AAP2010 Abstracts
Use the form below to search abstracts by Author, Institue or Keyword.
| Title | Professor |
| First Name | Claire |
| Surname | Colebrook |
| Institution | Penn State |
| Title of Paper | Truth, Form and Content |
| Select a Stream | Philosophy of Literature |
| Abstract | Form and Content One of the key ideas of modernist aesthetics was the notion that form is content. It would not be the case that one would see art as conveying information or material through some medium, but that the medium itself -- sensuous material, lines, figures, light, sound -- would be the art object itself, the subject of art. Such a manoeuvre would seem to preclude the function of truth in art, for art would represent nothing other than itself. Many prominent philosophers who have regarded art as important for philosophical questions have tended to focus on content rather than form, Martha Nussbaum regards literature as offering an array of possible lives and sympathies, while David Lewis regards fiction as possessing a mode of truth for its posited world. In this essay I argue the contrary: there is a truth to aesthetic form. In order to convey truth it is not only necessary for form to be appropriate; form itself has a truth content. In order to justify this claim I will be examining two different forms of the same content: Raymond Carver's short fiction and Robert Altman's film, Short Cuts. Carver's short story form discloses the limits of a certain normative conception of human life; Altman's visual method operates to reveal the limits of certain modes of visual and temporal cognition. |
