Abstract:
Art is all about human experience whether simple or complex. The content of an art
work, especially its surface spectrum, is generally understood by everyone but to
dig out what is beyond the surface has been considered as the duty of the art
criticism until the end of bourgeois literature in the second-modernity1
. Therefore,
from the Aristotelian or Barathamuni to Barthes, the art criticism had a great role to
play as the mediatory. In the art criticism, the aestheticism was what has been the
most over-determined principle due to its long existence as the sole tool to understand
the human experience in art.
The basic preconditions that determined the modern society underwent significant
structural changes and, accordingly, the contours of the new era revolutionized the
thinking of the ‘new world’ which ideologically depends on either postmodern
nihilism or historical mutation. If the paradigm shift in the mode of production and
the tools of the production changed the modern humanity, according to Marx, to an
extent that not only aestheticism but any other conventional literary principles
could never accurately be able to grasp, ‘the new world order’ that resulted from the
failures of the modern projects and from the higher stage of capitalism completely
denied to accept the fact that art can exist, in its earlier form and outlook, in the new
pluralistic and less serious world. It was a new world and heaps of new experiences
that the new civilizational rules created. Given the present dissidents and negation
of the modernity overwhelmingly dominate the future and continue to erode the
standards of the classical literature, a new form of literature and criticism would be
required by us.
It is assumed that the structural psychoanalysts and structural Marxists historically
produced theories that could understand the new consciousness, identities and
pluralistic values of the new post-industrial world order. The present form of art in
this new world stands far away from the orthodox art criticism i.e. aestheticism as
new tools were required by this new phenomenon. Those new tools were fairly able
to understand what has not been understood previously. This thesis will elaborate
how those new principles would be used in literary criticism through the eyes of the
movie ‘Amadeus’ (Shaffer, 1984)) by Milos Forman, which re-narrates the historical
antagonism between the two most renown Classical musicians Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart (1756- 1791) and Antonio Salieri (1750- 1825).
