number 6. the first of the comprehensive exams: aesthetics.

I've finalised the list for this comp, which focusses on the aesthetics of art and nature since the eighteenth century. Still to come: the secondary comp on post-humanism, environmental theory, and vital materialism.

The History of Aesthetics: Art and Nature (77 texts)

Early Aesthetic Theory (4 texts):

Aristotle. "Poetics," in Aristotle Poetics / Longinus On the Sublime / Demetrius On Style. Trans. Stephen Halliwell. 4-142. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995 [335 BC].

Longinus. "On the Sublime," in Aristotle Poetics / Longinus On the Sublime / Demetrius On Style. Trans. W.H. Fyfe. 159-308. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995 [1-3 AD].

Plato. The Symposium. Trans. Seth Bernadette. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986  [c. 385-380 BC].

——— The Republic. Trans. H.D.P. Lee. London: Penguin, 2003 [380 BC].

Eighteenth Century Aesthetic Theory (14 texts):

Baumgarten, Alexander. Reflections on Poetry. Trans. Karl Aschenbrenner and W.B. Holther. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994 [1735].

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. 6^th ed. Dublin: Graisberry and Campbell, 1779 [1757].

Diderot, Denis. Notes on Painting, To Serve as an Appendix to the Salon of 1765. In Diderot on Art. Trans. John Goodman. Vol. 1. 189-240. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995 [1766].

Herder, Johann Gottfried. "Critical Forests, or Reflections on the Art and Science of the Beautiful (First Grove)," in Herder: Selected Writings on Aesthetics. Trans. Gregory Moore. 51-176. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006 [c. 1769].

Hume, David. On the Standard of Taste and Other Essays. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril Co., Inc., 1965 [1757].

Hutcheson, Frances. An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. 3^rd ed. London: J. & J. Knapton, 1729 [1725].

Kant, Immanuel. “Introduction” and “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment”, in Critique of Judgment. Trans.Werner S. Pluhar. 3-232. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987 [1790].

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoön, or the Limits of Poetry and Painting. Trans.William Ross. London: J. Ridgway & Sons, 1836 [1766].

Price, Uvedale. "On the Picturesque," in On the Picturesque: With an Essay on the Origin of Taste, and Much Original Matter. 59-244. London: William S. Orr and Co., 1842 [1794].

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essays on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music. Trans. John T. Scott. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998 [1781].

Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Trans. Reginald Snell. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004 [1794].

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3^rd Earl of. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Farnborough: Gregg International, 1968 [1713].

Sulzer, Johann Georg. Dialogues on the Beauty of Nature. Trans. Eric Miller. Lanham: University Press of America, 2005 [1750].

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. Essay on the Capacity for the Sentiment for the Beautiful in Art, and On Instruction in It, in Essays on the Philosophy and History of Art. Trans. Curtis Bowman. Vol. 1. London: Continuum, 2005 [1763].

Romanticism (7 texts):

Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition New York: Oxford University Press, 1953.

Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Trans. Jonathan Mayne. 2^nd ed. London: Phaidon Press, 1995 [1863].

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Essays on Art and Literature, in The Collected Works. Trans. Ellen von Nardroff and Ernest H. von Nardroff. Vol. 3. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994 [1771-1829], 3-22, 68-92, 99-165, 192-204, 213-215.

———. “Part I: Methodology and General Scientific Topics”, in Scientific Studies, in The Collected Works. Trans. Douglas Miller. Vol. 12. 3-52. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995 [1771-1829].

Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe and Jean-Luc Nancy. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Trans. Philip Barnard and Cherly Lester Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988.

Novalis. Philosophical Writings. Trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997 [c. 1798].

Schlegel, Friedrich. Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Peter Firchow. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1991 [c. 1797].

Nineteenth Century Aesthetic Theory (6 texts):

Hegel, G.W.F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. T.M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 [1835], 1-298, 299-322, 427-442, 476-501, 517-529, 613-634, 684-710, 792-798, 888-892, 959-1238.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or. Trans. Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin, 1992 [1843].

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Marx and Engels on Literature and Art. Trans. Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski. St. Louis: Telos Press, 1973 [1844-92].

Morris, William. “Hopes and Fears for Art” and “Art and the Beauty of the Earth”, in Collected Works. Vol. 22. 3-174. New York: Russell & Russell, 1966 [1877-81].

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1872].

Ruskin, John. “Part 1”, in Modern Painters. 2^nd ed. Vol. 1. 1-148.  London: George Allen, 1906 [1843-60].

Twentieth Century Aesthetic Theory (28 texts):

Burgin, Victor, ed. Thinking Photography. 2nd ed. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1984 [1982].

Adorno, Theodor, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukacs. Aesthetics and Politics. London: Verso, 2007 [1938-73], 9-59, 100-141.

Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997 [1970].

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994 [1958].

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981 [1980].

———. “The Rhetoric of the Image” in Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Noonday Press, 1988.

