I decided to name my essay “Truth is Beauty, Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” as an allusion to the quote by John Keats that William Dean Howells mentions in his essay. The original quote reads “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.” The title to my essay can be considered a generational revision of Keats’s line. I borrowed the common line of “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” to show the relativist mindset of our generation. I placed this beside “Truth is Beauty”, alluding to Keats’s “Beauty is Truth”, because although our generation has a much more relativist approach to art than that of Howells, beauty is still highly valued as a- perhaps not absolute, but uniform- idea of beauty. I changed the order of these two capitalized words because I believe that although a uniform, capital B Beauty is an ultimate Truth in today’s society, this ultimate Truth is not entirely made up of a uniform Beauty. By placing next to each other these two very different, at times conflicting, ideas I attempt to introduce this generation’s beauty slogan while still acknowledging the influence that the absolutist mindset of Howells, his generation and the generations that precede him still has on society today.
Edits
The principal edit (aside from language/grammar and structural edits) was of my thesis. In the revised thesis, I intended to show that no matter what my opinion was on Howells’s thesis, that opinion would be highly contingent upon mine and Howells’s historical context.
” William Dean Howells’s “The Grasshopper: The Simple, the Natural, the Honest in Art” explores the question: what is the appropriate criteria to evaluate art. Howells urges artists to create art that reflects life, not art that mimics the rocks of those society considers great. Through a story about a grasshopper in nature versus one which is fabricated in a stylized manner, Howells reveals his belief about the existence of an ultimate truth. While I consider his message of the parallel between art and life to be very relevant and highly valued in today’s society, I differ with his belief in the existence of an absolute truth. Howell’s ideas regarding truth in art can be interpreted as relativist by imposing in it the idea that each person has their own reality; their own truth. Through diptych photography, I intend to prove that while Howell’s desired absolutist message is flawed, our contemporary interpretation of it, which differs from that of Howells as a product of our historical context, is inherently true.” Elizabeth: a bit confusing, but still provocative
Elizabeth’s Comments
Bold! Authoritative! and very thoughtful!
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