Noel Carroll

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Basic Theatrical Understanding: Considerations for James HamiltonNoël Carroll (bio)The publication of The Art of Theater by James Hamilton is a seminal event in the philosophy of theater.1 As the first book-length study of theater in the analytic tradition of philosophy, it will be a touchstone for many years of future discussion and debate. Anyone interested in the philosophy of theater will need to address Professor Hamilton’s accomplishment.The leading idea in The Art of Theater is that theatrical performance is an independent art form. That is, theatrical performance, as such, is not, as Aristotle suggested by his demotion of spectacle, a mere adjunct to literature, or essentially a medium for illustrating dramatic and comedic texts. Theatrical performance itself is an art in its own right. This view of theater art has been increasingly apparent in the practices of modern theater in the West, but these practices—as exemplified by Gordon Craig, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Jacques Copeau, Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, and, more recently, Robert Wilson—merely revealed what has always been the case: that theater is at root a performing art.Although for centuries theater in the West had been conceptualized as a text-based art, Hamilton maintains that this tradition is local. Theatrical performances in other cultures need not be the enactment of antecedently written-out texts. Furthermore, even within Western culture, most of us see and discuss plays without ever reading the texts upon which they are based. Hamilton takes these facts to support his view that theatrical performance is an autonomous art form. Among other things, this means that the critical model that presumes that the success of a theatrical performance must be assessed against the effectiveness of its implementation of the pertinent preexisting literary text is a misguided one. Although a preexisting literary text may be an ingredient in the production of a theatrical performance, fidelity to the aforesaid text is not mandated by the art of theater. [End Page 15]Insofar as theatrical performance is an art in its own right, it may—and quite clearly, as in the cases of the Performance Group, Kraken, Mabou Mines, etc., often does—adapt written texts for its own purposes. Moreover, refashioning the text, where there is one, is not simply an avant-garde practice; most productions edit the text for their own purposes. Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, which omitted no word from the accepted version of the text, was the exception to the rule. Thus, what Hamilton calls the ingredients model of the relation of texts to theatrical performances has the advantage on its side of better corresponding to actual practices, as compared to the notion that a theatrical performance is to be understood as a matter of bringing a literary text to life.Of course, one apparent advantage that the text-implementation model of theatrical performance might seem to possess is that it appears to have a way ready-to-hand for identifying theatrical performances. Gielgud’s performance, Olivier’s performance, and Burton’s performance are, ex hypothesi, all performances of Hamlet because they are all performances of Shakespeare’s text to which they all roughly comply. If, following Hamilton, we sever the relationship to the play-text, how can we account for the way in which we identify theatrical performances?2 That is, independently of reference to texts, how do we identify a theatrical performance as another instance of Hamlet?In order to solve this problem, Hamilton introduces the idea of “a basic understanding” of a theatrical performance. The basic understanding of a theatrical performance is, on Hamilton’s account, said to involve no more than comprehending on a moment-to-moment basis the ongoing bits of dialogue and stage action as they evolve, as well as understanding the transitions from one scene to another while also responding physically in a suitable manner to the evolving story (for example, laughing where laughter is appropriate) or emoting responsively to what is happening onstage. So, one has a basic understanding of a scene if, when the Musketeer says “On guard,” the spectator takes this to be an invitation to a duel; and when a rival character draws his sword, the...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BELSEY ON LANGUAGE AND REALISM by Noel Carroll Like much contemporary literary theory, Catherine Belsey's influential Critical Practice1 is antirealist, where "antirealism" refers both to the rejection of a putative literary style and to the espousal of an epistemological stance, the latter ostensibly grounded in a theory of language, adapted from Ferdinand Saussure. Moreover, these two antirealisms are connected in that stylistic antirealism is, in part, advanced as a consequence of epistemological —or perhaps more aptly "linguistic"— antirealism. Belsey's theory is avowedly political, designed to challenge the operation of ideology in literature, particularly realist literature. That is, though Belsey discusses literature of several different periods and of different genres, her primary preoccupation is with something she calls expressive realism, a tendency perhaps best exemplified by the nineteenth-century novel and still pursued by our less experimental writers. Purportedly, expressive realism is underwritten by at least two tenets: (1) realism insofar as it presumes that literature can accurately represent reality, and (2) a variant of expressionism insofar as it presumes we have access to the thoughts and intentions of authors {CP, p. 7). In this note, I shall concentrate exclusively on the linguistic arguments— which Belsey calls "Post Saussurean" — that are mobilized to discredit the first presumption of literary realism, its claim to represent reality. For Belsey, a major problem with expressive realism is that this sort of literature presents itself or is taken as an accurate reflection of reality. Belsey sometimes makes this point by saying that such literature purports to be an accurate representation of reality. At other moments, that which such literature claims to reflect accurately is said to be experiences of reality. But these alternative claims are also segued by 124 Noel Carroll125 saying that what is reflected are experiences of reality which are recognized to be true. Given the text, the variant of the reflection theory that appears to occupy Belsey most is the notion that literature reflects reality — that is, holds a mirror up to nature, as Hamlet might have it. This raises Belsey's political hackles because she believes that a commitment to the plausibility of the goal of reflecting life accurately invests realist literature with the aura of a socially unmediated, transhistorical, "natural" account of human life rather than an ideologically constructed one. In order to forestall this supposedly political repercussion, Belsey, taking advantage of her expanded version of Saussurean linguistics, charges that realism misconstrues the relationship between literature and the world. Indeed, ana this is the crux of her postSaussurean argument, the error here can be traced to something deeper, viz., a misconstrual of the relation between language and the world, of which the pretensions of literary realism are merely but an instance. Stated baldly, Belsey aspires to debunk literature's claims to realism by denying language's claims to realism. This may seem rather like killing a fly by using a cannon. And, in any case, one would have thought that questions about the representational efficacy of language were logically independent of the issue of the ideological operation of literary realism. However, Belsey, like many contemporary literary theorists, mistakenly believes that one contests literary realism by propounding epistemological reservations about language. Belsey claims that her linguistic antirealism derives from Saussure's putative discovery that "far from providing a set of labels for entities which exist independently in the world, language precedes the existence of independent entities, making the world intelligible by differentiating between concepts" {CP, p. 38). That language always precedes the existence of that to which it refers is a truly astounding discovery. And we should wish to know how Saussure, according to Belsey's interpretation, came upon it. For Saussure, language is a system of signs. Signs are composed of two elements: a material element— a sound-image or graphic image— called a signifier, and a conceptual element, what in different jargons is referred to as a meaning, an intension, or a connotation, and which in Saussure's terminology is called a signified. At this point it pays to notice what is missing in this account, viz., what other theorists sometimes call the reference, extension, or denotation of a term, that is, the set of 126Philosophy and...

