A Course on Aesthetics

1993
•
Author:

Renato Barilli
Translated by

Written in an elegant and clear style, Barilli’s text explores the basic inherent structures of human thought about the classification and evaluation of the arts. This work offers a broad perspective on current scholarship without favoring any one particular school, discipline, or ideology.

Written in an elegant and clear style, Barilli’s text explores the basic inherent structures of human thought about the classification and evaluation of the arts. This work offers a broad perspective on current scholarship without favoring any one particular school, discipline, or ideology.

Barilli’s text offers a broad perspective of current scholarship in aesthetics—without favoring any one particular school, discipline or ideology. Written in an elegant and clear style, Barilli’s text explores the basic inherent structures of human thought about the classification and evaluation of the arts. Barilli avoids any binding or dogmatic conclusions about artistic assessment in his consideration of both historical and more current art forms such as video and performance art. In doing so, he presents a provocative contemporary account of a scholarly concern.

Renato Barilli is professor of the phenomenology of styles at the University of Bolonga. He has published numerous books in Italian on poetics, cultural theory, and contemporary art, inculding Culturologia e fenomenologia degli stili, L’arte contemporanea, and II ciclo del postmoderno. The University of Minnesota Press has also published a translation of his Rhetoric (1989).

Karen Pinkus is currently assistant professor of Italian at Northwestern University. Her interests include psychoanalysis and the relation of visual and verbal arts. She is the translator of Giorgio Agamben’s Language and Death (Minnesota, 1991).

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