Relationship of Knowledge, Violence, Peace, Politics, and Arts
• Research:
o Minimum of 5 sources (minimum 2 outside source)
o All sources must be academic, scholarly sources (published books or academic journal articles); Khan Academy, Wikipedia, and Course Lectures will not be accepted as genuine sources.
o Each source must be cited within the essay using explicit reference to the relevant page number(s) in the source. If it isn’t cited, or isn’t cited properly, it will not count.
• Reference and Citation:
o Complete, correct, consistent references to sources should be made in either Chicago or MLA styles. This includes citation as well as bibliography. In-text citations, as well as footnotes or endnotes are acceptable.
o Info on Citation and Style can be found here:
• MLA:
https://owl(dot)purdue(dot)edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formatting_and_style_guide/mla_formatting_and_style_guide.html
• Chicago:
https://owl(dot)purdue(dot)edu/owl/research_and_citation/chicago_manual_17th_edition/cmos_formatting_and_style_guide/general_format.html
• Guideline Sheet for Academic Writing and Avoiding Plagiarism
Option 1: Essay
• Essay with research:
o Length: ~2000 ± 300 words (not counting titles and bibliography)
o File type: Word doc or PDF. No other file type will be accepted.
• Topic of your choice; must deal substantially with at least one course text (required, optional, recommended), unless approved by the instructor.
Option 2: Creative Work
• One piece of creative work (visual, audio, or textual) that responds substantially and directly way to at least one of the course texts. This could be a painting/2D work, a long
HUMN2001 – Final (Fall 2021)
poem or series of poems, short story, a song or songs, sound installation, short film or video work, animation, sculpture/3D work, etc.
• Written explanation/didactic with research:
o Explains in detail how the piece relates in substantial ways to one or more of the course texts and themes.
o Length: ~1000 ± 100 words (not counting titles and bibliography)
o File type: Word doc or PDF. No other file type will be accepted.
• Topic of your choice; must deal substantially with at least one course text (required, optional, recommended), unless approved by the instructor.
Overview (Essay)
The final essay is a scholarly essay on a topic of your choice, so long as it conforms to the range of material appropriate to the course. Your topic should focus on the one or more of our course texts, but additional texts, whether primary or secondary are allowed and necessary, respectively. Acceptable topics will include anything that engages with theories of art or aesthetic experience broadly construed, so long as it substantially deals with at least one course text.
Potential topics include: Plato and Aristotle on mimesis or form; Western vs. Non-western aesthetics; Politics and art; Language and art, art and theories of signs/symbols; What is the relationship between art and knowledge?; Art under capitalism; Aesthetics and race; Indigeneity and aesthetics; Kant on the difference between the transcendental aesthetic vs. reflective aesthetic judgements; Is art a universal human activity?; Embodiment and art; Does art have a historical essence?; What is the difference between natural beauty and artistic beauty in Kant or others?; What is Benjamin’s concept of aura?; How does morality relate to aesthetics in the Chinese, Japanese, or German theoretical traditions?; Is there an Ideal of artistic achievement in contemporary art (using Plato or Kant or Hegel)?; Is art free to express whatever it wants or is it determined by its material, historical, economic conditions, etc. (using Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, etc.)? Is art more than its commodity value? Does our aesthetics/art help construct or express our metaphysics/ontology? Can/should contemporary art still relate to the Absolute? (using Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Tu We Ming, Benjamin, Saito, Megumi, etc.)?
Parts/Structure of the Essay
The essay should have a clear internal and independent structure. It should be motived by a claim, a thesis. The structure of the essay is then dictated by the development of the argument for the thesis. This development can take many forms, but a common form is the following:
Introduction, Body, and Conclusion.
The purpose of an Introduction is to state the thesis of the paper, to introduce a problem or thematic the thesis deals with, to tell us what the approach to the problem will be, and to briefly summarize the structure of the essay itself. The Introduction should also tell us how the argument of the essay handles the problem or thematic, and therefore should foreshadow the conclusion.
HUMN2001 – Final (Fall 2021)
The Body section is the main portion of the work. It elaborates the argument and should be broken down into subsections which each deal with different parts of the argument. The structure of the Body itself can take many forms, but it should include an examination of the problem or thematic where necessary, information about relevant context, relevant analysis of text and artwork, and argument(s) combining the analysis and the context with the premises of the themes and problems
The Conclusion should use the evidence and argument(s) marshalled in the Body to forcefully demonstrate your thesis. It can sometimes be helpful to recapitulate the main features of the body before making your conclusion. However, be aware that there is a danger of redundancy here, so any recapitulation should be given the utmost attention and subjected to editorial criticism. Parsimony is always advisable over prolix.
General advice: If you do not outline your work (both before and as you write), the structure of the essay will be less clear to you and your reader, or the essay will lack real structure of its own.
