Congratulations to Genevieve Buono, who defended her doctoral dissertation on March 19th! Her topic was "Edith Stein’s Contributions to Aesthetic Realism" and her director was Michele Averchi, Ph.D, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America.
Genevieve Buono was born and raised in Kansas City, KS. She received a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Dallas in 2019 and an M.A. in Philosophy from The Catholic University of America in 2022. She lives in Front Royal, VA with her husband Isaac and son Raphael.
Dissertation Abstract:
In the final work that Edith Stein penned, The Science of the Cross, the artist is held as a paradigm example of someone whose life is ordered by a distinctively receptive sort of realism that is characterized by a confident trust in one’s impressionability and the felt need to express these interior stirrings. What are the conditions for the possibility of such artistic realism? How is the artist able to grasp and express something of the infinite fullness of meaning, and how does the structure of the work of art itself make it suitable for such a task? Stein does not directly address these questions in Science of the Cross, but her remarks there stake out the outlines of a positive claim about the nature of art, artistic activity, and artistic truth. This aesthetic vision can be more fully understood by tracing its development throughout Stein’s works. This dissertation synthesizes Edith Stein’s writings on aesthetic topics in order to present a systematic outline of her contributions to aesthetics. I argue that Stein articulates a vision of artistic creativity, the metaphysical structure of the work of art, and artistic meaning that is distinctively realist in this sense: it highlights the receptive, personal, and embodied engagement with meaning that occurs through artistic activity, and in doing so it implicitly (and, at times, explicitly) affirms the metaphysical, epistemological, and anthropological realism that Stein goes to great lengths to defend.