Thesis ID: CBB001567225

Imaginative Beholding: Physiological Psychology and the Discourse on Representation in fin-de-siècle Germany (2010)

unapi

Newman, Winifred Elysse (Author)


Harvard University
Picon, Antoine


Publication Date: 2010
Edition Details: Advisor: Picon, Antoine.
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.

...More

Description Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 72/01, Jul 2011. Proquest Document ID: 816094326.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001567225/

Similar Citations

Book Brain, Robert Michael; (2015)
The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-De-Siècle Europe (/isis/citation/CBB001551935/)

Article Lanzoni, Susan; (2009)
Practicing Psychology in the Art Gallery: Vernon Lee's Aesthetics of Empathy (/isis/citation/CBB000932855/)

Book Erica Fretwell; (2020)
Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling (/isis/citation/CBB457783202/)

Thesis Matthew H. Vollgraff; (2019)
The Science of Expression: Ausdruckskunde and Bodily Knowledge in German Modernist Culture (/isis/citation/CBB832353783/)

Article Pesic, Peter; (2013)
Helmholtz, Riemann, and the Sirens: Sound, Color, and the “Problem of Space” (/isis/citation/CBB001320409/)

Thesis Andrea Wald; (2015)
Ornament. Eine österreichische Befindlichkeit (/isis/citation/CBB012450814/)

Article Ostrovskii, M. A.; Sakina, N. L.; Fedorovich, I. B.; Chesnov, V. M.; (2002)
Istoriia stanovleniia i razvitiia fiziologii organov chuvstv v Rossii (/isis/citation/CBB000203000/)

Article Roger Smith; (2019)
The muscular sense in Russia: I. M. Sechenov and materialist realism (/isis/citation/CBB336726144/)

Article Schmidt, Michael J.; (2014)
Visual Music: Jazz, Synaesthesia and the History of the Senses in the Weimar Republic (/isis/citation/CBB001201425/)

Article T. J. Martinson; (2019)
Sense and Supersensibility: Kantian Aesthetics in Lamarckian Evolutionary Theory (/isis/citation/CBB019213234/)

Article Stoffers, Manuel; (2003)
Münsterberg's Nightmare: Psychology and History in fin-de-siècle Germany and America (/isis/citation/CBB000300900/)

Article Leo, Angela de; (2006)
The Origin of Graphic Recording of Psycho-Physiological Phenomena in Germany (/isis/citation/CBB001023631/)

Article Stefan Forrester; (2020)
Ernst Haeckel’s ‘Kant Problem’: metaphysics, science, and art (/isis/citation/CBB068647714/)

Article Jahoda, Gustav; (2005)
Theodor Lipps and the Shift from “Sympathy” to “Empathy” (/isis/citation/CBB000671010/)

Article Kockerbeck, Christoph; (2002)
Der Naturforscher Karl Möbius als Kunstkritiker (/isis/citation/CBB000300227/)

Article Ludwig Mach; (2016)
On the Principle of Temporal Diminution in Serial Photography (/isis/citation/CBB315427355/)

Article Ione, Amy; Tyler, Christopher; (2003)
Neurohistory and the Arts: Was Kandinsky a Synesthete? (/isis/citation/CBB000340386/)

Authors & Contributors
Vollgraff, Matthew H.
Andrea Wald
Fretwell, Erica
Martinson, T. J.
Forrester, Stefan
Wellbery, David E.
Concepts
Science and art
Aesthetics
Senses and sensation; perception
Physiological psychology
Psychology
Human body
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
18th century
Places
Germany
United States
France
Europe
Russia
Munich (Germany)
Institutions
Rossiiskaia Akademiia Nauk
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment