Being Aesthetics related to filosophy, to literary and artistic criticism and theory, the objective of this course unit is to introduce the major aesthtetic movements that translate mental frameworks and representations of man and the world in the work of art. This introduction centers itself in the selection of the most significant moments between Romanticism and Post-modernism, underlying the successive ruptures, opposite streams, and recovering former aesthetic generations when necessary.
In epistemological terms, this course unit locates itself outside of the filosophical scope of Aesthetics, and inherits instead the "aesthetic" reflexion of the seventeenth century, the "birth nest" of the term itself. The aesthetic tendencies which are the subject-matter of this course unit are, thus, a recent, modern issue. The tendencies, schools, attitudes, poetological trends, which throughout the twentieth century are more and more sprayed, are not themselves and their sepcific traces the subject-matter of this course unit, but instead their common features or what contributes for the description and understanding of the conceptual complexity or even the intrinsic contradictions of the four core tendencies. Because this is a generic and introductory course unit, there is an added effort to underline, in each of the four core tendencies, what they inherit from the tradition they aparently question, and in this way to indicate the former aesthetic tendencies and schools which obviously have a fundamental role in the genesis of the ones studied in this course unit.