Background
Fisher, Philip J. was born on October 11, 1941 in Pittsburgh. Son of Leo and Anna Fisher.
( Fisher places the work of George Eliot within the great...)
Fisher places the work of George Eliot within the great evolution that constitutes the nineteenth-century English novel. He reports not only about her work, but about an evolving complex literary form. Fisher examines Eliot’s work as responding to “the loss of society,” the breakdown between public life and individua moral history. As trust in the community as a base of moral life weakens, decisive changes occur: the English novel accommodated itself to the disappearance of society and changed from the representation of individuals as members of a social order to the description of the self surrounded by collections of unrelated others.
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( Breaking off the ordinary flow of experience, the passi...)
Breaking off the ordinary flow of experience, the passions create a state of exception. In their suddenness and intensity, they map a personal world, fix and qualify our attention, and impel our actions. Outraged anger drives us to write laws that will later be enforced by impersonal justice. Intense grief at the death of someone in our life discloses the contours of that life to us. Wonder spurs scientific inquiry. The strong current of Western thought that idealizes a dispassionate world has ostracized the passions as quaint, even dangerous. Intense states have come to be seen as symptoms of pathology. A fondness for irony along with our civic ideal of tolerance lead us to prefer the diluted emotional life of feelings and moods. Demonstrating enormous intellectual originality and generosity, Philip Fisher meditates on whether this victory is permanent-and how it might diminish us. From Aristotle to Hume to contemporary biology, Fisher finds evidence that the passions have defined a core of human nature no less important than reason or desire. Traversing the Iliad, King Lear, Moby Dick, and other great works, he discerns the properties of the high-spirited states we call the passions. Are vehement states compatible with a culture that values private, selectively shared experiences? How do passions differ from emotions? Does anger have an opposite? Do the passions give scale, shape, and significance to our experience of time? Is a person incapable of anger more dangerous than someone who is irascible? In reintroducing us to our own vehemence, Fisher reminds us that it is only through our strongest passions that we feel the contours of injustice, mortality, loss, and knowledge. It is only through our personal worlds that we can know the world.
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(Philip Fisher charts the pivotal role the museum has play...)
Philip Fisher charts the pivotal role the museum has played in modern culture, revealing why it has become central to industrial society and how, in turn, artists have adapted to the museum's growing power, shaping their works with the museum in mind. He explores how, over the last two centuries, museums have presented art objects outside their original context, effacing them, in order to represen...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FKYW860/?tag=2022091-20
( In this bold reinterpretation of American culture, Phi...)
In this bold reinterpretation of American culture, Philip Fisher describes generational life as a series of renewed acts of immigration into a new world. Along with the actual flood of immigrants, technological change brings about an immigration of objects and systems, ways of life and techniques for the distribution of ideas. A provocative new way of accounting for the spirit of literary tradition, Still the New World makes a persuasive argument against the reduction of literature to identity questions of race, gender, and ethnicity. Ranging from roughly 1850 to 1940, when, Fisher argues, the American cultural and economic system was set in place, the book reconsiders key works in the American canon--from Emerson, Whitman, and Melville, to Twain, James, Howells, Dos Passos, and Nathanael West, with insights into such artists as Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. With striking clarity, Fisher shows how these artists created and recreated a democratic poetics marked by a rivalry between abstraction, regionalism, and varieties of realism--and in doing so, defined American culture as an ongoing process of creative destruction.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674838599/?tag=2022091-20
(In his 1923 essay, "The Problem of Museums," Paul Valery ...)
In his 1923 essay, "The Problem of Museums," Paul Valery called the museum a "strange organized disorder" and likened it to a room where ten orchestras played simultaneously. Malraux similarly argued that the museum was a place for "pitting works of art against each other." But regardless of their problems, museums have become powerful influences in modern culture, deciding which artists and which of their works are to be preserved as part of our history. Indeed, such is their power that some critics have remarked that it has become the museum, and not the artist, who creates art. In Making and Effacing Art, Philip Fisher charts the pivotal role the museum has played in modern culture, revealing why the museum has become central to industrial society and how, in turn, artists have adapted to the museum's growing power, shaping their works with the museum in mind. For instance, Fisher contends that just as a medieval sculptor would link a statue stylistically to the cathedral it would adorn, the modern artist creates his work to mirror its ultimate destination, the museum. Using Jasper Johns' Divers (1962) as an example, he shows how this painting is almost like distinct works placed side by side, that is, Divers is itself a wall of paintings that mirror the wall of paintings in a museum gallery. He also points out that artists such as Frank Stella create sequences within their own work to echo one of the museum's main functions, the sequential ordering of styles. In addition, Fisher includes an extensive discussion of the function of the museum in industrialized society (as the organization mediating between the realm of technology and that of art making and consumption) and he describes a major shift in both the theory and practice of the visual arts, which he argues have been brought about ultimately by the processes of modern technological production. Along the way, he offers insightful commentary on the work of major artists including Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Degas, Picasso, Klee, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, and many others. Vividly illustrated with numerous halftones and 14 color plates, Making and Effacing Art is an important contribution to our understanding of modern art and culture.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195060466/?tag=2022091-20
( Why pause and study this particular painting among so ...)
Why pause and study this particular painting among so many others ranged on a gallery wall? Wonder, which Descartes called the first of the passions, is at play; it couples surprise with a wish to know more, the pleasurable promise that what is novel or rare may become familiar. This is a book about the aesthetics of wonder, about wonder as it figures in our relation to the visual world and to rare or new experiences. In three instructive instances--a pair of paintings by Cy Twombly, the famous problem of doubling the area of a square, and the history of attempts to explain rainbows--Philip Fisher examines the experience of wonder as it draws together pleasure, thinking, and the aesthetic features of thought. Through these examples he places wonder in relation to the ordinary and the everyday as well as to its opposite, fear. The remarkable story of how rainbows came to be explained, fraught with errors, half-knowledge, and incomplete understanding, suggests that certain knowledge cannot be what we expect when wonder engages us. Instead, Fisher argues, a detailed familiarity, similar to knowing our way around a building or a painting, is the ultimate meeting point for aesthetic and scientific encounters with novelty, rare experiences, and the genuinely new.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674955625/?tag=2022091-20
English language and literature educator
Fisher, Philip J. was born on October 11, 1941 in Pittsburgh. Son of Leo and Anna Fisher.
Bachelor, U. Pittsburgh, 1963. Department of Administration and Management, Harvard University, 1966, Doctor of Philosophy, 1970.
Assistant professor University Virginia, Charlottesville, 1970-1972, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, 1973-1980, associate professor English and American literature, 1980-1987. Reid professor English and Harvard University College professor, Cambridge, since 2005. Professor Brandeis University, Waltham, since 1987.
Chair department English Harvard University, Cambridge, 1990-1993, professor, since 2005. Assistant professor Andrew Mellon Harvard University, 1976-1977. Visiting professor Free University Berlin, 1981, Yale University, 1985-1986, University Konstanz, West Germany, 1986, Harvard University, 1986-1987.
Advisory board Institute Advanced Study, Berlin, since 1994.
( Why pause and study this particular painting among so ...)
(Philip Fisher charts the pivotal role the museum has play...)
(In his 1923 essay, "The Problem of Museums," Paul Valery ...)
( In this bold reinterpretation of American culture, Phi...)
( Fisher places the work of George Eliot within the great...)
(A study of the popular novel of the 19th century and how ...)
( Breaking off the ordinary flow of experience, the passi...)
1 child, Mark.