1. POLANDAnna Chęćka-Gotkowicz. Dysonanse krytyki: O ocenie wykona-nia dzieła muzycznego. Gdańsk: Słowo/Obraz Terytoria, 2008,252 pp. ISBN 978-83-7453-874-9The book Dysonanse krytyki: O ocenie wykonania dziełamuzycznego (The dissonances of criticism: On the assessmentof musical performance) deals with the problem of musicalperformance, which for the audience constitutes the first andoften the only possibility of knowing a work of music. The authorbelieves that musical performance receives too little attention incomparison with analyses of the work of music itself, and arguesthat a musical performance should be considered an independentwork of art. A performer, located between the composer and theaudience, works with the composer and gives birth to a newmusical quality based on the score. The fact remains, however,

that this new musical quality is developed thanks to the performer’s subjective artisticvision. Assessing a musical performance requires of the listener not only exploration ofvalues potentially in the score, but also an examination of values peculiar to musicalpractice. On the one hand, the musical meaning of the score is in potentia subject tointerpretation; on the other hand, the art of interpretation, as a process of turning musicnotation into audible music, can, in the author’s opinion, be the source of a new artwork.This being so, musical performance needs to be judged in a suitable way.

Bogusław Jasiński. Estetyka po estetyce: Prolegomena doontologii procesu twórczego. Piaseczno: Ethos, 2008, 238 pp.ISBN 978-83-607-9900-0The author of Estetyka po estetyce (Aesthetics after aesthetics:Prolegomena to an ontology of the creative process) isa philosopher, aesthetician, and also a short-story writer anddramatist. In this book he endeavours to formulate a new model for aesthetics, which would not refer to artworks as defined objects,but rather to art as a process of creation. The book’s intention is to base new artistic currents and phenomena, such as performances,multimedia arts, action art, multimedia installations, on sucha model of aesthetics. In other words, this sort of model wouldconstitute the philosophical perspective for contemporary artisticactivities, which have largely abandoned the traditional under-

standing of artworks and concentrated on the process of the creation of these artisticactivities and participation in them. From this perspective, artists communicate their creativeprocesses to audiences directly, and therefore allow art to be authentically engaged andenable an authentic fusion of aesthetic theory and artistic practice. Contemporary aestheticsshould therefore not concentrate on artworks, but rather on art as a creative process.

Leszek Sosnowski. Sztuka – Historia – Teoria: Światy ArthuraC. Danto. Krakow: Collegium Columbinum, 2007, 440 pp.ISBN 978-83-89973-73-3Sztuka – Historia – Teoria (Art – history – theory: The worlds ofArthur C. Danto) is the first Polish book-length reconstruction ofthe philosophy of Arthur C. Danto. According to Danto, we aretoday witnessing the end of the history of art, which is beingsuperseded by a pluralism of forms and theories. This does not,however, exclude the possibility of formulating a definition of art,expressing its theory, or presenting a narration of its develop-ment. This is exactly what Danto does, working at three levels: art,criticism, and philosophy. All approaches are important to him,but in this book the first two levels are subordinate to the last.

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According to Sosnowski, analyzing Danto’s ontology of art means reconstructing the‘architecture’ of his investigations, where access to the ontological ‘roots’ has beenpreceded by reflection on the ‘branches’ – namely, the methodology, epistemology, andphilosophy of history. Danto’s essentialist theory contains definitional features of a workof art which, according to him, are imperceptible and keep art and reality fromintermingling and contaminating each other. According to Sosnowski, Danto appliesAristotle’s and Aquinas’s metaphysics to works of art, and this constitutes the originalityof his own philosophy of art.

Dorota Koczanowicz. Doświadczenie sztuki: Sztuka życia;Wymiary estetyki pragmatycznej. Wrocław: WydawnictwoNaukowe DSW, 2008, 213 pp. ISBN 978-83-89518-72-9‘Experience’ is the chief category of pragmatist aesthetics. It is alsothe main subject of Dorota Koczanowicz’s Doświadczenie sztuki(The experience of art: The art of living; Dimensions of pragmaticaesthetics). Though she starts with an account of WilliamJames’s philosophy of experience, the principal chapters aredevoted to John Dewey’s thought and its continuation andexpansion in Richard Shusterman’s philosophy. Every experiencehas the potential to create a unified, total experience which has anaesthetic quality. Underlying these beliefs is the view that we cantrace the development of art to simple, everyday experiences. This

way of thinking opens up the possibility of adapting Dewey’s philosophy to discussionsof contemporary art, which is often concerned with the problem of the relationshipbetween art and life. Starting with the question of what the place of art is in everyday lifeand how everyday life exists in art today, Koczanowicz, in the last chapter of the book,discusses the work of Katharine Kuharic, a contemporary American artist, who inventedan interesting technique of absorbing and modifying the cultural and socialenvironment.

