Aesthetics Of Negativity

Author : William S. Allen
Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
ISBN 13 : 0823269302
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Aesthetics of Negativity written by William S. Allen and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maurice Blanchot and Theodor W. Adorno are among the most difficult but also the most profound thinkers in twentieth-century aesthetics. While their methods and perspectives differ widely, they share a concern with the negativity of the artwork conceived in terms of either its experience and possibility or its critical expression. Such negativity is neither nihilistic nor pessimistic but concerns the status of the artwork and its autonomy in relation to its context or its experience. For both Blanchot and Adorno negativity is the key to understanding the status of the artwork in post-Kantian aesthetics and, although it indicates how art expresses critical possibilities, albeit negatively, it also shows that art bears an irreducible ambiguity such that its meaning can always negate itself. This ambiguity takes on an added material significance when considered in relation to language as the negativity of the work becomes aesthetic in the further sense of being both sensible and experimental, and in doing so the language of the literary work becomes a form of thinking that enables materiality to be thought in its ambiguity. In a series of rich and compelling readings, William S. Allen shows how an original and rigorous mode of thinking arises within Blanchot’s early writings and how Adorno’s aesthetics depends on a relation between language and materiality that has been widely overlooked. Furthermore, by reconsidering the problem of the autonomous work of art in terms of literature, a central issue in modernist aesthetics is given a greater critical and material relevance as a mode of thinking that is abstract and concrete, rigorous and ambiguous. While examples of this kind of writing can be found in the works of Blanchot and Beckett, the demands that such texts place on readers only confirm the challenges and the possibilities that literary autonomy poses to thought.

Author : Christoph Menke
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780262133401
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Sovereignty of Art written by Christoph Menke and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Christoph Menke attempts to explain art's sovereign power to subvert reason without falling into an error common to Adorno's negative dialectics and Derrida's deconstruction.

Author : Arnold Berleant
Publisher : Andrews UK Limited
ISBN 13 : 1845402936
Total Pages : 237 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sensibility and Sense written by Arnold Berleant and published by Andrews UK Limited. This book was released on 2011-11-28 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aesthetic sensibility rests on perceptual experience and characterizes not only our experience of the arts but our experience of the world. Sensibility and Sense offers a philosophically comprehensive account of humans' social and cultural embeddedness encountered, recognized, and fulfilled as an aesthetic mode of experience. Extending the range of aesthetic experience from the stone of the earth's surface to the celestial sphere, the book focuses on the aesthetic as a dimension of social experience. The guiding idea of pervasive interconnectedness, both social and environmental, leads to an aesthetic critique of the urban environment, the environment of daily life, and of terrorism, and has profound implications for grounding social and political values. The aesthetic emerges as a powerful critical tool for appraising urban culture and political practice.

Author : Susan Blood
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780804780865
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Baudelaire and the Aesthetics of Bad Faith written by Susan Blood and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1997-04-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of Baudelaire's canonization in the critical debates of the twentieth century, focusing particularly on his role in the development of a modernist consciousness. Much recent work on Baudelaire assumes his modernism by emphasizing his relationship to current critical preoccupations—by sounding him out on issues of race and gender, for example, or by "correcting" his politics. The author begins from the premise that this updating of Baudelaire mistakenly takes him for our contemporary. Instead, she attempts to treat modernism as a historical problem by seeing Baudelaire as engaged in a more difficult dialogue with twentieth-century critics. The book concentrates on two key moments in the literary history of the twentieth century, the periods following each world war. At these junctures French intellectuals intensely reconsidered their cultural patrimony and articulated something like a modernist consciousness. Baudelaire stood at the center of this process, becoming a sacred figure of modernism, and his poetry contributed to a radical reorienting of aesthetic sensibilities. For the post-World War I period, the author focuses on Paul Valéry's essay "Baudelaire's Situation"; for post-World War II, on the virulent debate between Jean-Paul Sartre and Georges Bataille over the question of Baudelaire's "bad faith." She argues that Sartre's resistance to the sacralization of Baudelaire and to the continuing formulation of a modernist ideology actually suggests a valuable way of rethinking Baudelaire's poetry and critiquing the modern consciousness. She attempts to show that something like an "aesthetics of bad faith" exists, and that it is a useful concept for understanding modernism in relationship to its own history. Throughout, Baudelaire's poetry is examined in detail, with a focus on its relationship to his writings on caricature, on the problem of the "secret architecture," and on the place of allegory in a symbolist poetics. In the closing chapter, the author analyzes Baudelaire's denunciation of photography, which reveals the various tensions (or "bad faith") implicit in the modernist consciousness.

