Download Our Aesthetic Categories in PDF by Sianne Ngai Full Book and published by . This book was released on 2015-10-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture, dominating the look of its art and commodities as well as our ways of speaking about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this study Ngai offers an aesthetic theory for the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism.
Download Theory of the Gimmick in PDF by Sianne Ngai Full Book and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative theory of the gimmick as an aesthetic category steeped in the anxieties of capitalism. Repulsive and yet strangely attractive, the gimmick is a form that can be found virtually everywhere in capitalism. It comes in many guises: a musical hook, a financial strategy, a striptease, a novel of ideas. Above all, acclaimed theorist Sianne Ngai argues, the gimmick strikes us both as working too little (a labor-saving trick) and as working too hard (a strained effort to get our attention). Focusing on this connection to work, Ngai draws a line from gimmicks to political economy. When we call something a gimmick, we are registering uncertainties about value bound to labor and time—misgivings that indicate broader anxieties about the measurement of wealth in capitalism. With wit and critical precision, Ngai explores the extravagantly impoverished gimmick across a range of examples: the fiction of Thomas Mann, Helen DeWitt, and Henry James; photographs by Torbjørn Rødland; the video art of Stan Douglas; the theoretical writings of Stanley Cavell and Theodor Adorno. Despite its status as cheap and compromised, the gimmick emerges as a surprisingly powerful tool in this formidable contribution to aesthetic theory.
Download Owens, Laura in PDF by Scott Rothkopf Full Book and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A richly illustrated, expansive mid-career survey of the stand-out American artist's pioneering and influential work, with each copy featuring a unique silk-screen cover printed in Owens's studio Since the early 1990s, Laura Owens (b. 1970) has challenged traditional assumptions about figuration and abstraction in her pioneering approach to painting. Created in close collaboration with the artist on the occasion of her mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, this inventive and comprehensive book features an incisive introduction by Scott Rothkopf, critical essays, literary texts, and short commentaries on a variety of subjects related to Owens's broad interests, which range from folk art and needlework to comics and wallpaper. Reflections by more than twenty of Owens's fellow artists, collaborators, assistants, dealers, family members, and friends offer an array of perspectives on her work at different periods in her life, beginning with her high school years in Ohio and ending with her current exhibition. A rich trove of more than a thousand images, drawn from the artist's personal archive and largely unpublished before now, includes personal correspondence, journals, academic transcripts, handwritten notes, source material, exhibition announcements, clippings, and installation photographs. Strikingly, each copy also features a unique silk-screen cover printed in Owens's studio, giving readers the opportunity to own an original work of art. Together, all of these elements provide a rare and intimate look at how an artist might make her way in the world as well as how art gets made, movements take hold, and relationships evolve over time.
Download Object Oriented Environs in PDF by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen Full Book and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2016 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Object Oriented Environs is the lively archive of a critical confluence between the environmental turn so vigorous within early modern studies, and thing theory (object oriented ontology, vibrant materialism, the new materialism and speculative realism). The book unfolds a conversation that attempts to move beyond anthropocentrism and examine nonhumans at every scale, their relations to each other, and the ethics of human enmeshment within an agentic material world. The diverse essays, reflections, images and ephemera collected here offer a laboratory for probing the mystery and potential autonomy of objects, in their alliances and in performance. The book is the trace of an event-space crafted over a day of conversation in two seminars at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in 2014 in St. Louis and offers its nineteen essays as the end to the work-cycle of the collective we crafted that day. It is a noisy collation, full of bees, bushes, laundry, crutches, lists, poems, plague vectors, planks, chairs, rain, shoes, meat, body parts, books, and assorted humans (living and dead), and also a repertoire of dance steps, ways of configuring the relations between subject and object, actors or actants (human and otherwise). It is also a book that asks readers to ponder their environs, to consider the particularities of their world, of their reading experiences, and to consider what orders of meaning we might be able to derive from attending closely to all the very many things we come into being with. Contributors include: Lizz Angello, Sallie Anglin, Keith M. Botelho, Patricia A. Cahill, Jeffrey Cohen, Drew Daniel, Christine Hoffmann, Neal Klomp, Julia Lupton, Vin Nardizzi, Tara Pedersen, Tripthi Pillai, Karen Raber, Pauline Reid, Emily Rendek, Lindsey Row-Heyveld, Debapriya Sarkar, Rob Wakeman, Jennifer Waldron, Luke Wilson, and Julian Yates.
