• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.61-81
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• 1998

This paper is to explore a new planning paradigm for urban landscape-not a new paradigm for urban landscape planning- in the light of environmental aesthetics. This is an endeavor to construct an alternative to the philosophical absence in the landscape profession. The landscape has been conceived of visual -oriented urban scene, and this notion is one of consequences of subject-object dualism in Western modernity project. In contrast with this convention, the authors consider urban landscape as the aesthetic field in which an experience of urban landscape actually works in human ordinary life and experience. To acquire an aestetic experience in this aesthetic field, we need to replace the doctrine of disinterestedness with engagement and contemplation with participation. This concept of participatory engagement with landscape can be translated in specific and concrete ways into urban landscape planning, replacing the traditional panoramic landscape with engaged landscape. The authors approach the urban landscape from the vantage point of an aesthetics of engagement by developing the four environmental situations : the sailing ship, the circus, the cathedral, and the sunset. They may serve as useful guides in cultivating and beautiful urban landscape to replace the forces of vulgarity and monotony that depress the modern city. What is beautiful urban landscape\ulcorner What makes the urban landscape beautiful\ulcorner Finally, the authors suggest identity and amenity as practical concepts of urban landscape planning for an aesthetic experience.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.25-42
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• 1996

During the last two and a half decades, philosophical interest in the aesthetics of nature and environment has been gained momentum. One of the most coherent theories in this arena of debate has been developed over a series of articles by Allen Carlson. The purpose of this paper is to examine Carlson's theory critically and suggest an alternative aspect that remains untouched by his model. Briefly stated, Carlson's view of the appreciation of nature is that it is a matter of under standing nature under suitable scientific categories. His argument, based on the objectivist epistemology, is basically a disjunctive syllogism : a) The concept of appreciation, derived from traditional disinterestedness and Stolnitz's aesthetic attitude, provides an insight into the explanation of aesthetic appreciation of nature, and is objectivistic in the light of its object-oriented character. b) Nature must be appreciated as nature itself, and the natural environmental model is the appropriate loci of our nature appreciation. c) The paradigmatic form of our nature appreciation is order appreciation. d) There can be a correct and objective aesthetic judgment of nature, and the sources of guiding categories pertinent to it is natural science and natural history. In regarding nature as an environment and as natural, his natural environmental model is meaningful. Nevertheless, his stance results in some serious problems : a) The natural environmental model excludes certain very common appreciative responses to nature-responses of a less intellective, more visceral sort. Therefore, the arousal model with appropriate emotions might be one of our characteristic forms of nature appreciation. b) Even if we consider the scientific knowledge as an objective source of our nature appreciation, this gives rise to the question of whether the natural science can be objective or not. Is there an objectivist aesthetic appreciation of nature\ Does aesthetic appreciation of nature need to be science-based\

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.73-97
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• 2010

Representation of destitution may be considered as an expression of a social desire toward forging a bond or solidarity with the impoverished. However, political and ethical demands of the solidarity force the formulaic framework structuring the form of representation to its limits. The thesis aims to examine the responses to such demands within the tradition of modernist literature that can be traced from Charles Baudelaire, Knut Hamsun to Franz Kafka and that somehow culminates with Samuel Beckett, and to analyze how the issue of destitution that weaves through Beckett's works criticizes and inherits such a heritage. Whereas destitution in 19th century Realism is structurally fixed and its potential for change is inherently excluded, for these writers, destitution is no longer the state of rigid reality in which any possibility is limited. It is destitution as an imperative that calls for exploitation of possibilities that can be recuperated from the impoverished condition of destitution. What these writers consistently resist against is destitution that leads to compensation and reward. Since occupying a superior position toward the other as the subject of description or sympathy can be seen as one form of profit or reward, they have persistently pursued absolute solitariness and austere conditions rather than prematurely simulating a sense of solidarity and community. The ultimate goal of destitution as an imperative is to pursue destitution in order to worsen it by identifying and then excluding and expending possessions and assets to a state of penury. This is a paradoxical process that opens up the realm of possibilities of destitution and redefines it as abundance and wealth. Destitution for Beckett as seen in the writers above is the objective of literature. But, what he focuses on is to amplify the shreds of economic world that still remain in a state of poverty and to reveal extreme poverty as a state of odd affluence and to transform it into a pursuit of accumulation and profit. One of his famous axioms, "less is more", contains the essence of such a paradoxical strategy. In a sense, such approach is a twist on the strategy that identifies and uses any remaining potential hidden in destitution as was pursued by other writers. It also expands on the imagination of the destitute described by Hamsun. But Hamsun and Beckett are diametrical opposites. Unlike Hamsun, Beckett does not link imagination with a sense of guilt. Imagination is not intended to overcome the destitute reality nor to culminate in artistic martyrdom as in the case of Kafka's hunger artist. The imagination of the impoverished in Beckett is simply a hilarious game and not an escape that ends in a sense of guilt. This game formulates a "rhetorical question" or derision at the ironical situation where the pursuit of hunger and art as the disinterestedness has been turned into symbolic capital. It is inherently a fundamental critique at the aestheticization of destitution that has been pursued by Modernism. Beckett's efforts at divulging falsehood inherent in non-profit acts such as charity, donation and hospitality are dissections of social fictions in which aestheticization of destitution remains a part of the whole.