Description
Students will create a 1 page-long typed response to one of three review prompts. Responses must be in MLA format.
Purpose:
Explore in writing what you have read/watched and what we have presented in the modules.
Instructions:
Reply to only 1 of 3 topics/questions located below.
Students are to submit their assignment by Jan 14th, 11:59 pmusing the submission link on this page.
Use citations and supporting evidence from texts/videos found in Modules Week 1-2.
Restate the chosen topic/question in the first few sentences of your response.
MLA Format Review Purdue WebpageLinks to an external site.
Topic/Questions:
Compare and contrast beauty and aesthetics. Use examples when possible.
Reading :
How the individual thinks is unique, and how the individual sees beauty is unique. What I may think is beautiful, you may not. How do we think this way? Or what makes us think something is aesthetically pleasing?
Neuroscientist Semir Zeki discusses how we interpret beauty in the TED talk video below:
“Have you ever wondered, as you gaze at something beautiful, exactly what it is that makes it beautiful? Do all things which you experience as beautiful have a single defining characteristic? Indeed, could you even write a definition of beauty itself?
The great Irish polymath, Edmund Burke, described beauty as “for the greater part, some quality in bodies acting mechanically upon the human mind through the intervention of the senses”. I will explore Burke’s definition from a neurobiological perspective and show that there is a single fundamental characteristic to the experience of beauty, one which is independent of culture, education and ethnic background. Moreover, a neurobiological interpretation of Burke’s “intervention of the senses” also gives a brain-based explanation for why the search for the nature of beauty has been so elusive.”