Do not rely on recapitulating the proceeding of your research as the structure of your essay. This means avoiding ‘walking through’ your research in your own essay by simply summarizing it, and relying on that summary for structure. This is what the précises are for, to a degree, but not essays. Do look at other essays in relevant fields to see how they tackle the issue of form: how they introduce topics and break up sections, how they start and end paragraphs, etc.
Further Resources on Writing Essays: https://writingcenter(dot)fas(dot)harvard(dot)edu/pages/essaystructure.
Professor's Name
Subject
Date
Politics and Art
Abstract
Art can be viewed as a political debate, a descriptive, interpretative, or expressly critical approach, or a means for transcending the political. Art alters our understandings and views of the world by changing the discursive frames through which politics is discussed. Politics and art studies investigate art's connection with politics and its worldview; it examines art's influence on our knowledge of politics and issues solutions. The current study also looks at the critical and emancipatory potentials of art and interactive art and social action in the context of new kinds of political communication. Art and politics have a broad spectrum of similarities and influences; this can be described by the rise of artists using art to pass political statements; the paper looks into the relationship between politics and art.
Introduction
Politics and art are primarily founded on the concept that art "ends up playing a predefined threshold in the structure of social life, in the manner in which individuals assume responsibility for constructing their narratives, for engaging in the maintenance of their sociopolitical realities (Mulvey 159)." This position may be examined from an art theory and historical standpoint and a liberal arts standpoint. Art can be regarded as a form of or complement to public dialogue, a descriptive, interpretative, or openly critical estimate, or a means for transcending the political. The role of art in the political debate can also be examined.
Art is political when it complicates rather than simplifies and when it "stretches the thread of perception and knowledge far beyond what is formerly seen and understood." Art is political when it reinterprets "whatever was already seen and acknowledged" to develop new understandings (Muley, 160). These reinterpretations aid in revealing existing power structures within society by determining what was earlier classified and what was considered worthy of assessment in the first place, as well as recognizing what was heretofore not seen and, thus, not known, as well as trying to identify what must be seen or known. The essay looks into the deep connection where art influences politics and also vice versa.
The Relationship Between Knowledge, Politics, and Art
Art articulates a philosophical and consequential perspective on reality, and both the vision and the understanding may be evaluated (Muley 162). Three questions arise as a result of this statement. How can the perspective articulated by art be examined from the standpoint of political science? What type of information may be generated by evaluating art's worldview? Moreover, what can observers and people who read do with this newly created information; how can they put it to use? Such an analysis must employ and develop analytical techniques appropriate for political art assessment.
Studies in the area of politics and art must be cognizant of, and fully represent, the products that are unique leadership roles of the person doing the analysis; thus, the "auto"-element in very many literary works on politics and art, either intentionally restricting the review to first-person tales or implicitly recognizing that no message can be thought of without its writer (Mulvey 163). The current writing, for example, would not be possible without my education experience in art research.
Politics and art understanding, modestly, enhance information gained somewhere else in the human sciences and assist explain what other types of study cannot. More expansively (and controversially), it analyzes the world in new ways and reveals what traditional modes of social inquiry conceal. Research on politics and art broadens the discursive frameworks within which politics develops, creating the path for new kinds of political participation while exposing the shortcomings and biases of traditional modes of social research (Muley 162). In so doing, it calls into question both the information created elsewhere and the dominant positions resulting from this knowledge.
Privilege for a certain method entails the marginalization of alternative modes of inquiry through epistemic downgrading; the information generated as a result cannot help but be constrained. Nor can the mechanisms through which some exclude others be considered unpolitical. Social science "provides the knowledge," but art, "tells us a lot," but what tells us is not "knowledge." Declaring a certain type of speech "epistemological privileged" overlooks contingencies; epistemological privileged is a cultural construct, and the link between "the world around nowadays" (Wendt) and the academic "in here" must be considered.
Images and Words in Art
Critical examination of the relationship between what is visible and what is recognized as part of the political study of the visual arts. Nevertheless, how can we comprehend what we see? "That 'language' (in some way) frequently enters the experience of seeing photography or observing anything else (Wendt 45)." The knowledge that pictures are capable of creating is ("usually") created via language, which is dependent on the conversion of what we are seeing into what we say or think about what we see. This type of knowledge generation necessitates a general examination of the link connecting words and visuals.
Quality and Quantity
Many more photos are being created in the digital era than before. How will this rise in picture generation influence knowledge production? How can viewers deal with the volume of pictures they are subjected to daily? How can people respond to visuals depicting situations when the sheer volume of imagery overpowers them? There is an argument that notion the more we observe, the more we know is flawed. "Never before has an era been so knowledgeable about itself," he said, referring to illustrated publications. "Never before has a golden age so little about itself (Wendt 25)."
It is also stated that (apparently similar) photos of victims "may provide a generic and uniform visual description that automatically disconnects victims and depoliticizes conflict (Wendt 38)." Pictures of victims ar...