Thesis Abstract

Art and Difficulty in the Modern World

Roberta Raymond

This dissertation utilises the works of Theodor Adorno and Paul Ricoeur in order
to study the difficulty of art in the modern world. A Benjaminian foundation of
micrological thinking is supplemented by Adorno’s idea of constellation as a
critical practice. This analysis is then linked to Paul Ricoeur’s concept of the
trace and its ‘lag in reception’. Three genres – dance, memoir and the American
musical inform the aesthetic investigation.

This thesis begins by examining ideas of identity thinking, the non-identical,

mimesis, hermeneutics and identity to address fundamental questions about the
role of art as a reservoir of human experience. It focuses on the deception of
enlightenment thinking and its role in reifying artworks as commodities. In the first
section of the thesis such reification is exposed through an examination of the
broken form of George Balanchine’s ‘contemporary’ style of classical dance.

The second section of this thesis examines such fragmented forms. In an

examination of memoir (as a repository of memory), montage is identified as a
postmodern construct. The desire to historicise an event, reducing it to a
‘situation’, has clear parallels with the desire to dominate through the perspective
of an administered world. This aspect is challenged through a reading of Elie
Wiesel’s Night.

In the final section of the thesis, the parallels between micrological thinking and
fragmented form in modern art are identified through an examination of the
Prologue in West Side Story. The choreographic vignettes simultaneously create
and destroy semblance. The individual styles of dancing within the group
represent the conflict between the individual and the universal, which is analysed
through Ricoeur’s theory of ipse and idem identity. The theme of utopia is also
examined as it manifests itself in West Side Story as a desire for ‘a new way of
living’.