considers to be the truth. She writes how totalitarianism creates a " fantastically fictitious consistency " (OT, 352) in explaining reality by ordering the facts into an absolute and straightforward logical procedure. Consequently, when this logic appropriates structures of knowledge, it can lead to " epistemic violence, " 3 subjugation and closure against nonknowledge. A germane and present-day extension of epistemic totality as discussed above is what Emmanuel Levinas simply calls " war " : when " impositions " — or " concepts " , " generalities " such as a heretic or a threat — are imposed on the other, and hence the other's " alterity " is denied. 4 This appropriation of alterity prevents preserving the other as other, 5 and it is epistemically — if not physically and geographically — violent. A case in point can be the war of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the Middle East and the violence of Sunni Muslims against Others (Kurds and Christians, or non-" selves, " non-Sunnis, other nonknowers of " my " religion) which, aside from its main cause being prolonged and problematic imperial interventions, also feeds off epistemic totality.

Many authors have claimed a moral and educational significance for wonder. In this article Anders Schinkel assesses these claims in order to address the question whether we do indeed have reason to stimulate the sense of wonder and to provoke experiences of wonder in education with a view to its moral effects or importance. Are there moral effects of wonder-or does wonder have a moral significance-that give us a (further) reason to promote children's sense of wonder and to attempt to elicit the experience of wonder in children? And if so, will any experience of wonder do, from a moral perspective, or do only some experiences of wonder-in specific contexts, or with a specific object-have the desired effect? Schinkel argues that, although there is certainly a case to be made for wonder's moral (educational) importance, it needs to be made cautiously. Wonder coheres more easily with some emotions and attitudes than with others, but in the end its moral significance depends to a large extent on how we interpret or make sense of our wonder and what we wonder at. In moral education, therefore, the value of wonder depends on how it is framed and morally charged.

My chapter, ‘Education and the Arts: inspiring wonder’, in ed. A. Schinkel, Wonder, education and human flourishing. Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit University Press, pp 256-270.

Anders Schinkel (2017; 2018) defends the role of deep wonder as an antidote to the instrumentalising effects of a neoliberal approach to education. Yet how to educate for wonder when wonder often seems to be elusive; arising anywhere at any time yet seemingly difficult to grasp when aimed for directly? In this chapter, I will further build on Schinkel’s ideas and defend the arts as an important vehicle for prompting the experience of wonder. The arts are likely to give rise to a sense of wonder due to the way in which they present concepts, images and ideas in new and creative ways. Such artistic depiction encourages those engaging with artworks to adopt a certain way of seeing; a mode of perception that is open and receptive and thus likely to result in feelings of wonder. I claim that creating space for the arts on the school curriculum will provide opportunities for wonder in educational settings.

"This is an intriguing study of marvels, miracles and wonder stories and the ways medieval people responded to them. Brewer integrates studies in neuroscience, modern social psychology and reception theory to investigate how readers and listeners reacted to stories of wonder and to show how their demands for proof contributed to the development of medieval skepticism." Kathleen Kamerick, University of Iowa, USA Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages explores the response by medieval society to tales of marvels and the supernatural, which ranged from rm belief to outright rejection, and asks why the believers believed and why the skeptical disbelieved. Despite living in a world whose structures more often than not supported belief, there were still a great many who disbelieved, most notably scholastic philosophers who began a polemical program against belief in marvels. Keagan Brewer re-evaluates the Middle Ages' reputation as an era of credulity by considering the evidence for incidences of marvels, miracles and the supernatural and demonstrating the reasons people did and did not believe in such things. Using an array of contemporary sources, he shows that medieval responders sought evidence in the commonality of a report, similarity of one event to another, theological explanations and from people with status, to show that those who believed in marvels and miracles did so only because the wonders had passed evidentiary testing. In particular, he examines both emotional and rational reactions to wondrous phenomena and why some were readily accepted and others rejected. This book is an important contribution to the history of emotions and belief in the Middle Ages. Keagan Brewer is based at the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Sydney. His publications include Prester John: The Legend and Its Sources (Aldershot, 2015).