PHL 388 Final Exam Quotes

Freud

“There must be a voice within us which is prepared to recognize the compelling power of fate in Oedipus…His fate moves us only for the reason that it might have been ours, for the oracle has put the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him.”

Freud

“By his analysis, showing us the guilt of Oedipus, the poet urges us to recognize our own inner self, in which these impulses, even if suppressed, are still present.”

Freud

“Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of the wishes that offend morality, wishes which nature has forced upon us, and after the revelation of which we want to avert every glance from the scenes of our childhood.”

Marxism (Stuart Sim)

“The main thrust of Marxist aesthetics will be to contextualize artworks within that progressively unfolding ideological conflict, in order to determine how the arts are helping to form ideological attitudes.”

Marxism (Stuart Sim)

“…[I]t is not clear that a law of art, if we by that a law for constructing value judgments that is independent of political considerations, is even possible under a Marxist scheme.”

Marxism (Stuart Sim)

“A direct correlation is assumed between what people see or read and what people believe and then proceed to act upon. Both theories [Plato’s and Marx’s] would appear to conceive of reception as a fairly passive process, in which a highly impressionable individual uncritically consumes work of literature and the ideological assumptions encoded within them. The obvious solution is to censor those works deemed to feature socially unacceptable views, and substitute for them others containing approved sentiments…”

Devereux

“Men—like women—do not simply look. Their looking—where and when they do it and at what—mimics a particular way of thinking about and acting in the world.”

Devereux

“Men, in contrast, only rarely function as eroticized objects for female (or male) spectators.”

Devereux

“There remains… a tendency to speak of the female spectator. In so doing, feminist film theory assumes all women share the same aims and aspirations, and that they come to the film text similarly equipped.”

Devereux

“…[C]reating a female voice or female gaze…The required transformation of film depends not upon some female essence, but upon a consciously adopted political perspective.”

Steven Pinker (“A Window onto the World”)

“Many style manuals treat traditional rules of usage the way fundamentalists treat the Ten Commandments: as unerring laws chiseled in sapphire for mortals to obey or risk eternal damnation. But skeptics and freethinkers who probe the history of these rules have found that they belong to an oral tradition of folklore and myth.”

Steven Pinker (“A Window onto the World”)

“The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself. The purpose of writing is presentation and the motive is disinterested truth.”

Steven Pinker (“A Window onto the World”)

“A scholar who is proposing a hypothesis must go on the record with it in as precise form as possible at least once so that critics can see exactly what he is claiming and give it their best shot.”

Steven Pinker ("The Curse of Knowledge”)

“We are primates, with a third of our brains dedicated to vision, and large swaths devoted to touch, hearing, motion, and space. For us to go from “I think I understand” to “I understand” we need to see the sights and feel the motions. Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images…”

Steven Pinker ("Arcs of Coherence")

“Sometimes a writer should cleave an intimidating block of print with a paragraph break just to give the reader’s eyes a place to alight and rest.”

Steven Pinker ("Arcs of Coherence")

“Writers often resist telegraphing their point at the outset. Sometimes they feel it would spoil the suspense. Sometimes they are victims of professional narcissism and write as if the reader were interested in every blind alley, fool’s errand and wild-goose chase they in engaged in while exploring the topic.”

Steven Pinker ("Arcs of Coherence")

“Wording should not be varied capriciously, because in general people assume that if someone uses two different words they’re referring to two different things.”

Steven Pinker ("Arcs of Coherence")

“Examples, explanations, violated expectations, elaborations, sequences, causes and effects are arcs of coherence that pinpoint how one statement follows from another. They are not so much components of language as components of reason, identifying the ways in which one idea can lead to another in our train of thought.”

Steven Pinker (“Telling Right from Wrong”)

“…[H]aving prescriptive rules is desirable, indeed indispensable, in many arenas of writing. They can lubricate comprehension, reduce misunderstanding, provide a stable platform for the development of style and grace, and signal that a writer has exercised care in crafting a passage.”

Steven Pinker (“Telling Right from Wrong”)

“Phony rules, which proliferate like urban legends and are just as hard to eradicate, are responsible for vast amounts of ham-fisted copyediting and smarty-pants one-upmanship. Yet when language scholars try to debunk the spurious rules, the dichotomizing mindset imagines that they are trying to abolish all standards of good writing.”

Pater

“What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book to ME? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? And if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presences, and under its influence?”

Pater

“The Aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind.”

Wilde

“Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation….Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts which have influenced us.” (189)
“Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely along its own lines. It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So, far from being the creation of its, it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us is the history of its own progress.”

Wilde

“Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.”

Tolstoy

“Artistic (and also scientific) creation is such mental activity as brings dimly perceived feelings (or thoughts) to such a degree of clearness that these feelings (or thoughts) are transmitted to other people.”

MY MAIN MAN RICHARD RICHARDS ("Aesthetics and Naturalism")

“…[T]he philosophical investigation into art… ‘is best conducted within the framework of our empirical knowledge of the world.’”

MY MAIN MAN RICHARD RICHARDS ("Aesthetics and Naturalism")

“A better way to think about the philosophy and the science may be in terms of three oppositions. First, some questions, problems and solutions are more empirical while some are more conceptual. Second, some are more concrete while some are more abstract. Third, some are more descriptive while some are more prescriptive. It may be that we tend to identify the first of each of these contrasts more with science and second more with philosophy, but each is associated with both science and philosophy.”

MY MAIN MAN RICHARD RICHARDS ("Aesthetics and Naturalism")

“…the normativity problem. Science may be able to tell us about how we actually experience art, why we make our aesthetic judgments and the mechanisms that underly our engagement with art, but it isn’t obvious that science can tell us how we should engage with and experience art and what preferences we should have. It can tell us what artworks we like best and least and what factors affect our judgment of art but not what factors should affect our judgment—what makes an artwork truly good or bad.”

MY MAIN MAN RICHARD RICHARDS ("Aesthetics and Naturalism")

“The second philosophical objection to a scientific approach to art is based on the worry that while the science can tell us many things, it cannot tell us what us most important philosophically—the conceptual basis of art.”

MY MAIN MAN RICHARD RICHARDS ("Naturalized Aesthetics: Evolution of Art")

“If anything, art behaviors seem instead to impose evolutionary costs. The time we spend dancing, singing, painting and storytelling is time that we could be doing things of obvious benefit relative to survival and reproduction, such as looking for food, constructing shelters, and forming relationships with potential mates. If so, then the individuals who engage in art behaviors would instead be at a disadvantage and evolution should eliminate these behaviors.”

MY MAIN MAN RICHARD RICHARDS ("Naturalized Aesthetics: Evolution of Art")

“If Pinker is right, the stories we hear provide us with thought experiments that can give us potential solutions to life problems. And presumably, those who hear more and better solutions will have an advantage over the less fortunate.”

MY MAIN MAN RICHARD RICHARDS ("Naturalized Aesthetics: Evolution of Art")

“If there is competition among humans for resources and mates, one might think it would be a disadvantage [through storytelling] to reveal one’s own successful strategies develop the cognition of others, or confer hard-won insights about human psychology. Why would anyone just give away that advantage?”