Aesthetic Criticism

Klevan, Andrew

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_18

Andrew Klevan⁴

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1 Citations

Abstract

This chapter explains the characteristics and components of aesthetic criticism.

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Notes

1.
René Wellek, ‘Literary Criticism’, In What Is Criticism?, ed. Paul Hernadi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 298.
2.
Judy Pearsall, ed., The New Oxford Dictionary of English (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
3.
See Philip Smallwood, Reconstructing Criticism: Pope’s Essay on Criticism and the Logic of Definition (Lewisburg and London: Bucknell University Press and Associated University Presses, 2003), for a lengthy and detailed discussion of this contestation.
4.
Despite the capaciousness and contestation, I sometimes refer to aesthetic criticism as simply ‘criticism’. This is because the philosophers and critics I cite often use the one word, and also because some of the matters discussed are also relevant to other forms of criticism (especially other branches of evaluative criticism).
5.
This chapter repeats work from my book Aesthetic Evaluation and Film (2018), primarily from Part II entitled ‘What Is Aesthetic Criticism?’ Much of the chapter is not film specific because the characteristics of (aesthetic) criticism outlined are applicable to other arts and artefacts as well as film. Indeed, a main intention is to emphasise transferable aspects because my experience is that film studies is largely unfamiliar with the philosophy of aesthetic criticism. Explicit crossover is, and has been, rare although some of its concerns and insights have made their way into film criticism (or they have been discovered independently).
6.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1987 [1790]).
7.
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, ‘Cultural Evaluation’, in Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics (Oxford Art Online), ed. Michael Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), accessed April 19, 2017, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t234/e0200
8.
F.E. Sparshott, The Concept of Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 118.
9.
Stein H. Olsen, The End of Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 137; Stein H. Olsen, ‘Appreciation’, in Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics (Oxford Art Online), ed. Michael Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), accessed March 30, 2017, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t234/e0027
10.
Olsen, ‘Appreciation’.
11.
Harold Osborne, Aesthetics and Criticism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955), 21, 23.
12.
Sparshott, The Concept of Criticism, 113.
13.
Noël Carroll, On Criticism (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 45.
14.
Gary Day, Literary Criticism: A New History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 199.
15.
Olsen, ‘Appreciation’.
16.
Walter Hinderer, ‘Literary Value Judgments and Value Cognition’, in Problems of Literary Evaluation, ed. Joseph P. Strelka (University Park & London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969), 54; Richard Shusterman, The Object of LiteraryCriticism(Elementa 29) (Amsterdam, K&N, Kindle Edition, 1984).
17.
Graham Hough, An Essay on Criticism (London: Duckworth & Company, 1966), 1970.
18.
Roger Seamon, ‘Criticism’, in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (Second Edition), eds. Berys Gaut and Dominic M. Lopes (London and New York, Routledge, 2005), 412.
19.
Seamon, ‘Criticism’, 412.
20.
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin, 2009 [1961]).
21.
Sontag, Against Interpretation, 7. There is now a strand in contemporary film studies, broadly labelled AffectTheory, which pays attention to sensation, the sensuous, and the textural in film (and Sontag’s essay is a prototypical example of it). Affect scholars believe that sensory qualities have been overlooked or disregarded. Instead, film studies has concentrated on, for example, signification (the meaning of elements), or narrative (the way the story is structured), or classifications (genre, periods, movements), or sociology (the cultural, historical, political contexts). Even when the concentration was on form and style, it was characterised by too much distance and was too cognitive. Affective, sensory, and pre-cognitive dimensions, and the value that arises from them, have been insufficiently embraced. According to affect scholars, some films make particularly productive use of film’s affective, sensory, and pre-cognitive dimensions.
22.
Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The HollywoodComedy of Remarriage (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1981), 116–118.
