"Didactic" redirects here. For the album by Means End, seeThe Didact.
Didacticism is aphilosophy that emphasises instructional and informative qualities inliterature,art, and design.[1][2][3] In art, design, architecture, and landscape, didacticism is a conceptual approach that is driven by the urgent need to explain.[3]
The term has its origin in theAncient Greek word διδακτικός (didaktikos), "pertaining to instruction",[4] and signified learning in a fascinating and intriguing manner.[5][6]
Didactic art was meant both to entertain and to instruct. Didactic plays, for instance, were intended to convey a moral theme or other rich truth to the audience.[7][8] During the Middle Age, the Roman Catholic chants like theVeni Creator Spiritus, as well as the Eucharistic hymns like theAdoro te devote andPange lingua are used for fixing within prayers the truths of the Roman Catholic faith to preserve them and pass down from a generation to another. In theRenaissance, the church began asyncretism between pagan and the Christian didactic art, a syncretism that reflected its dominating temporal power and recalled the controversy among the pagan and Christian aristocracy in the fourth century.[9] An example of didactic writing isAlexander Pope'sAn Essay on Criticism (1711), which offers a range of advice about critics and criticism. An example of didacticism in music is the chantUt queant laxis, which was used byGuido of Arezzo to teachsolfege syllables.
Around the 19th century the termdidactic came to also be used as a criticism for work that appears to be overburdened with instructive, factual, or otherwise educational information, to the detriment of the enjoyment of the reader (a meaning that was quite foreign to Greek thought).Edgar Allan Poe called didacticism the worst of "heresies" in his essayThe Poetic Principle.
Some examples of research that investigates didacticism in art, design, architecture and landscape:
"Du Didactisme en Architecture / On Didacticism in Architecture". (2019). In C. Cucuzzella, C. I. Hammond, S. Goubran, & C. Lalonde (Eds.), Cahiers de Recherche du LEAP (Vol. 3). Potential Architecture Books.[3]
Cucuzzella, C., Chupin, J.-P., & Hammond, C. (2020). "Eco-didacticism in art and architecture: Design as means for raising awareness". Cities, 102, 102728.[12]
Some examples of art, design, architecture and landscape projects that present eco-lessons.[13]
^Cucuzzella, Carmela; Chupin, Jean-Pierre; Hammond, Cynthia (July 2020). "Eco-didacticism in art and architecture: Design as means for raising awareness".Cities.102: 102728.doi:10.1016/j.cities.2020.102728.S2CID218962466.
Wittig, Claudia.Prodesse et Delectare: Case Studies on Didactic Literature in the European Middle Ages / Fallstudien Zur Didaktischen Literatur Des Europäischen Mittelalters. Germany, De Gruyter, 2019.
The dictionary definition ofdidacticism at Wiktionary