Maria Popczyk. Estetyczne przestrzenie ekspozycji muzealnych:Artefakty przyrody i dzieła sztuki. Krakow: Universitas, 2008,268 pp. ISBN 978-83-242-0888-3The aim of Estetyczne przestrzenie ekspozycji muzealnych (Theaesthetic space of museum exhibitions: Artefacts of nature andworks of art) is to reveal the aestheticizing of artefacts of natureand works of art, which occurs in the exhibition space ofa museum, in its Modernist and Post-Modern models. Accordingto Popczyk, a work of art may be considered independently, andits aesthetics may be discussed in that way, ignoring the contextof the exhibition space. Nowadays, however, while works of artcontinue to be exhibited in museums, the exhibition itself is nolonger an aesthetically neutral space. Popczyk describes what shecalls the un-aesthetics of uprooting as a practice used bymuseums to anaesthetize the visitors and make them ignore theoriginal context of the work of art, providing the possibility of

practising aesthetics and the history of art by pointing out the historical and stylisticvalues of the exhibited work, and thus building the aesthetic space of the exhibition. Thepast context of the works and the act of creation initiating their rise are, however,potentially contained in the exhibited works, though neutralized in the Modernistpractice of exhibiting art. In her proposed scheme of the structure of an exhibited work ofart, Popczyk tries to provide the possibility of undertaking detailed analyses of theconnections between aesthetics and politics, the aesthetic character of ethnographicexhibitions in trans-cultural studies, and, lastly, to provide a basis for interpreting variouscontemporary artistic practices.

Monika Bokiniec

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2. SLOVAKIAJuraj Malíček. Vademecum popkultúry. Nitra: ULUK UKF, 2008,150 pp. ISBN 978-80-8094-287-8The volume Vademecum popkultúry (A vade-mecum of popculture) consists of two parts. In the first half, Malíček defines thenotion of pop culture using the conceptual vocabulary developedby the Nitra School, a Slovak semiotic movement based at theUniversity of Constantine the Philosopher, Nitra. Malíček’s aim is to make that vocabulary applicable to more general aspects ofpop culture. The second part consists of a terminological vade-mecum of pop culture and a specialized dictionary of pop-culturejargon. The author describes the relations between pop cultureand the traditional arts, discusses the signs and language of popculture, and traces the sources of its nonconformity and itsstratification (mainstream, slipstream, periphery). The dictionary

offers definitions of concepts Malíček believes important for an understanding of popculture (like the global, the eclectic, superfluity, sitcom, manga, MMORPG).

Ľubomír Plesník, ed. Tezaurus estetických výrazových kvalít.Nitra: ULUK UKF, 2008, 474 pp. ISBN 978-80-8094-350-9The entries in Tezaurus estetických výrazových kvalít (A thesaurus ofaesthetic expressive qualities), a publication of the Nitra Schooland the fruit of several years’ labour, provide explanations ofimportant categories of expression with regard to their specificsemiotic contexts. The notion of expressive quality in the contextof the Nitra School denotes an experienced quality of a semioticartefact (the quality of its impact on the recipient, the modality ofits pragmatic efficaciousness, stylistic function or stylistic value).The group of scholars led by Professor Ľubomír Plesník furtherdevelop the system of aesthetic categories of expression asworked out by Ladislav Miko, the founding figure of the School.Each entry includes a characteristic of the category, an explanation

of it as a stylistic quality, and its relation to other theoretical frameworks. The thesaurus isintended primarily for students of art theory, aesthetics, and cultural studies.

Arthur C. Danto. Zneužitie krásy alebo Estetika a pojemumenia. Bratislava: Kalligram, 2008, 208 pp. ISBN 978-80-8101-025-5This is a Slovak translation of The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics andthe Concept of Art, a collection of Danto’s recent essays. It is thefirst book-length publication by Danto to appear in either Czechor Slovak. The main theme of the book is the role that beauty –a traditional aesthetic category – plays (or rather does not play) incontemporary art. Danto discusses the reasons Avant-garde andPost-Modern artists turned away from beauty, and reflects on therelation between beauty and other aesthetic categories, but alsopolitics. This book follows up on ideas expressed inDanto’s previous works, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace(1981) and After the End of Art (1997).