23.
Andrew Klevan, ‘Living Meaning: The Fluency of Film Performance’, in Theorizing Film Acting, ed. Aaron Taylor (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 34–35.
24.
Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Belknap Press, 2005), 7–12; Andrew Klevan, ‘Notes on Stanley Cavell and Philosophical Criticism’, in New Takes in Film-Philosophy, eds. Havi Carel and Greg Tuck (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
25.
Arnold Isenberg, Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, eds. William Callaghan, Leigh Cauman, Carl Hempel, Sidney Morgenbesser, Mary Mothersill, Ernest Nagel, and Theodore Norman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 156–71.
26.
Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 376–7.
27.
John Casey, The Language of Criticism (London: Methuen, 2011 [1966]), 22–3, 34.
28.
Robin Wood, Personal Views: Explorations in Film [Revised Edition] (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 17–18. Criticism would not simply apply a theory a priori, that is to say, in advance of the experience. However, it understands that some aspects of particular films may be revealed by theory, for example, Marxist or Freudian theory. This may be because the critic understands a film to be operating in the same or similar territory to the theory. Moreover, once the link to the theory has been made, it remains to be ascertained whether the relation is aesthetically meritorious or not.
29.
Graham Fuller and Terry Eagleton, ‘The Question of Value: A Discussion’, New Left Review, I/142 (1983), 83.
30.
Monroe Beardsley, ‘The Name and Nature of Criticism’, in What is Criticism?, ed. Paul Hernadi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 155.
31.
Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981 [1958]), 527–9.
32.
Personal, affective, and entertainment value, however, may also be, and often are, desirable outcomes of aesthetic value.
33.
Alan H. Goldman, ‘Evaluating Art’, in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, ed. Peter Kivy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
34.
Goldman, ‘Evaluating Art’, 101.
35.
Goldman, ‘evaluating Art’, 106.
36.
Bohdan Dziemidok, ‘Aesthetic Experience and Evaluation’, in Essays on Aesthetics: Perspectives on the Work of Monroe Beardsley, ed. John Fisher (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 57.
37.
Dziemidok, ‘Aesthetic Experience and Evaluation’, 64.
38.
Helen Vendler, The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), 2.
39.
John M. Ellis, ‘The Logic of the Question “What is Criticism?”’, in What is Criticism?, ed. Paul Hernadi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 24–25.
40.
David Fuller, ‘William Empson: from verbal analysis to cultural criticism’, in Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Patricia Waugh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 156.
41.
F.R. Leavis, F.R., The Common Pursuit (London: Hogarth, 1984 [1952]), 213.
42.
Michael Bell, F.R. Leavis (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 35.
43.
Bell, F.R. Leavis, 16.
44.
Quoted in Bell, F.R. Leavis, 121.
45.
George Steiner, ‘F.R. Leavis’, in 20th Century Literary Criticism: A Reader, ed. David Lodge (London and New York: Longman, 1995 [1962]), 622–3.
46.
Leavis, The Common Pursuit, 212–3.
47.
Leavis, The Common Pursuit, 213.
48.
Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, 372–3.
49.
Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, 372.
50.
David Daiches, ‘Literary Evaluation’, in Problems of Literary Evaluation, ed. Joseph P. Strelka, (University Park & London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969), 167.
51.
Contemporary ideological assumptions and prejudices probably influence this pedagogy. In different times and places, description, often referred to as ekphrasis, was regarded as a valuable skill requiring formal training.
52.
William Logan, ‘Forward into the Past: Reading the New Critics’, in Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism, ed. Garrick Davis (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2008), xi–xii.
53.
V.F. Perkins, Film as Film (London: Penguin, 1991 [1972]), 79.
54.
Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 1988), 70.
55.
Booth, The Company We Keep, 71.
56.
Kendall L. Walton, ‘Categories of Art’, in Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 [essay first published 1970]), 198–9.
57.
E.H. Gombrich, ‘A Historical Hypothesis’, in History as a Tool in Critical Interpretation, eds. Thomas F. Rugh and Erin R. Silva (Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1978).
58.
Patrick Doorly, The Truth about Art: Reclaiming Quality (Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2013).
