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| Campus | Bryn Mawr |
| Semester | Fall 2024 |
| Registration ID | ITALB221001 |
| Course Title | What is Aesthetics? |
| Credit | 1.00 |
| Department | German |
| Instructor | Ghezzani,Tommaso |
| Times and Days | MW 02:40pm-04:00pm
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| Room Location | TAYB |
| Additional Course Info | Class Number: 1980 This course investigates how global thinkers, poets, and artists reflected in their works on the roles and powers of art, poetry, and human creativity. The course approaches this theme through a cross-cultural and trans-historical approach, which encompasses the Italian Humanism, which argued for the first time for the importance of aesthetic knowledge, as well as the Age of Enlightenment, which founded aesthetics as a specific scientific discipline. Readings from these writers will show how artistic products, human imagination, and poetry are not just light-hearted activities but powerful cognitive tools which can reveal aspects of human history. If the human being is deemed to be a combination of reason and feeling soul and body art and poetry, which border both the rational and irrational realms, appear the most appropriate scientific tool to reveal the human essence and its destiny. The discussion will focus on pivotal global writers and philosophers such as Giambattista Vico and Giacomo Leopardi, who pioneered aesthetic, historical, literary, and anthropological ideas which are still crucial in the current theoretical debate on arts and poetry. All readings and class discussion will be in English. Students will have an additional hour of class for Italian credit. Approach: Critical Interpretation (CI), Inquiry into the Past (IP); Haverford: A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts) (A) ( ) Enrollment Cap: 15. If enrollment exceeds the cap, the lottery criteria is as follows: ITAL Majors and Minors by class (seniors, then juniors, then sophomores). |
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