———. “Death of the Author” in Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Noonday Press, 1988.

Benjamin, Walter. “Photography” in The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002 [1927-40].

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. 211-244. London: Pimlico, 1999 [1936].

Bourdieu, Pierre. “Part I: The Field of Cultural Production,” in The Field of Cultural Production. Ed. Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

           

———. “Part III: The Pure Gaze: Essays on Art,” in The Field of Cultural Production. Ed. Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge , MA: MIT Press, 2000.

Cixoux, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in Continental Aesthetics: Romanticism to Postmodernism: An Anthology. Ed. Richard Kearney and David Rasmussen. 388-399. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001.

Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.

Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee Books, 1980 [1934].

Derrida, Jacques. “Economimesis,” in Continental Aesthetics: Romanticism to Postmodernism: An Anthology. Ed. Richard Kearney and David Rasmussen. 431-450. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001 [1981].

Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.

Foucault, Michel. "The Eye of Power," in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Trans. Colin Gordon. 146-165. Toronto: Random House, 1980 [1970].

———. "Las Meninas," in The Order of Things. Trans. Tavistock. 3-18. New York: Routledge, 2002 [1966].

Gadamer, Hans Georg. “Part 1: The Question of Truth As It Emerges in the Experience of Art,” in Truth and Method. Trans. Weinsheimer and Marshall. 1-171. London: Continuum, 2006 [1960].

Heidegger, Martin. “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Basic Writings. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. San Francisco: Harper, 1993 [ 1951].

———. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. 139-212. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993 [1935-36].

Marcuse, Herbert. The Aesthetic Dimension: Towards a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics.  Trans. Die Permanenz der Kunst. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture. London: Routledge, 1999.

Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Ground of the Image. Trans. Jeff Fort. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.

Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Virilio, Paul. Art as Far as the Eye Can See. Trans. Julie Rose. Oxford: Berg, 2007.

Contemporary Theory and the New Aesthetics of Nature (18 texts):

Badiou, Alain. Handbook of Inaesthetics. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.

Berleant, Arnold. The Aesthetics of Environment. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.

Carlson, Allen. Aesthetics and the Environment. London: Routledge, 2000.

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. 2^nd ed. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1995 [1971].

Grosz, Elizabeth. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

Hepburn, Ronald. “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” in The Aesthetics of Natural Environments. Ed. Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant. 43-62. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2004.

Heyd, Thomas. “Aesthetic Appreciation and the Many Stories about Nature,” in British Journal of Aesthetics. 41 (2001): 125-137.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Translator Not Named. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.

Moore, R. Natural Beauty: A Theory of Aesthetics Beyond the Arts. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2008.

Milani, Raffaele. The Art of Landscape. Trans. Corrado Federici. Montreal; Ithica: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009.

Ranciere, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004.

Saito, Yuriko. Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford University Press, 2007.

Serres, Michel. The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. Trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley. London: Continuum, 2008.

Sheppard, S. and Harshaw H. Forests and Landscapes: Linking Ecology, Sustainability and Aesthetics. New York: CAB International Publishers, 2001.

Sparshott, F. “Figuring the Ground: Notes on Some Theoretical Problems of the Aesthetic Environment,” in Journal of Aesthetic Education. 6:11 (1972): 11-23.

Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. London: Routledge, 1993.

Thompson, J. “Aesthetics and the Value of Nature,” in Environmental Ethics. 17 (1995): 291-305.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.

number 5. summer projects.

I've just returned from the Ethics and Aesthetics of Architecture and the Environment conference put on by ISPA and the Landscape Research Group up in Newcastle - a thoroughly inspiring time, though likewise I've come to new directions for my work in domestic aesthetics. This will, no doubt, be reflected later in the summer at the Artification conference in Helsinki.

Work on my comps is ticking along steadily - the reading lists won't be finalised until the autumn, but for now I am working through a 100-text bibliography in the history of European aesthetics. Work on nature/vital materialism/post-humanism remains on the backburner.

On a more exciting note, work on Hampstead Heath and the history of its environs continues, and I'm delighted to have had a chance to peruse the newest text in the cannon, Taking the Waters: A Swim Around Hampstead Heath by Caitlin Davies. It's available in most local shops - Daunt in South End Green has signed copies, as does Waterstones in Hampstead High Street - and also via Amazon.

It is a perfect little inroad to thinking about my ongoing side-project: the women of Hampstead Heath.

number 4. projects piling up.

The start of the winter term is also, of course, the start of the new year, a time I generally dub "Abstract-Writing Season". It is a time for hauling out trillions of half-baked ideas, tarting them into slightly more palatable projects, and pitching said projects to myriad conferences/seminars/symposia/journals. A busy time.

But the winter term is fantastically brief - there are only ten weeks left. I've gotten stuck into two classes - Politics of Aesthetics, Culture & Modernity - which are essentially there to knock off a significant amount of work for my comps. And on that front, comps are currently coming together.