59.
Bell, F.R. Leavis, 47.
60.
Bell, F.R. Leavis, 47.
61.
Bell, F.R. Leavis, 87.
62.
See especially William K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, Sewanee Review 54, no. 3 (1946): 468–88. Another advantage of this locution is that a film is the symbiotic result of many significant personnel, and disentangling attribution is often difficult and unnecessary when making an evaluative claim.
63.
Quoted in Graham McFee, Artistic Judgement: A Framework for Philosophical Aesthetics (Heidelberg, London and New York: Springer, 2011), 93.
64.
Bell, F.R. Leavis, 114.
65.
Casey, The Language of Criticism, 149.
66.
Noël Carroll. Philosophy of Art: a contemporary introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 189, 199.
67.
Beardsley, Aesthetics, 82–88.
68.
Paul Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics Volume 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 401–2.
69.
‘Verdictive’ and ‘substantive’ are terms used by Nick Zangwill, ‘Aesthetic Judgment’, in Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, accessed April 19, 2017, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-judgment/
70.
Frank Sibley, ‘Aesthetic Concepts’, in Approach to Aesthetics, eds. John Bensen, Betty Redfern and Jeremy Roxbee Cox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006 [1962]), 1.
71.
Sibley, ‘Aesthetic Concepts’, 1.
72.
Rather than being based on the requirements of the particular film, the meritorious ascription is perhaps based on an implicit assumption that women should be, and it is good if they are, graceful.
73.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006 [1953]), 27, point 66.
74.
Roger Scruton, Art and Imagination (London: Methuen, 1974), 247–8; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989 [1966]), 3, Point 8.
75.
Bell, F.R. Leavis, 20.
76.
Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1975), 198–9.
77.
David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, in Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology, eds. Steven M. Cahn and Aaron Meskin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008 [1757]).
78.
Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, 110.
79.
Colin Lyas, ‘The Evaluation of Art’, in Philosophical Aesthetics: An Introduction, ed. Oswald Hanfling (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 372.
80.
Casey, The Language of Criticism, 29.
81.
Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, trans. K. Pilcher Keuneman (London and New York: Continuum, 2004 [1966]); Hugh M. Davidson, ‘The Critical Position of Roland Barthes’, in Criticism: Speculative and Analytical Essays, ed. L.S. Dembo (Wisconsin and London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 99.
82.
Joel J. Kupperman, ‘Reasons in Support of Evaluations of Works of Art’, The Monist 50, no. 2, (1966): 224.
83.
One definition of ‘subjective’ given in Pearsall ed., The New Oxford English Dictionary.
84.
Margaret Macdonald, ‘Some Distinctive Features of Arguments Used in Criticism of the Arts’, in Aesthetics, ed. Jerome Stolnitz (New York and London: Macmillan, 1965 [1949]), 103.
85.
This is an elaboration based on the legal analogy made by Macdonald in ‘Some Distinctive Features of Arguments Used in Criticism of the Arts’. I also deploy it for different ends.
86.
Max Black, ‘“Perfection” as a Term in Aesthetics’, in Art and Philosophy: A Symposium, ed. Sidney Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1966), 32.
87.
Black, ‘Perfection’, 32.
88.
Black, ‘Perfection’, 32.
89.
This is also true of science where insights of great significance and value have depended on the personalities of individual scientists apprehending and interpreting the world.
90.
James Grant, The Critical Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
91.
The critic is a multi-faceted figure: detective, counsel, judge, and jury all rolled into one.
92.
Macdonald, ‘Some Distinctive Features of Arguments Used in Criticism of the Arts’, 111.
93.
Shusterman, The Object of Literary Criticism.
94.
Smallwood discussing H.A. Mason’s views on criticism in Reconstructing Criticism, 146.
95.
For example, Johann Gottfried Herder cited by Wellek, ‘Literary Criticism’, 300.
96.
Booth, The Company We Keep, 32.
97.
Murray Krieger, ‘Literary Analysis and Evaluation – and the Ambidextrous Critic’, in Criticism: Speculative and Analytical Essays, ed. L.S. Dembo (Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 34.
98.
Day, Literary Criticism, 250.
99.
Day, Literary Criticism, 250.
100.
F.R. Leavis, Revaluation (Middlesex: Penguin/Pelican, 1972 [1936]).
101.
Such discourses might be necessary to achieve alternative perspectives on artworks, for example, for radical critique.
102.
