REEVALUATION WESTERN THOUGHT AND CIVILIZATION: CULTURE, ART AND LITERATURE
Project no. 925 · Status: Kapanmış · 2014
Summary
The aim of this study is to identify Western culture and its major categories of reason and sense making. In order to provide an understanding on the influential contemporary American culture and politics, it is of primary importance to have an insight into the archetypal sources of Western culture in general and thus to turn our focus on Medieval and Renaissance Europe, Christianity and early roots of Western civilization. Besides West’s basic categories of sense making, such as “binary oppositions” or “rationality” and “commonsense,” this study also aims to evaluate individualism, as one of the major myths of Western culture, in terms of individual’s relation with Christianity and/or authority. The themes to be discussed within the historical context from late thirteenth to eighteenth century are: Allegoric narrative of Medieval Christian art and grotesk as a means of resistance and subjectivity, Renaissance’s humanism and liberation of art and artist, and finally Enlightenment as a process instance to Western culture’s self-confrontation