Author : Artemy Magun
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350430005
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Temptation of Non-Being written by Artemy Magun and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-05-02 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do we enjoy artworks that depict disasters and suffering? Is this a hangover from the Modernist impulse to break the rules of harmony? Is there actually a proper way to perform negativity in art without resorting to nihilism? The Temptation of Non-Being uses these fundamental questions to paint a picture of contemporary art as beset by an outbreak of the negative, and to construct a new theory of art as a medium of complex negativity. The negative in art is explained not as a simple negation or destruction, but as a multifaceted, polymorphous structure with a vast range of strategies and techniques from parody and pastiche to defamiliarization and non-resemblance. Charting the depth of these negative practices, Artemy Magun shows how they become progressively more complex and explicit, illustrating them with interdisciplinary examples from Lars von Trier, Jacek Malczewski, Andrei Platonov and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. At the heart of this layered, nested structure lies an understanding of Modern aesthetics that helps to answer even more questions: how can the testing, probing nature of art lead to this preoccupation with the negative? Why does this negativity emerge in the first place? What can it tell us about art itself and how it functions in society? This is an erudite and provocative analysis that enriches the ongoing evaluation of both 'high' and 'low' art.

Author : Kang Liu
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780822324485
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Aesthetics and Marxism written by Kang Liu and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000-03-10 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVLiu’s study examines writers, philosophers, and political leaders in China and the West and reveals the extent to which they incorporate ideas about “culture” and “aesthetics” in their theories and practices./div

Author : Jadranka Skorin-Kapov
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 1498524575
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Intertwining of Aesthetics and Ethics written by Jadranka Skorin-Kapov and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-04-21 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Intertwining of Aesthetics and Ethics: Exceeding of Expectations, Ecstasy, Sublimity analyzes the common experiential ground for both aesthetics and ethics by considering experiential environment (both nature and art), the precedents to desire, the notion of experience incorporating a break, and the reverberations of surprise leading to the intertwining of aesthetics and ethics. Jadranka Skorin-Kapov discusses different philosophical positions on the relationship between nature and art, in conversation with Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Gadamer, and Adorno. She argues that Kantian sublimity can carry over from nature to art. As part of the discussions of expectations and authenticity, the author interprets Husserl’s view on expectations, Heidegger’s view on death and authenticity, Blanchot’s view on death, and Arendt’s view on natality. As for understanding the aesthetic experience as the paradigmatic experience, Skorin-Kapov is informed by Dewey’s work on art as experience, Gadamer’s work on experience of art, and Jauss’s work on the aesthetics of reception and the horizon of expectations. After our sensibility and representational capability are broken, recuperation then leads to sublimity and the subsequent feelings of admiration and/or responsibility, allowing for the intertwining of aesthetics and ethics. Additionally, elements of Kantian morality, Foucault’s ethics, and Kierkegaard’s work on interactions between aesthetics and ethics together help to characterize the relation between aesthetics and ethics. Since we often encounter surprise due to unexpectedness in comedy, Skorin-Kapov also interprets philosophical views on the comedy and laughter (including Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Meredith, and Bergson), using the theatrical work of Dario Fo as an example. The novel analysis in The Intertwining of Aesthetics and Ethics will be of particular interest to students and scholars working or teaching in aesthetics, phenomenology, art history, cultural studies, and ethics.

Author : Sianne Ngai
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674041526
Total Pages : 433 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ugly Feelings written by Sianne Ngai and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Envy, irritation, paranoia—in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity. Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called “animatedness,” and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called “stuplimity.” She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-twentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening. Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of ugly feelings to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature—with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race—but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.

Author : Ruth Ronen
Publisher : SUNY Press
ISBN 13 : 0791476677
Total Pages : 199 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Aesthetics of Anxiety written by Ruth Ronen and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2009-01-15 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Places anxiety at the heart of the aesthetic experience.

Author : Jane Forsey
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1527522652
Total Pages : 150 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book On Taste written by Jane Forsey and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers an original and innovative collection of fresh approaches to the investigation of the idea of taste. It is divided into three sections: the concept of taste; taste and culture; and gustatory taste. The papers in all three parts deal with the way that aesthetics interpenetrates discussions of food, political conflict, art appreciation, aesthetic judgement, and education. These are fresh, never-before published contributions from a range of scholars, using the most recent literature in their areas of expertise. There is no other book available that collects the latest research in this field, and, as such, it represents a key contribution to recent aesthetic, and more broadly philosophical, interest in matters of taste.