The process at York Humanities is very flexible. I basically have a general (75+ texts) and a specialised (50 texts) comp, both of which are basically extended essays outlining major issues in my fields of interest. For the specialised comp, we have to design an undergraduate course syllabus - strangely the bit I'm looking forward to most.

Tentatively, it's looking like:
- Aesthetics in Continental Thought (General Comp)
- Nature in Environmental Philosophy (Specialised)

I still have to solidify committees and reading lists. Joan has off-handedly mentioned next December as a good deadline (that would be 9 months earlier than scheduled) so I'm working towards that.

Best news of the term? I finally finished my Hampstead Heath paper, based on a talk given last summer at the IIAA's summer conference on urban nature. It only took... all year.

number 3. romantic women, romantic landscape.

Photo by Andy Sewell, 2011. Please buy his extraordinary book of Heath photos.

I'm wholly absorbed in preparations for my Women & Nature seminar next week, on the parallel stories of Fanny Brawne, Elizabeth Kent, and Hampstead Heath. I've come to see each as a character in my narrative - in an effort to give voice to both Brawne and Kent, who have been given so little attention of their own (Brawne, almost solely in reference to Keats; Kent in reference to Leigh Hunt), I have become obsessed with their lives in this place whose history is so bound up with the men through which we know them. It is impossible to ignore the Heath as the backdrop for their lives - with Keats and Hunt, the Heath is always taken for granted as their landscape, but with both Brawne and Kent, little has been said of their contribution to the Heath's story.

I've nearly finished writing the section on Brawne and hope to have Kent finished by the end of the weekend. Having become fully enraptured by their lives, I must admit I've rarely felt so moved by the objects of my research. Partly because the Heath matters so much to me. And partly because of the difficulties in finding these women's voices amidst so many others.

number 2. materialising continuity in nature.

I've settled on a rough topic for my Matters of Nature essay, and as we were encouraged to do something that would benefit either our comps or theses in the long run, I've gone for what is likely to be a significant chunk of my research for both comps and at least one thesis chapter. Any further recommendations are appreciated.

Roughly: How is interspecies interconnectedness – or even subject/object dissolution – conceived of in multispecies ethnography/STS/the intersection of phenomenology and anthropology, and how does it differ from the accounts given in aesthetics?

Tentatively: Looking at Berleant's notion of the aesthetic community, grafting this onto his thoughts about the aesthetic field. Comparing with Sarah Whatmore's account in Hybrid Geographies. And also the accounts given, variously, by: Latour, Ingold, Casey, Barad, and Jane Bennett. And the Matsutake Worlds Research group, because I like fungi.

A Proposed Bibliography:

Arnold Berleant, Living in the Landscape: Towards an Aesthetics of Environment (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997).

Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetics of Environment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).

Edward S. Casey, Getting Back Into Place: Toward a renewed understanding of the place-world (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).

Allen Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment (London: Routledge, 2000).

Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant, "Introduction," The Aesthetics of Human Environmentsed. Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press, 2007).

Timothy Choy, Lieba Fair, Michael Hathaway, Miyako Inoue and Anna Tsing, "A New Form of Collaboration in Cultural Anthropology: Matsutake Worlds," American Ethnologist 36, no. 2 (2009): 380-403.

William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon, 69-90 (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1995).

James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 1986).

Tim Ingold, The Perception of Environment: Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill (London: Routledge, 2000).

S. Eban Kirsky and S. Helmriech, "The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography," Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 545-576.

Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

Timothy Morton, "Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals," SubStance 37, no. 3 (2008): 73-96.

Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

Sarah Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies: natures cultures spaces (London: Sage Publications, 2002).

Sarah Whatmore, "Materialist Returns: Practising Cultural Geographies in and for a more-than-human world," Cultural Geographies 13, no. 4 (2006): 600-609.

number 1. getting started.

I began my PhD in September, 2011 at York University in Toronto, Canada. Nestled into a quiet corner of the Division of Humanities, I'm beginning my research under the supervision of Joan Steigerwald. While the whole doctoral process is somewhat lengthier in Canada than in Britain, I'm concocting some form of timeline in which I'd like to get it done - but I've heard the record in the department is a hefty six years. Here's to shaving a couple years off that time!

At present, I'm taking two relevant courses:
1. Historical Perspectives on Women and Nature
2. Matters of Nature

Both are allowing me to consider the idea of nature - one in an historical perspective, the other in the context of STS and anthropology. Lots of Latour in that one. Tentatively, papers in the works are on the relation between women and London parks (probably Hampstead Heath, given my predilection for it) and something on visualising the idea of 'community' in nature. To be determined in the coming weeks.

Personal research underway as well - still finishing a publication draft of my Hampstead Heath paper, written for last summer's International Institute of Applied Aesthetics summer conference, and drafting abstracts for the coming year of conferences. Busy busy busy.