JAV200H1 Study Guide - Fall 2018, Comprehensive Midterm Notes - Semiotics, French Language, Fantasy
12 Oct 2018
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JAV200H1
MIDTERM EXAM
STUDY GUIDE
Fall 2018
JAV200 Intro to Critical Theory
Lecture 1
PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN – a cursory survey
into what images are about
The myth of Hollywood
o ex wizard of oz
o Wizard behind the curtain controlling the spectacle of what we watch
The myth of Zeaxis and parrha
o And elder wrote of a painting competition, painting from 1650 –
reconstructing an ancient piece of writing
o Adriean van der Splet
o Stories written as history
o Painting competition between the two painters who can paint the most
realistic image
o One guy reveals his fruit painting from under a sheet, birds try to eat it
o Hes confident hes the best painter
o The other guy painted a curtain
o Fundamental myth, animals are about representation, animals dont have the
capability
o Diff between animals and humans
o What does representation mean, idea of realism with a capital or little r
o Image 1637 Nicholas Poussin Agraphia – shadow painting
o About a lover going away to war, the lover traced the others shadow on a
wall before going off to war
o Thought of as the first painting
o the Arcadian shepherds
Greek Myths about Shadows
o the allegory of Platos cave – story of enlightenment and learning and seeing
reality for how it is
o Platos myth of the republic – genesis for todays democracy
o story: there are ppl chained in a cave facing a wall – on the wall there are
images of ppl, monsters, figures – because they were born chained to the wall
thats all they know, they cant even see each other, they find that there is a
fire illuminating and that its a light projection, finally leaves and sees the sun
and everything outside
o this coincides with the allegory that learning is not learning something new –
Plato believed in the realm of the forms, spiritual realm like heaven
o earth isnt perfect
o so he thought our reality is the pale shadow compared to the realm of the
forms, and its a bad copy of the realm
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o also thought we all have internal souls, search for going home where we
became spiritual in the realm of the forms
o enlightenment for him is like becoming whole again and remembering when
we were perfect in the realm
o saying everything we see is a copy and worse than the realm
o biase towards the arts, and that its not as important fooled convinced
representation
o to plato representation is bad
o math is perfect
o things start at the top and trickles down quality gets lower
Aristotle vs Plato
o Aristotle – believed in idealism
o Platonism
o Aristotle – pilomorphism
o Beliefs from the bottom up, built in material reality
o First scientist
o Chair example – Plato= there is a perfect chair but in reality we dont get
perfect chairs, all the rest are bad copies
o Aristotle = heres a chair, theres a chair, there is no perfect chair, there are
tons of chairs → as a result we abstract an idea of a chair to represent many
diff variations, we use for study, thinking, communication
o Main diff between the two
o So in a way images give us more idea what is going on and more tools to use
Images and Reality – Symbols in Images:
o Magritte – the treason of images its not a real pipe, its a representation of a
pipe → materiality of images****
o Applies for paintings in the old days
o Laptops – images on computer still has a materiality
o Every image has materiality***
o Compare between learning through tv and through books
o Video – john burger, visual culture, understanding contemporary images
o Questions of reproducibility, market value, feminism?
o Philosophers behind this type of presentation
o He said painting were really religious (idea of the icon)
o But images today are messages that are transmitted/ printed
o )mages that always were very coded that werent necessarily religious
o Ex still lifes -1630 (baroque) northern Europe = highliy realistic painting
o Looks like a simple image but for ppl in this era it was a particular purchase
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
