Critique of TasteGalvano Della Volpe was the dominant philosopher of Italian Marxism for twenty years after the Liberation. His most important book was a work of aesthetic theory—Critique of Taste. Della Volpe, proponent of a robust materialism in all his writings, was concerned to rehabilitate the inherently rational and intellectual nature of art. Opposing both the sociological reductionism of Plekhanov or Lukács, and the formalist irrationalism of Croce or New Criticism, Della Volpe’s aim was to demonstrate that conceptual meaning is always inseparable from aesthetic effect. Whether he is discussing Pindar or Góngora, Cleanth Brooks or Roland Barthes, Goethe or Mallarmé, Della Volpe is always challenging, always illuminating. Critique of Taste represents one of the major crossroads of twentieth-century aesthetics. |
Contents
Preface | 11 |
The Literary Symbol | 92 |
Text and Context III | 111 |
Sound and Meaning | 148 |
Laocoon 1960 | 173 |
Other Sign Systems | 201 |
Music | 215 |
Legacy of Lessing | 228 |
On the Concept of Avantgarde | 244 |
A Note on Glossematics | 263 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
abstract aesthetic aestheticist allegory Antigone architecture Aristotle artistic bourgeois character Cleanth Brooks concept concrete Contini criterion Croce Dante Dante's decadentist dialectic discourse elements Eliot Engels epistemological equivocal example expressive fact Faust figurative figurative arts film function genera Gianfranco Contini glossematics Goethe Goethe's grammatical Greek Hegel hence historical Hjelmslev hubris human I. A. Richards ideas imagination intellectual intuition Kant language langue linguistic sign literal literal-material literary criticism literature logical London Lukács Mayakovsky means metaphor metaphysical modern moral morphemes mystical nature omni-contextual painting paraphrase particular philosophical phonetic Pindar poem poet poetic symbol poetic text poetry polysemic precisely problem pure rational reality reason relation rhetorical rigorous romantic scientific semantic organicity sense signifier social socialist realism Sophocles sound specific structural stylistic T. S. Eliot technical things thou thought translation truth typicality unity univocal values verbal words