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Images and Shadows: Levinas and the Ambiguity of the Aesthetic

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Staehler T.

Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics

2010

vol. 47

issue 2

123-144

Levinas’s comments on art appear contradictory. On the one hand, he criticizes art as being disengaged from ethical concerns and constituting a possibility of moral evasion; on the other hand, he engages quite closely and in a supportive fashion with some art, such as Paul Celan’s poetry. Interpreters commonly argue that only one of Levinas’s conceptions of art, either the affirmative or the negative, represents his true attitude towards art. In this article the author seeks to make both statements compatible with each other and thus relevant to Levinas’s conception of art. She focuses on his essay ‘Reality and Its Shadow’, where art is diagnosed as an ambiguous phenomenon. She argues that full understanding of the ambiguity of art demands that Levinas’s different statements about art are considered together; only thus can the complete picture of the ambiguity emerge. Furthermore, it turns out that the very same feature which makes art open to misunderstanding – namely, its precarious materiality – also allows an artwork to sustain itself and to be revived. Art reveals a shadow, withdrawal, or resistance that belongs to reality itself.

The aesthetic and the pedagogical – two opposing notions? A comparative analysis of Polish and British blogs about children’s literature

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Fornalczyk-Lipska A.

Scripta Neophilologica Posnaniensia

2022

vol. 22

215-225

Children’s literature belongs simultaneously to the literary and the educational sys-tem – this is why the notions of the aesthetic and the pedagogical seem to be crucial in its study. They are often seen as opposing each other. The dichotomy between them appears to be even more interesting when approached from a cross-cultural perspective. Whereas English authors of books for the young reader were among the first to support the development of the children’s book into an art form in its own right (around the middle of the 19th century), their Polish counterparts followed suit decades later, as earliest attempts at writing artistically and without excessive didacticism appeared in the 1930s. In this context, a question arises whether and to what extent these traditional approaches to children’s literature and critique are still topical. I will address this question on the basis of a qualitative analysis of themed blogs written about literature for the young reader published in Poland and in the United Kingdom in the recent years. Interestingly, blogs discussing children’s literature are not addressed directly to the child, but to the “mediator circle”, or “gate-keepers”, primarily parents, teachers and librarians. With the help of content analysis and discourse analysis tools, I will try to determine the main themes present in their discussion of children’s and young adult literature, and to address them from the perspective of the traditional dichotomy between the aesthetic and the pedagogical.

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1 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics

1 Scripta Neophilologica Posnaniensia

1 Fornalczyk-Lipska A.

1 Staehler T.

1 2022

1 2010

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Images and Shadows: Levinas and the Ambiguity of the Aesthetic

The aesthetic and the pedagogical – two opposing notions? A comparative analysis of Polish and British blogs about children’s literature