PHL 365 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Eduard Hanslick, Abstract Art, Sentimentality
2 Apr 2016
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November 30th, 2015 sentimental art + music and the emotions. The evocation of tender emotion by a pleasing idealization. Sentimentality can sometimes be good not necessarily a bad thing. Sentimentality allows one to avoid unpleasant memories or realities (richards) Sentimentality allows one to appear to have certain feelings without needing to actually experience them (wilde) Sentimentality allows one to inflate one"s self of sense through fantasy (saville) There is more to sentimentality than the personal insincerity, hypocrisy, or fantasizing these writers attribute to it. Sentimentality can actually be displayed in circumstances where we might even heap praise on it for its exhibition of certain virtues moral, aesthetic, and psychological. Not trying to escape from death: like dickens, soften the edges of death fictional scenarios, able to confront these awful situations without being overwhelmed with grief, not an attempt to forget, but an attempt to remember.
