I have a dilemma! The sections on what Ken/dall Walt/on is calling psychological participation in fiction in Mim/esis as Make-Bel/ieve seem, to me, wrong, especially when he's talking about fear (at a scary movie—this seems to be a standard scenario). Not just wrong but argued in an annoying fashion. E.g. ascriptions to Charles, the moviegoer, of various degrees of seeming fear at various points in the argument, or saying that the seeming fear experienced by people at scary movies doesn't motivate them to, say, leave (witness Chuck munching his popcorn between involuntary screams) and then acknowledging that it motivates some people not to attend in the first place. This makes for frustrating reading because it almost encourages me to think and try to synthesize an argument and, well, thinking is hard. So my dilemma is this: should I just skip those sections now, finish the book, and move on to, say, the Gormenghast trilogy, or do I not skip them and try to come up with said argument? (Not skipping them and not trying to come up with an argument apparently hasn't occurred and never will occur to me.) The benefit of the latter would be that, if I took D/avid H/ills's class on aesthetics in the fall, it would probably come in handy already to have something like that sketched out. The benefits of the former should be obvious.
Also, if the jacket copy on Jean-Paul Schaeffer's Art of the Modern Age is accurate (and that kind of thing always is), that about which I claimed interest when I was writing my statement of purpose for grad school applications (and I did not lie about my interest, my dears, no, I did not lie) has already been accomplished. Drat!
Remember that story you told me once about a professor who claimed that his decades of scholarship had rendered his aesthetic palate incapable of enjoying anything except a number of things fewer than five? Don't become that guy, Ben. I'm not sure you need to take any more classes on aesthetics.
Posted by: dave zacuto | August 09, 2005 at 05:36 PM
I think you just made that story up.
Posted by: ben wolfson | August 09, 2005 at 05:39 PM
And I've only taken two, one on Kant and Hume and one that was basically a grab bag.
Posted by: ben wolfson | August 09, 2005 at 05:40 PM
I definitely didn't just "make" that story up, Ben, whatever that means,
Posted by: dave zacuto | August 09, 2005 at 07:22 PM
The suspense is killing me!
Posted by: Matt Weiner | August 11, 2005 at 10:10 AM
Well, clearly I'm going to skip those parts for the preservation of my vital cool.
I say "I'm going to" because I haven't read anything at all in the past two days! Nothing!
Posted by: ben wolfson | August 11, 2005 at 10:14 AM
The suspense I referred to was the suspense about what comes after Dave's ultimate comma. I think you should read those parts, myself. And I have fairly direct evidence that extensive study of aesthetics does not prevent a person from taking joy in comic books.
Posted by: Matt Weiner | August 11, 2005 at 10:43 AM
Ok, I actually read those parts, and then I had to stop.
It seems the number of things I actively imagine myself to be doing, and to be true of me, every time I look at a picture is much larger than I would have guessed.
Posted by: ben wolfson | August 11, 2005 at 12:53 PM
I don't doubt that the study of aesthetics takes the joy out of art.
Posted by: Kriston | August 13, 2005 at 07:43 AM
No, really, my aesthetician friend was just telling me basically that aestheticians basically talk a lot about art in kind of philosophically informed ways. Enjoying it the while. (Kriston, if you were saying that comic books aren't art he's going to get you.)
Posted by: Matt Weiner | August 13, 2005 at 08:32 AM
The famous line is that aestheticians no more enjoy art than physicists enjoy light. I for one think the transition from experiencing to appreciating art is substantive.
But I have no beef with comic books! I just read a Transmetropolitan trade the other day, if that suffices for bona fides.
Posted by: Kriston | August 13, 2005 at 08:45 AM
I don't even know what that means! I think my fida has been boned. (I'm not the big comic book guy, though....)
Isn't appreciating art taking a deeper kind of joy? I'm not sure I understand you here... but I enjoy really taking apart I enjoy and trying to see how it works, in an amateur way ["That's you, Weiner"]. And it seems to me like aestheticians are reasonably often doing that but with cooler theories. (This was inspired by a (real-life) comment about why La Jetée differs from a slide show. A comment that I think is wrong, because it suggests that if you haven't seen La Jetée and you read this comment it won't differ from a slide show, and that is insane.)
Posted by: Matt Weiner | August 13, 2005 at 10:15 AM
(The comment was, "There's the epistemic possibility that there will be movement.")
Posted by: Matt Weiner | August 13, 2005 at 10:16 AM
And it seems to me like aestheticians are reasonably often doing that but with cooler theories.
Sadly, lots of analytic aesthetics is incredibly dry and uninteresting, and little of what I've read is about how particular artworks do their thing, but rather about how, say, we can be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina. The puzzle isn't how Tolstoy engages our emotions, but how we can have emotions at all—after all, AK doesn't really exist. So one can discuss this problem without really having read anything, though claims about what "we" typically "do" in "situations" will be harder to formulate or support in that case.
Posted by: ben wolfson | August 13, 2005 at 10:22 AM
Well, Noel Carroll's work on monsters sounds like it might be cool....
Posted by: Matt Weiner | August 14, 2005 at 01:13 PM