Program in Aesthetics and Debates on Arts and Literature

1. Aesthetics: art, technique and philosophy in its historical course

• Art and the Human Condition: Primitive Art
• Medieval art: the symbolic, the sacred and the beautiful
• Renaissance and Baroque Art: The Desecration of the Sacred
• The birth of aesthetics. Art as guiding principle of Humanity (Kant y Schiller)
• The discovery of the sinister and the ugly: romantic aesthetics (Hoffmann, Rosenkranz, Jean Paul)
• The work of art: sacred space and time. Back to Earth (Heidegger, Gadamer)
• Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility: The Loss of the Aura (Benjamin)
• The problem of beauty in the society of information and spectacle (Han, Baudrillard, Debord)
• Art, technique and beauty in the contemporary world

2. Philosophy and literature: thinking about the human condition in a literary way

• Literary classics and canon, to know the human condition?
  • Justification of the course
  • Selection of authors and works
  • Realism as a framework
  • Auerbach
• Realism in the Western tradition
  • Justification of a comparative vision
  • French realism and its evolution
  • The differential characteristics of realism in England
  • The influence of the Russians: the exploration of the human condition
  • Analysis of works: Tolstoy, Dickens, Balzac, Flaubert
  • Commentary on other support texts
• Realismo y condición humana
  • Psicologismo
  • ¿Objetividad?
  • Realismo y moral. Sympathy y piedad
  • Categorías para el análisis
  • Aplicación en el comentario: un coeur simple (Flaubert), A Christmas Carol (Dickens), Un cuento de Chejov

3. Iconography and Art History. Contemplating and capturing reality from solitude and silence

• The initial amazement
• The joy of existing
• Light and color. Space and time
• Art and word. The motto and epitaph
• The work of art as a treatise
• Architectures of the soul. Constructions and texts
• Creative silence
• Art pathologies and theraphy
• The Afterlife