The Aesthetic and Modernity

Paper Summary:

The paper discusses how the aesthetic form, even that of language, played a highly important role in terms of modernity's exploration of the nature of representation. The paper explains how it played an important role as an alternative to language, as a mode of both perceiving and expressing experience. The paper examines Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" and Heidegger's "Work of Art" and shows how the aesthetic is presented, in both theories and representations of modernity, as highly important for the perception and expression of experience as a meaningful unity.

From the Paper:

"Allyson Booth notes in Postcards from the Trenches that expressionist architects, in their handling of 'glass in a way that encourages us not to see through glass but to see glass' opened up, in modernity, a 'self-consciousness about the nature of representation'. Being primarily a post-war phenomenon, this mode of aesthetic representation was contemporary in 1927 when Virginia Woolf published her novel To the Lighthouse. It can thus be seen as significant that she opens this novel with part one entitled, 'The Window'. By means of its obvious reference to glass, Woolf immediately establishes a connection between the aesthetic use of glass in the expressionist architecture of modernity and the thematic concerns of To the Lighthouse. This connection indicates that Woolf, like the architects of her time, wished to direct her readers towards a consideration of language as a material of construction and, like the expressionist architect, demanded that her structural material was itself examined rather than merely looked through."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Booth, Allyson, Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space Between Modernism and the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)
• Cantor, Norman F., Twentieth-Century Culture: Modernism to Deconstruction (New York: Peter Lang, 1998)
• Cowley, Julian, York Notes Advanced, Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse (London: York Press, 2000)
• Heidegger, Martin 'The Origin of the Work of Art' in Basic Writings, ed. by David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1993)
• Heidegger, Martin, 'Being and Time' in Basic Writings, ed. by David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1993)

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