TOPIC: Aesthetics: West – Orient.

CONTENTS
The lessons aim the finality to illustrate the birth of Aesthetics, that occurred in the 18th century, known as the century of critics, as well as its evolution the centuries after. Beside a disciplinary Aesthetics typically occidental the idea of beauty established in other cultures will be examined and problematized.
In a particular way the idea of beauty will be dealt with, as it is lived by a totally different culture, that is the oriental one. In this case, some questions will be imposed: why was Aesthetics born in the West? Which knowledge is at the bottom of the experience of Oriental beauty?
From here it will be started to understand how some aesthetic ideas that have founded the western knowledge can go in crisis at the moment in which they will be compared with the experience of beauty present in other cultural forms.

Reference texts:

1. P. D’Angelo – E. Franzini – G. Scaramuzza, Estetica, Cortina Editore, Milano (del testo studiare l’Introduzione e i seguenti autori: Vico, Baumgarten; Burke; Batteux; Kant; Schlegel; Hegel; Baudelaire; Benjamin).

2. Joachim Ritter, Estetica e modernità, Marinotti;

3. Okakura Okakuzo, Il libro del tè, Garzanti;

4. Junichiro Tanizaki, Libro d’ombra, Bompiani;

5. Aurel Kolnai, Il disgusto, Marinotti editore, Milano;

FORMATIVE OBJECTIVES.
The course aims to provide useful tools for the critical understanding of aesthetics, artistic and literary phenomena, linked to contemporary feeling, with particular regard to its extreme forms, as they are reflected in individual behavior and cultural production. At the end of the course the students will be able to organize an interpretative discourse in which the notions of aesthetics learned will have the function of giving greater philosophical awareness.