Art as experience: gadamer's rejection of aesthetic consciousness through play, symbol and festival

Woodward, Christopher (2012) Art as experience: gadamer's rejection of aesthetic consciousness through play, symbol and festival. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

[English] PDF (Migrated (PDF/A Conversion) from original format: (application/pdf)) - Accepted Version Available under License - The author retains copyright ownership and moral rights in this thesis. Neither the thesis nor substantial extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's permission. Download (19MB) [English] PDF - Accepted Version Available under License - The author retains copyright ownership and moral rights in this thesis. Neither the thesis nor substantial extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's permission. (Original Version)

Abstract

Although Gadamer's aesthetic writings are aimed at dismantling the scientific method's monopoly on truth-claims, they also constitute an aesthetic theory in themselves. This theory is the application of Gadamer's anti-methodological stance to the process of artistic interpretation in an attempt to give artworks the right to make credible claims about reality and escape the "aesthetic consciousness" that prevents art from making these claims. To describe the mechanics of this process, Gadamer employs the concepts of play, symbol, and festival to showcase how artworks relate to history and tradition, how they disrupt the subject-object relationship, and how their persistent character provides a constant source of self-understanding for an audience. This thesis intends to show that this attack on aesthetic consciousness is the focus of Gadamer's aesthetic theory, and that the concepts of play, symbol, and festival, in their relation to his concept of Erfahrung , are the means of this attack.

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