Download John Ashbery and Anglo-American Exchange in PDF by Oli Hazzard Full Book and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-07 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1966, John Ashbery wrote: 'The English language is constantly trying to stave off invasion by the American language; it lives in a state of alert which is reflected to some degree in English poetry.' This book shows how the work of a major post-war American poet has been centrally concerned with questions of national identity and intercultural poetic exchange, by reading crucial episodes in Ashbery's oeuvre in the context of an 'other tradition' of modern English poets he himself has defined. This line runs from the editor of Ashbery's recent Collected Poems, Mark Ford, through Lee Harwood in the late 1960s, F. T. Prince in the 1950s, to 'chronologically the first and therefore most important influence' on his own work, W. H. Auden. Through detailed close readings of the poetry of Ashbery and these English poets, original interviews, and extensive archival research, a new account of Ashbery's aesthetic, and a significant re-mapping of post-war English poetry, is presented. The biographical slant of the book is highly significant, as it reads these writers' poetry and correspondence together for the first time, suggesting how major poetic innovations arose from specific social contexts, from the particulars of relations between poets, and also from a broader climate of Anglo-American exchange as registered by each poet. The book's presentation of the process of poetic influence is attentive to actual exchanges between contemporaries as evidenced in correspondence, as opposed to speculative relationships with dominant figures, and as such represents a departure from many other studies of Ashbery's work. Key themes include 'Englishness' as a national imaginary, the concept of the 'minor', reciprocal influence, and the poetry of coteries. The result is that both Ashbery himself, and the landscape of post-war English poetry, are presented in significantly new lights.
Download Aesthetics as Space in PDF by Ossi Naukkarinen Full Book and published by Aalto korkeakoulusäätiö. This book was released on 2020-05-04 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A living environment that is perceived as aesthetically pleasant improves our quality of life, and we continuously assess the world we live in from this point of view. How things look, sound and feel clearly makes a difference. Are the surrounding objects, views, people, user interfaces and buildings beautiful, ugly, handsome or elegant? In addition to assessing our surroundings, we prefer doing and making things in such a way as to promote aesthetic appeal. We comb our hair, we furnish and decorate, we tune up our social media profiles and we create art for aesthetic reasons. Aesthetic values guide our choices and decisions when we are shopping, dining at the table, spending our time on holiday, voting in the polling booth or choosing a spouse. But what actually is aesthetics? Where and how does it exist? Is everybody's taste as good as anybody's? How does aesthetics relate to beauty, or art? How are the current megatrends, such as digitalization, molding aesthetics? Aesthetics as Space explores the aesthetic aspects of our life in the 21stcentury and addresses the question above, along with many others. There is no all-encompassing 21st-century aesthetics; rather, it is a multi-dimensional space of competing interpretations and ideas. This book gives the reader tools for understanding these different approaches.
Download The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction in PDF by Huw Marsh Full Book and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction explores the importance of comedy in contemporary literature and culture. In an era largely defined by a mood of crisis, bleakness, cruelty, melancholia, environmental catastrophe and collapse, Huw Marsh argues that contemporary fiction is as likely to treat these subjects comically as it is to treat them gravely, and that the recognition and proper analysis of this humour opens up new ways to think about literature. Structured around readings of authors including Martin Amis, Nicola Barker, Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, Howard Jacobson, Magnus Mills and Zadie Smith, this book suggests not only that much of the most interesting contemporary writing is funny and that there is a comic tendency in contemporary fiction, but also that this humour, this comic licence, allows writers of contemporary fiction to do peculiar and interesting things – things that are funny in the sense of odd or strange and that may in turn inspire a funny turn in readers. Marsh offers a series of original critical and theoretical frameworks for discussing questions of literary genre, style, affect and politics, demonstrating that comedy is an often neglected mode that plays a generative role in much of the most interesting contemporary writing, creating sites of rich political, stylistic, cognitive and ethical contestation whose analysis offers a new perspective on the present.
Download Sensoria in PDF by McKenzie Wark Full Book and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Design, Politics, the Environment: a survey of the key thinkers and ideas that are rebuilding the world in the shadow of the anthropocene As we face the compounded crises of late capitalism, environmental catastrophe and technological transformation, who are the thinkers and the ideas who will allow us to understand the world we live in? McKenzie Wark surveys three areas at the cutting edge of current critical thinking: design, environment, technology and introduces us to the thinking of nineteen major writers. Each chapter is a concise account of an individual thinker, providing useful context and connections to the work of the others. The authors include: Sianne Ngai, Kodwo Eshun, Lisa Nakamura, Hito Steyerl, Yves Citton, Randy Martin, Jackie Wang, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Achille Mbembe, Deborah Danowich and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Eyal Weizman, Cory Doctorow, Benjamin Bratton, Tiziana Terranova, Keller Easterling, Jussi Parikka. Wark argues that we are too often told that expertise is obtained by specialisation. Sensoria connects the themes and arguments across intellectual silos. They explore the edges of disciplines to show how we might know the world: through the study of culture, the different notions of how we create such things, and the impact that the machines that we devise have had upon us. The book is a vital and timely introduction to the future both as a warning but also as a road map on how we might find our way out of the current crisis.
Download Fun, Taste, & Games in PDF by John Sharp Full Book and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reclaiming fun as a meaningful concept for understanding games and play. “Fun” is somewhat ambiguous. If something is fun, is it pleasant? Entertaining? Silly? A way to trick students into learning? Fun also has baggage—it seems inconsequential, embarrassing, child's play. In Fun, Taste, & Games, John Sharp and David Thomas reclaim fun as a productive and meaningful tool for understanding and appreciating play and games. They position fun at the heart of the aesthetics of games. As beauty was to art, they argue, fun is to play and games—the aesthetic goal that we measure our experiences and interpretations against. Sharp and Thomas use this fun-centered aesthetic framework to explore a range of games and game issues—from workplace bingo to Meow Wolf, from basketball to Myst, from the consumer marketplace to Marcel Duchamp. They begin by outlining three elements for understanding the drive, creation, and experience of fun: set-outsideness, ludic forms, and ambiguity. Moving from theory to practice and back again, they explore the complicated relationships among the titular fun, taste, and games. They consider, among other things, the dismissal of fun by game journalists and designers; the seminal but underinfluential game Myst, and how tastes change over time; the shattering of the gamer community in Gamergate; and an aesthetics of play that goes beyond games.
