Metamorphosis - Creative Imagination in Fine Arts Between Life-Projects and Human Aesthetic Aspirations

How do we perdure when we and everything around us are caught up in incessant change? But the course of this change does not seem to be haphazard and we may seek the modalities of its Logos in the transformations in which it occurs. The classic term "Metamorphosis" focuses upon the proportions between the transformed and the retained, the principles of sameness and otherness. Applied to life and itsbecoming, metamorphosis pinpoints the proportions between the vital and the aesthetic significance of life.Where could this metaphysical in-between territory come better to light than in the Fine Arts? In this collection are investigated the various proportions between the vital significance of the constructivism of life and a specifically human contribution made by the creative imagination to the transformatory search for beauty and aesthetic values.

Inhaltsverzeichnis:

"Everything Flows": The Poetics of Transformation.- Rustic Architecture: The Metamorphosis of Nature and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain.- "Mystic Physicality" in the Work of Luis Barragan. Poetic Dislocation at La Casa Gilardi.- Saint-Amant, Holland House, and the Queen of England.- Defining Boundaries in Theatrical and Ceremonial Space in the Middle Ages.- Life and Human Struggle in Moby Dick.- Fiery Purification: Artaud's Theater of Metamorphoses.- Bel Esprit. An Assay in Depth-aesthetics.- Fly Thought on Golden Wings: The Transforming Power of Music in Verdi's Nabucco.- Challenge to a National School at Risk: Mikel Dufrenne's The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (1953).- Painterly Transubstantiations/Political Change.- Fugitive Realities: Konrad Fiedler.- The Primacy of Gesture: Phenomenology and the Art of Chinese Calligraphy.- Gestural Abstraction and the Fleshiness of Paint.- Flesh of the World: The Art and Practice of Dunya McPherson.- The Genesis of Clay F igurative Sculpture in California, 1955-1974: Potter and Pot, and Intersubjective Encounter in the Work of Peter Voulkos.- Between Canvas and Celluloid.- A Sense of Direction: The Phenomenon of the Authentic Artistic Choice.- The Image made Flesh: A Photographic Re-reading of the Pygmalion Myth.- Perception, Phenomenology and the Object as Actor: The Evidence of Form in Redmoon Theater's Hunchback.- Playing with the Void: Dance Macabre of Object and Subject in the Bio-objects of Kantor's Theater of Death.- St. Francis's Canticle of the Creatures: The Metamorphic Effect of Poverty on Writing Poetry.- The Dance of the Angels, the Mysteries of Pseudo-Dionysius and the Architecture of Gothic Cathedrals.- A Portrait of the Artist as a Sophist-Plato and Iris Murdoch's Art ofFiction.- Interpreting Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on the Basis of Tymieniecka's Sociocommunal Psychiatric Theraputics.- The Restitution of the Terrestrial Iconography of St. Francis in the Po st-Trent Era: Annibale Carracci's St. Francis in Penitence.- The Dream of Ascent and the Noise of Earth: Paradoxical Inclinations in Euripides' Bacchae, Shakespeare's The Tempest, and Stevens' "Of Modern Poetry".- Index of Names.