A concept of immediacy as seen in Lin Fengmian's painting and William Carlos Williams' poetry (China)

As many critics have noted, to return to (Hillis Miller) or to restore (Karsten Harries) immediate experience is fundamental in modern thought and art. Although the words "return" and "restore" themselves suggest that the concept of immediacy is not a new idea either in philosophy or in aesthetics and art, many modern philosophers and artists, with an anxiety over the split of the spirit and the phenomenal world enhanced by the dominance of science and technology, pay much attention to the idea of immediacy, in order to rebuilt an intimate relationship between the human and the world.; Martin Heidegger, with his Existentialist Phenomenology, seems to have probed into the core of the concept of immediacy as a philosophical consciousness, a perceptual orientation, and an aesthetic tendency and exerted a great influence on modern thought and art. This dissertation, therefore, intends to examine the concept of immediacy and its meaning in selected works in modern art following the ideas of Heidegger. It is worth noting that Heidegger has approached the other ancient tradition: Daoism, as he returns to pre-Socratic understanding of physis in order to overcome the subject-object split in metaphysical thought derived from post-Platonic meta-physis. Thus, a discussion of Daoist ideas is made. It is aimed at, on the one hand, reaching a better understanding of the concept of immediacy itself and, on the other, building a theoretical connection between the two artists to be considered in this study, a Chinese painter Lin Fengmian and an American poet William Carlos Williams.; Lin Fengmian and William Carlos Williams, with their theoretical thinking, have reached a phenomenological consciousness--an awareness of man's deeper kinship to the world as it is and of which he is essentially a part. However, they, as artists, join in the tendency of the return to the concept of immediacy in their own ways--artistic creations. Their understanding of the concept of immediacy must be imbued and embodied in their art works. In this study, therefore, a more detailed formal analysis of selected works of Lin and Williams is made according to some aesthetic strategies adopted by the two artists.