Jana Sošková, ed. Filozoficko-estetické reflexie posthisto-rického umenia. Studia aesthetica 10. Prešov: Acta FacultatisPhilosophicae Universitatis Prešoviensis, 2008, 483 pp.ISBN 978-80-8068-699-4This anthology of papers on the special features of contemporaryart and its reception, Filozoficko-estetické reflexie posthistorickéhoumenia (Philosophical-aesthetic reflections on post-historical art),explores new ways of communication amongst scholars workingin various disciplines in the field of art. The unifying background ofthe collected essays is A. C. Danto’s reflections on art after the endof art. The volume is divided into four sections: ‘The Self-Reflectionof Aesthetics and Post-Historical Art’, ‘Aesthetics, the Art of the

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Second Half of the Twentieth Century and Interdisciplinary Communication’, ‘The Field ofAesthetics and Interdisciplinary Communication’, and ‘Recent Research in ContemporaryArt’. The anthology comprises thirty-six papers by scholars in Slovakia, the CzechRepublic, Poland, and France.

Adrián Kvokačka

3. HUNGARYFerenc L. Lendvai. A fiatal Lukács: Útja Marxhoz: 1902–1918.Budapest: Argumentum/Lukács Archívum, 2008, 443 pp.ISBN 978-963-446-483-9The period described by Lendvai in A fiatal Lukács: Útja Marxhoz:1902–1918 (The young Lukács: His way to Marx: 1902–18) is uniquein the life of the best-known Hungarian philosopher György Lukács,because it is characterized almost exclusively by writings on art andaesthetics. Lendvai’s monograph is basically a philosophicalinvestigation aimed at showing the validity of Lukács’s work, yet italso examines the genesis of the texts. He divides Lukács’s pre-Marxist or proto-Marxist phase into three stages. The first, from 1902to 1907, consists mostly of literary critiques on Hungarian andforeign authors. In the second, from 1908 to 1911, Lukács wrote twobooks, different in both content and style: History of theDevelopment of Modern Drama and Soul and Form (both 1910),

a collection of essays. The main achievements of the third stage, from 1912 to 1918, are the‘Heidelberg Philosophy of Art’, a manuscript of roughly 500 pages, and The Theory of theNovel (1920). Lendvai identifies two interconnected tendencies in all these writings –namely, a sociological approach to art and a critical attitude defined by disillusionment.

Magdolna Orosz. ‘Progresszív egyetemes poézis’: Romantikusellentételezések és utópiák. Budapest: Gondolat, 2007, 227 pp.ISBN 978-963-693-072-1In ‘Progresszív egyetemes poézis’: Romantikus ellentételezések ésutópiák (Progressive universal poetry: Romantic oppositions andutopias) Magdolna Orosz undertakes the difficult task of providinga comprehensive analysis of the aesthetic programmes of what shecalls the Goethe Age. Her key to this vast material is various pairs ofconcepts, or, more precisely, dichotomies that cannot and neednot be resolved, because it is exactly their dichotomic – sometimeseven contradictory – nature and tension that makes them sofruitful to the philosophical understanding of art. Although the titlesuggests an examination of Romantic topics, the book is notconfined to German Romanticism. Two sub-sections are concernedwith Goethe and Schiller, building on the notions ‘ancient vs

modern’ and ‘naive vs sentimental’, respectively. The longest chapter is devoted toFriedrich Schlegel. Here, Orosz inquires into several pairs of concepts, such as ‘beautiful’and ‘interesting’ (in Schlegel’s essay on the study of Greek poetry), fragmentarity anduniversality, chaos and order, understanding and incomprehensibility. In the last chapter,Orosz interprets different works of literature, including Schlegel’s Lucinde,Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and Tieck’s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen.

Dénes Schreiner. Schelling és az antikvitás. Budapest:Áron/Brozsek, 2009, 216 pp. ISBN 978-963-9210-63-9 In Schelling és az antikvitás (Schelling and antiquity), a revisedversion of his PhD thesis, Schreiner analyzes Schelling’s Lectures onthe Philosophy Art. The fact that Schelling never published theLectures suggests that he was not satisfied with them, andSchreiner’s book helps us to understand the possible reasons forthat. It is a highly critical reading of the text, focusing on theconceptual and structural tensions of a speculative theory thataims to see its theses confirmed by the phenomena of Greekmythology. Schelling’s contention that the Greek gods, being idealand real, absolute and individual at the same time, are the onlytrue figures suitable for artistic representation, defines a peculiar,

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sometimes even biased approach to mythology. After reconstructing Schelling’smetaphysical notion of art and the role assigned to the gods and mythology within it,Schreiner goes on to examine the question of whether mythology can really beintegrated into a system of art like this. He demonstrates that whereas Schelling turnedout to be sensitive to factors like mythical temporality and the narrative nature of thegods, he was bound to ignore others, such as the difference between dealing with mythsand works of art, the varieties of myth, the non-divine aspects of mythology, and theproblem of theogony.

