Imaginative Beholding: Physiological Psychology and the Discourse on Representation in fin-de-siecle Germany (2010)
Newman, Winifred Elysee (Author)
Harvard University
Physical Details: 314 pp.
Language: English
From classical antiquity to the late nineteenth century a representation in art was judged successful based on it's broadly mimetic fidelity to Nature. The changing sense of reality at the turn of the century brought to the fore a new paradigm of representation seemingly as a clean rupture with the past in that a celebration of abstraction, illusion and distortion of the natural became the norm. The subject of this dissertation is to demonstrate that the modernist understanding of representation was not solely a rupture with the past but emerged from a productive exchange of concepts between the arts and sciences in the late nineteenth century from the discipline of psychology. I will contend that without the new models of mind emerging in German physiological psychology in the thirty year period 1860s-1890s the concept of representation in aesthetics would not have escaped the boundaries of classical mimesis and fostered the necessary conditions for the production and reception of modernity in aesthetics and by extension, art. The exchange between aesthetics and science of new knowledge produced by instruments and empirical methodologies of calibrating psychological responses to visual and sensual stimuli leads to an ontological shift in the concept of representation. This physiological aesthetics not only provided the terms for new formalist languages of art and criticism it also instigated a reconsideration of the limitation of the classical definition of representation in art. The emergence of early modernism depends on the new psychologism not only to explain the effects of a work of art and the new role of the observer, but also suggests that a new mechanics of thought is necessary to rationalize the reality of modernism through representation.
...MoreDescription Cited in ProQuest Diss. & Thes. : doc. no. 3435304.
Similar Citations
Article
Leo, Angela de;
(2006)
The Origin of Graphic Recording of Psycho-Physiological Phenomena in Germany
(/isis/citation/CBB001023631/)
Article
Becquemont, Daniel;
(2007)
Les réticences de Bain face à la théorie des localisations cérébrales de Jackson et de Ferrier
(/isis/citation/CBB000954378/)
Article
Forest, Denis;
(2007)
Bain et les théories centralistes du contrôle de l'action et de la conscience d'agir
(/isis/citation/CBB000954380/)
Chapter
Dror, Otniel E.;
(2010)
Seeing the Blush: Feeling Emotions
(/isis/citation/CBB001221459/)
Book
Schmidgen, Henning;
(2009)
Die Helmholtz-Kurven: Auf der Spur der verlorenen Zeit
(/isis/citation/CBB001220074/)
Article
Borck, Cornelius;
(2002)
Kopfarbeit: Die Suche nach einer präzisen Meßmethode für psychische Vorgänge
(/isis/citation/CBB000201117/)
Article
Dupont, Jean-Claude;
(2007)
Sources et implications physiologiques du discours psychologique chez Bain
(/isis/citation/CBB000954379/)
Thesis
Newman, Winifred Elysse;
(2010)
Imaginative Beholding: Physiological Psychology and the Discourse on Representation in fin-de-siècle Germany
(/isis/citation/CBB001567225/)
Article
Stoffers, Manuel;
(2003)
Münsterberg's Nightmare: Psychology and History in fin-de-siècle Germany and America
(/isis/citation/CBB000300900/)
Book
Hippius, Hanns;
(2008)
The University Department of Psychiatry in Munich: From Kraepelin and His Predecessors to Molecular Psychiatry
(/isis/citation/CBB000830856/)
Chapter
Dufour, Michel;
(2006)
La Psychologie: une nouvelle science entre sens commun, physiologie et métaphysique?
(/isis/citation/CBB001024263/)
Chapter
Cicciola, Elisabetta;
(2009)
Alfred Binet e il laboratorio di psicologia fisiologica della Sorbonne
(/isis/citation/CBB001221013/)
Article
Williams, Elizabeth A.;
(2010)
Stomach and Psyche: Eating, Digestion, and Mental Illness in the Medicine of Philippe Pinel
(/isis/citation/CBB001031521/)
Book
Martensen, Robert Lawrence;
(2004)
The Brain Takes Shape: An Early History
(/isis/citation/CBB000470153/)
Article
Malin, Brenton J.;
(2009)
Mediating Emotion: Technology, Social Science, and Emotion in the Payne Fund Motion-Picture Studies
(/isis/citation/CBB000951928/)
Article
Arenson, Kelly E.;
(2011)
Natural and Neutral States in Plato's Philebus
(/isis/citation/CBB001250011/)
Article
Brain, Robert Michael;
(2012)
Self-Projection: Hugo Münsterberg on Empathy and Oscillation in Cinema Spectatorship
(/isis/citation/CBB001251565/)
Article
Winter, Alison;
(2004)
Screening Selves: Sciences of Memory and Identity on Film, 1930--1960
(/isis/citation/CBB000501056/)
Book
Rousseau, George S.;
(2004)
Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture and Sensibility
(/isis/citation/CBB000641998/)
Article
Pind, Jorgen L.;
(2008)
Gudmundur Finnbogason, “Sympathetic Understanding,” and Early Icelandic Psychology
(/isis/citation/CBB000774852/)
Be the first to comment!