Art, Emotion, and Ethics is a brilliant book with many important, useful, insightful, and even profound things to say about a range of topics including the relation of the imagination to art, understanding, and ethics, and the paradox of fiction, as well as sensitive and in-depth interpretations of masterpieces by the likes of Rembrandt and Nabokov. It is very convincing in its jousts with autonomists for people like me who favor the view that sometimes ethical blemishes are aesthetic blemishes and sometimes ethical merits count as aesthetic merits. But that is because I am not an autonomist or even a moderate autonomist.

Beyond Aesthetics brings together philosophical essays addressing art and related issues by one of the foremost philosophers of art at work today. Countering conventional aesthetic theories - those maintaining that authorial intention, art history, morality and emotional responses are irrelevant to the experience of art - Noël Carroll argues for a more pluralistic and commonsensical view in which all of these factors can play a legitimate role in our encounter with art works. Throughout, the book combines philosophical theorizing with illustrative examples including works of high culture and the avant-garde, as well as works of popular culture, jokes, horror novels, and suspense films.

This article reviews the various ways in which the later writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein have been employed to address the question “What is Art?”. These include the family resemblance model, the cluster concept model and the form of life model. The article defends a version of the form of life approach. Also, addressed the charge that it would have been more profitable had aestheticians explored what Wittgenstein actually said about art instead of trying to extrapolate from his writings an approach to what Nigel Warburton calls the art question.

In recent years, the philosophy of art has profited enormously by applying to the study of art insights derived from the philosophies of mind and language, naturalized epistemology, psychology, evolutionary theory, and cognitive science. A case in point: the discussion of the nature of picturing and pictorial perception has obviously benefited from the influence of perceptual psychology and cognitive studies. Likewise, the theorization of art in relation to the emotions has also exploited contemporary advances in adjacent areas of inquiry.