American magic: The importance of seeing shapes
Item
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Title
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American magic: The importance of seeing shapes
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:9310dddfc6d2:11853
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identifier
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12490
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Creator
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Rutkoff, Rebekah,
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Contributor
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Joan Richardson
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American literature | Film studies | Philosophy
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Abstract
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American Magic: The Importance of Seeing Shapes opens the field of American's defining philosophy of pragmatism (in a lineage that stretches from Jonathan Edwards to Emerson to William James and, most recently, to Stanley Cavell) by using the work of American avant-garde filmmaker Robert Beavers as the catalyst for realization. The project is an extended exercise in practical aesthetics, an amplifying series of essays that considers "seeing shapes" from a variety of positions---philosophical, linguistic, poetic and visual. As I investigate the crossroads of Beavers' films and philosophical texts across both time and disciplinary bounds, I trace the slow movement from belief in divinity-in-God to divinity-in-imagination, a "progress" that evolves in American over the course of three centuries. I identify in both the American philosophical tradition and Beavers' films a microscopic focus on the practices of reading and writing as means of crystallizing consciousness of the mind-at-work. This approach foregrounds an interest in the divine potential of such embodied awareness for the film spectator or reader/writer of philosophy.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