Zoltán Papp

4. THE CZECH REPUBLICMiloš Ševčík. Bergsonova koncepce komické představivostia smíchu. Prague: Univerzita Karlova v Praze – Filozofickáfakulta, 2008, 87 pp. ISBN 978-80-7308-214-7Miloš Ševčík, in Bergsonova koncepce komické představivostia smíchu (Bergson’s conception of the comic imagination andlaughter), aims at presenting the qualities of Henri Bergson’sconception of the comic as elaborated in his famous Laughter: AnEssay on the Meaning of the Comic (1911). After restatingBergson’s crucial argument that the comic imagination feeds onthe ultimate source of the comic, the mechanical nature of humancharacter, Ševčík focuses on the relationship between comicmanifestations and this ultimate source. One chapter is devoted tothe social function of laughter. In the Appendix, Ševčík comparesBergson’s conception of the comic to that of the French literary

critic and scholar Louis Cazamian (1877–1965), showing Cazamian’s original conceptionof humour to be Bergsonian in character.

Lubomír Doležel. Fikce a historie v období postmoderny.Prague: Academia, 2008, 160 pp. ISBN 978-80-200-1581-5Fikce a historie v období postmoderny (Fiction and history in thePost-Modern age) challenges what the author takes to bea disquieting blurring of the difference between history andfiction, inaugurated by Hayden White and other members of thePost-Modern current of New Historicism. According to Doležel,however, this removal of boundaries started with RolandBarthes’s 1967 essay ‘The Discourse of History’. Doležel bases hisdefence of the need to differentiate between historical andfictional narrative on his ‘fictional worlds’ theory presented inHeterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (1998). The argumentspresented in the book have been elaborated in papers on thetopic published in English over the last twenty years (for example,in New Literary History and Poetics Today).

Lubomír Doležel. Studie z české literatury a poetiky. Prague:Torst, 2008, 356 pp. ISBN 978-80-7215-337-4Another recent publication by Lubomír Doležel, ProfessorEmeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto,Studie z české literatury a poetiky (Studies in Czech literature andpoetics) is an anthology of essays on Czech literature and literarycriticism. It is divided into three sections: the essays in the firstsection, entitled ‘Authors and Works’, are on important writers likeFranz Kafka, Karel Čapek, and Milan Kundera; the second section,‘The Prague School’, comprises articles assessing the legacy of thePrague Structuralists Jakobson, Mukařovský, and Vodička; theessays in the section ‘Steps Forward’ are Doležel’s own originalcontributions to literary theory and aesthetics.

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Marta Filipová and Mathew Rampley. Možnosti vizuálníchstudií: Obrazy – texty – interpretace. Brno: Barrister & Principal,2008, 254 pp. ISBN 978-80-87029-26-8In Možnosti vizuálních studií (The possibilities of visual studies:Images – texts – interpretations) Filipová and Rampley, wholecture on visual culture in the United Kingdom, have broughttogether papers by a number of scholars, Czech and foreign,working in the dynamically evolving field of Visual Studies. Thepapers mostly centre on matters usually thought to have beenneglected by traditional art history and theory (popular imagery,comics, cartography, new media), but the anthology also includesessays on methodological problems that notoriously arise whena new field of study is ‘discovered’.

František Mikš. Gombrich: Tajemství obrazu a jazyk umění;Pozvání k dějinám a teorii umění. Brno: Barrister & Principal,2008, 359 pp. ISBN 80-7364-045-7František Mikš’s recent work, whose title translates as Gombrich:The Secret of the Image and the Language of Art; An Invitation toArt History and Theory, is an ambitious endeavour to introducereaders to the intricacies of thinking on art through theexplanation of a work by a major art historian of the last century,Ernst Gombrich. The author sets Gombrich’s complex theory of artin the context of thinkers that influenced Gombrich, such as KarlPopper and Konrad Lorenz. The book is therefore not limited to arthistory, but includes a treatment of aesthetic, philosophical, andpsychological questions as well.

