After the Avant-Gardes

As the example of the viceroy butterfly shows, it’s impossible to fully understand living processes by reducing them to their co ...

each of our brains shares the same model-making abilities and standard operating procedures. Douglas Hofstadter suggests that hu ...

Then another sentence follows: “His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.” ...

as fiction. They don’t have to. The reader knows she’s reading a novel from the moment she picks up the book and willingly submi ...

we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.... We slip into a dream, forgetting the ...

metrical poetry activates both halves of a reader’s brain simultaneously. In writing metrical verse, a poet is literally transmi ...

understanding poetry, where words have many shades and levels of mean- ing beyond mere reference and dictionary definition. It p ...

meaning. Once having selected a word, the poet then becomes aware of interesting semantic relationships with others in the poem. ...

choice. Redundancy makes communication possible by imposing rules that force speakers and writers to conform to somewhat predict ...

notes that the text of “bliss” can lie awfully close to boredom. Writing of Finnegans Wake, that ur-text of the modern avant-gar ...

“meaning.” This method pioneered by Stein comprises one type of Modernist “difficulty” and has been widely imitated in recent de ...

in his essay on Joyce’s Ulyssesand alluded to in his poem’s Greek and Latin epigraphs and final notes on primitive myths. In som ...

of English blank verse. Paradoxically, it was by reducing the freedom of his imaginary monkeys that he liberated them to write s ...

All “postmodernisms” had in common an essential scepticism about the existence of an objective reality, and/or the possibility o ...

ogy—will require a re-birth of objectivity in philosophy, leading to a broad cultural consensus regarding what art is. Until an ...

Ironically, today’s avant-gardists themselves hardly ever use the term avant-garde. Postmodern, or postmodernist, is preferred, ...

calling the Cubists “reactionary.” Even critics, he lamented, had aban- doned traditional standards in their effort “to keep up ...

The Root of the Problem Controversy is woven into the very fabric of intellectual discourse. Have an opinion on a hot social or ...

Art, a survey of philosophers’ failed attempts over a thirty-year period to pin down the precise nature of art. Instead of attem ...

It is art if it is called art, written about in an art magazine, exhibited in a museum or bought by a private collector. It seem ...