Steven Weiner, computer specialist and Aesthetic Realism associate, writes:
Variety, richness, depth—that is what every person deeply wants to feel the world has. But people have also felt smart (though pained) thinking that what surrounds them is not worthy of their attention and emotion. As the latest issue of The Right Of shows, Aesthetic Realism explains those two ways of seeing—and what really represents us. For a new, encouraging comprehension of yourself, and of states of mind in America now, read “Emphasis & the Human Hope,” the remarkable current issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known!
The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:
We begin to serialize here a lecture immensely important in literary criticism, and for the life of everyone. It is thrilling, deep, and kind. Eli Siegel gave this talk, Imagination Has Emphasis, in 1971; the text he uses in it is G.K. Chesterton’s Charles Dickens, of 1906. Through what Mr. Siegel says and through the passages of Chesterton that he has so valuably and sensitively chosen, we feel in a way that is new and true who Charles Dickens is, and what we ourselves hope for.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was very popular in his lifetime. But Eli Siegel is the critic who has shown what is most important in Chesterton’s writing. And Aesthetic Realism explains that what makes any writer, any artist, any instance of art important corresponds to what we are looking for in our own lives: “All beauty,” Aesthetic Realism shows, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
The quality the present lecture is about, emphasis, has something that can be seen as its opposite, and this something has various forms. The opposite of emphasis can be seen as nuance; it can be seen also as tepidity, or as fading; it can be seen too as something blended, or muted, or even opaque. Mr. Siegel says early in his talk, “The world consists for people of what stands out and what doesn’t”; emphasis makes something clearly stand out….Read more