Meyer Schapiro, ‘On Perfection, Coherence, and Unity of Form and Content’, in Art and Philosophy: A Symposium, ed. Sidney Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1966), 15.
103.
Stephanie Ross, ‘When Critics Disagree: Prospects for Realism in Aesthetics’, The Philosophical Quarterly 64, no. 257 (2014).
104.
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, ‘Contingencies of Value’, Critical Inquiry 10, no. 1, (1983): 27, 22.
105.
Steve Blandford, Barry Keith Grant, and Jim Hillier, TheFilm StudiesDictionary (London: Arnold, 2001), 57.
106.
Andrew Britton, Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton, ed. Barry K. Grant (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 433.
107.
John Gibbs, ‘Filmmakers’ Choices’, in Close-up 01, eds. John Gibbs and Douglas Pye (London and New York: Wallflower, 2006), 5.
108.
Gibbs, ‘Filmmakers’ Choices’, 5.
109.
Alex Clayton, ‘V.F. Perkins: Aesthetic Suspense’, in Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice, eds. Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 212.
110.
Meraj Dhir, ‘A gestalt approach to film analysis’, in Arnheim for Film and Media Studies, ed. Scott Higgins (New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2011), 99; Rudolph Arnheim, Film asArt (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: California University Press, 1957).
111.
Dhir, ‘A gestalt approach to film analysis’, 97.
112.
Dudley Andrew, ‘Foreword to the 2004 Edition’, in What is Cinema? Volume 1, ed. Hugh Gray (California: California University Press, 2005), xx; Bert Cardullo, ‘Introduction’, in Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties, ed. Bert Cardullo (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), xiii–xiv.
113.
John Gibbs, The Life of Mise-en-Scène: Visual Style and British Film Criticism, 1946–78 (Manchester and London: Manchester University Press, 2013), 177.
114.
Gibbs, The Life of Mise-en-Scène, 177.
115.
Quoted phrases are taken from an interview by Gibbs with one of the Movie critics, Charles Barr. Gibbs, The Life of Mise-en-Scène, 180.
116.
There may be instances of effects which despite being relatively one note have other merits. They might have been difficult to achieve, or the experience might be unusual or unconventional.
117.
Gibbs, The Life of Mise-en-Scène, 180; then Lindgren quoted in Gibbs: 180. The problems in merely acclaiming the communicative efficacy of a device are similar to the problems in acclaiming the fulfilment of a filmmaker’s purpose.
118.
Gibbs, The Life of Mise-en-Scène, 180.
119.
I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London and New York: Routledge, 2001 [1924]), 187.
120.
Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 187.
121.
Interpretative and evaluative claims can be obvious for all the same reasons and, consequently, will not be persuasive.
122.
V.F. Perkins, ‘Must We Say What They Mean? Film Criticism and Interpretation’, in Movie, no. 34 (1990).
123.
Another holistic concern is structure. For example, are a film and its internal sections of the right duration, and how is material advantageously introduced and developed, or withheld and released, over its length? Kenneth Burke encourages responsiveness to the structuring, and the formal movement, of material across a work, to the production of ‘crescendo, contrast, comparison, balance, repetition, disclosure, reversal, contraction, expansion, [and] magnification’ (quoted in Booth, The Rhetoric of Irony, 226).
124.
J.W. Mackail quoted in Osborne, Aesthetics and Criticism, 279.
125.
John Gibbs, and Douglas Pye, ‘Introduction’, in Style and Meaning: Studies in the detailed analysis of film, ed. John Gibbs and Douglas Pye (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), 11.
126.
Although it is the particular arrangement of a film’s features that are of primary concern, this does not entail severing it from other films or the world outside.
127.
Perkins, Film as Film, 118.
128.
Perkins, Film as Film, 23.

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Oxford University, Oxford, UK
Andrew Klevan

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Andrew Klevan
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The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA
Noël Carroll
William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, USA
Laura T. Di Summa
Baton Rouge Community College, Baton Rouge, LA, USA
Shawn Loht

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Klevan, A. (2019). Aesthetic Criticism. In: Carroll, N., Di Summa, L.T., Loht, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_18

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_18
Published: 31 October 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-19600-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-19601-1
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