Lenka Krausová and Jan Schneider, eds. Intermedialita: slovo –obraz – zvuk; Sborník příspěvků ze sympozia. Olomouc:Univerzita Palackého, 2008, 334 pp. ISBN 978-80-244-2054-7Lenka Krausová and Jan Schneider, eds. Vybrané kapitolyz intermediality. Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého, 2008, 147 pp.ISBN 978-80-244-2055-4Intermedialita (Intermediality: Word – image – sound; Proceedingsof a symposium) and Vybrané kapitoly z intermediality (Selectedessays on intermediality), edited by Jan Schneider and LenkaKrausová, contain papers on the theme of ‘intermediality’ byliterary and media theorists and aestheticians. As the word‘intermediality’ suggests, most of the contributions to both thevolumes consider various theoretical implications of the crossingof media (such as literature, film, theatre, internet, and television).

Jaroslav Anděl and Petr Szczepanik, eds. Stále kinema:Antologie českého myšlení o filmu 1904–1950. Prague: Národnífilmový archiv, 2008, 430 pp. ISBN 978-80-7004-136-9Jaroslav Anděl and Petr Szczepanik, eds. Cinema All the Time:An Anthology of Czech Film Theory and Criticism 1904–1950.Prague: National Film Archive, 2008, 315 pp. ISBN 978-09-3004-299-8Cinema All the Time is a long-overdue anthology of Czechmeditations on film. (It was first published in Polish translation ina slightly different form as Obrazy, obrazki, obrazeczki: Antologiaczeskiej myśli filmowej. Tom I. Gdańsk: Słowo obraz terytoria, 2005,and now appears simultaneously in both Czech and Englisheditions.) The anthology includes important essays written inCzech during the first half of the twentieth century. Among the

authors of these early reflections on the medium are not only film critics, film directors,architects, and composers, but also fiction writers, linguists, aestheticians, andsociologists. The title is a bit misleading, however, because the scope of the anthologyhas been conceived broadly enough to include works even predating the medium of themotion picture in the 1880s, such as the 1819 essay ‘Contributions to the Understanding

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of Sight from a Subjective Perspective’ by the physiologist Jan Evangelista Purkyně.A volume covering the second half of the century is in preparation.

Marie Havránková, ed. Pražský lingvistický kroužek v ko-respondenci: Bohuslav Havránek, Roman Jakobson, VilémMathesius, Jan Mukařovský, Bohumil Trnka, Miloš Weingart.Korespondence z let 1923–1970. Prague: Academia, 2008, 448 pp. ISBN 978-80-200-1622-5Pražský lingvistický kroužek v korespondenci (The Prague LinguisticCircle in letters: Bohuslav Havránek, Roman Jakobson, VilémMathesius, Jan Mukařovský, Bohumil Trnka, and Miloš Weingart,1923–70) allows those interested in the history of the ‘PragueSchool’ to learn ‘at first hand’ about internal organization of theCircle and the personal and professional relations of its members,whose works have had a lasting impact on structural linguisticsand aesthetics.

Jiří Přibáň. Pod čarou umění. Prague: Artlab2007; Kant, 2008,144 pp. ISBN 978-80-86970-59-2What unites the essays collected in Pod čarou umění (Footnotes toart) is the manifest conviction of their author, the philosopher JiříPřibáň, Professor of Law at Cardiff Law School, that art, past andpresent, is an irreducible means of questioning the obvious. Arthas always achieved this through beauty, but in the Post-Modernera this is no longer enough; beauty must become ironic to fulfilits purpose. Přibáň’s writing is inspired by Richard Rorty’s use ofthe concept of irony in political philosophy, but he also draws onMilan Kundera’s essays on art and supports the arguments withexamples of works by contemporary artists. The collection ofessays aims at a wider readership than just scholars, stressing thesocial importance of art in contemporary culture.

Petra Hanáková, ed. Výzva perspektivy: Obraz a jeho divák odmalby quattrocenta k filmu a zpět. Prague: Academia, 2008,216 pp. ISBN 978-80-200-1625-6Výzva perspektivy (The challenge of perspective: The image and itsspectator from quattrocento painting to film and back) comprisesthree polemical essays on perspectival representation in paintingand film. The essay by Václav Hájek, ‘Where Does the Image End?’,explores the notion of framing as a necessary condition ofpictorial representation. It is followed by Petra Hanáková’s ‘Did theRenaissance Give Birth to Film Spectatorship?’, which challengesthe conventional view that there is a traceable historicalcontinuity between Renaissance perspectival painting andmodern cinematographic representation. Barbora Lungová’s ‘TheSubject as a Spot’ elaborates the views presented in Hanáková’s

essay and applies them to an interpretation of Peter Greenaway’s film The Draughtsman’sContract (1982).

Jakub Stejskal

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