DeepDyve eBooks - A Critical Theory of Creativity

Introduction

Howells, Richard

Pages: 1 –5

[According to Plato, ‘Art is form of play, not to be taken seriously.’1 But Plato was wrong, because aesthetics, creativity and design serve both to illuminate and to constitute the path to Utopia.]

Available

Visions and Derisions of Utopia

Howells, Richard

Pages: 6 –28

[Utopia is a word famously first used by Sir Thomas More as the name of his ideal, imaginary island in his seminal Utopia of 1516. Here, Utopians enjoyed comprehensive welfare state in which the concept of private property did not exist. Everyone enjoyed a six-hour working day ans had so little...

Available

Ernst Bloch and Utopian Critical Theory

Howells, Richard

Pages: 29 –43

[Critical theory has a reputation for hostility towards popular culture. This is not wholly undeserved. According to Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, popular culture was repetitive, formulaic and mind numbing — mass-produced for consumption like any other industrial product. It was, in their...

Available

Homo Aestheticus

Howells, Richard

Pages: 44 –59

[North America provided the examples of historic ‘intentional communities’ discussed in Chapter 1. This chapter considers two more North American case studies: the Amish of the Eastern United States and the Zapotec of central Mexico. Unlike the Ephretans and the Harmonists, these communities...

Available

Case Study: Navajo Design, Culture and Theology

Howells, Richard

Pages: 60 –81

[The Navajo provide an excellent case study for the relationship between Utopia, culture, creativity and aesthetics and design. As Paul Zolbrod puts it, there is a direct relationship between the elements of Navajo poetic tradition and the way Navajos conduct their daily lives. The separateness...

Available

Archetypes, the Unconscious, and Psychoanalysis

Howells, Richard

Pages: 82 –100

[A problem with case studies is that no matter how individually illuminating they may be, they might at the same time fail sufficiently to link the phenomenal and the noumenal, and so render the examples isolated or simply anecdotal. In this chapter, I will respond to this objection by arguing...

Available

Roger Fry and the Language of Form

Howells, Richard

Pages: 101 –115

[Psychoanalysis, as we saw in the last chapter, can provide great insight into the conscious and unconscious content of visual texts. What happens though, with works which are predominantly formally rather than content-based? Or if indeed they have no recognisable figurative content at all? This...

Available

From Genesis to Job

Howells, Richard

Pages: 116 –130

[As this book moves towards its conclusion, it is important to stress that in Chapter 4, I made no theological claim for the validity Navajo religion. Neither in Chapter 6 did I attempt to insert anything of the supernatural into the epistemological gap that Fry had detected in his understanding...

Available

Homo Absconditus

Howells, Richard

Pages: 131 –147

[Bloch’s Christianity has a number of emerging heroes, some of whom are distinctly non-traditional. In the Old Testament, Adam and the serpent merge into a Promethean figure seeking to be like God, while Job exposes God himself as being unworthy of human hope and trust. As Bloch moves to the...

Available

Conclusion: The Republic of Heaven

Howells, Richard

Pages: 148 –155

[Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy is ostensibly a series of books for older children. It is also a series whose theological content has attracted the attention of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It is set in a world not wholly unrecognisable from our own and centres on the adventures...

Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

A Critical Theory of Creativity

Advanced Search

Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

A Critical Theory of Creativity

Our policy towards the use of cookies