Download Jane Austen and Other Minds in PDF by Eric Reid Lindstrom Full Book and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-31 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jane Austen's fiction is itself philosophy, a fact to which Stanley Cavell attested when he honored his philosophical teacher, J. L. Austin, through homage to her and her work. Engaging equally in criticism and in philosophy, Jane Austen and Other Minds demonstrates the standing of Austen's fiction as a philosophical investigation, both in its own right and as a resource to ordinary language philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Eric Reid Lindstrom addresses a long-standing shortcoming of Austen scholarship by locating in her fiction a linguistic phenomenology available to the novelistic everyday but not afforded her in intellectual history. He simultaneously advances recognition and understanding of J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell, and of ordinary language philosophy, within Austen scholarship and the broader field of contemporary literary studies. This book argues compellingly for Cavell's choice of Austen as a means to pursue 'passionate exchange,' reimagining her common association with restriction and confinement.
Download The New Politics of the Handmade in PDF by Anthea Black Full Book and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary craft, art and design are inseparable from the flows of production and consumption under global capitalism. The New Politics of the Handmade features twenty-three voices who critically rethink the handmade in this dramatically shifting economy. The authors examine craft within the conditions of extreme material and economic disparity; a renewed focus on labour and materiality in contemporary art and museums; the political dimensions of craftivism, neoliberalism, and state power; efforts toward urban renewal and sustainability; the use of digital technologies; and craft's connections to race, cultural identity and sovereignty in texts that criss-cross five continents. They claim contemporary craft as a dynamic critical position for understanding the most immediate political and aesthetic issues of our time.
Download The Broken Voice in PDF by Robert Eaglestone Full Book and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Which writer today is not a writer of the Holocaust?' asked the late Imre Kertesz, Hungarian survivor and novelist, in his Nobel acceptance speech: 'one does not have to choose the Holocaust as one's subject to detect the broken voice that has dominated modern European art for decades'. Robert Eaglestone attends to this broken voice in literature in order to explore the meaning of the Holocaust in the contemporary world, arguing, again following Kertesz, that the Holocaust will 'remain through culture, which is really the vessel of memory'. Drawing on the thought of Hannah Arendt, Eaglestone identifies and develops five concepts--the public secret, evil, stasis, disorientalism, and kitsch--in a range of texts by significant writers (including Kazuo Ishiguro, Jonathan Littell, Imre Kertesz, W. G. Sebald, and Joseph Conrad) as well as in work by victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust and of atrocities in Africa. He explores the interweaving of complicity, responsibility, temporality, and the often problematic powers of narrative which make up some part of the legacy of the Holocaust.
Author :Jean-Thomas Tremblay Publisher :State University of New York Press Release Date :2021-09-01 ISBN :1438485174 Pages :322 pages Rating :4.8/5 (438 Download)
Download Avant-Gardes in Crisis in PDF by Jean-Thomas Tremblay Full Book and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-09-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charts underexamined genealogies of minoritarian aesthetic responses to the multiple crises of the long 1970s. Avant-Gardes in Crisis claims that the avant-gardes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are in crisis, in that artmaking both responds to political, economic, and social crises and reveals a crisis of confidence regarding resistance's very possibility. Specifically, this collection casts contemporary avant-gardes as a reaction to a crisis in the reproduction of life that accelerated in the 1970s—a crisis that encompasses living-wage rarity, deadly epidemics, and other aspects of an uneven management of vitality indexed by race, citizenship, gender, sexual orientation, class, and disability. The contributors collectively argue that a minoritarian concept of the avant-garde, one attuned to uneven patterns of resource depletion and infrastructural failure (broadly conceived), clarifies the interplay between art and politics as it has played out, for instance, in discussions of art's autonomy or institutionality. Writ large, this book seeks to restore the historical and political context for the debates on the avant-garde that have raged since the 1970s. Jean-Thomas Tremblay is Assistant Professor of English at New Mexico State University. They are currently completing a monograph titled Breathing Aesthetics. Andrew Strombeck is Professor of English at Wright State University. He is the author of DIY on the Lower East Side: Books, Buildings, and Art after the 1975 Fiscal Crisis, also published by SUNY Press.
Download Cinema's Bodily Illusions in PDF by Scott C. Richmond Full Book and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2016-10-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do contemporary big-budget blockbuster films like Gravity move something in us that is fundamentally the same as what avant-garde and experimental films have done for more than a century? In a powerful challenge to mainstream film theory, Cinema’s Bodily Illusions demonstrates that this is the case. Scott C. Richmond bridges genres and periods by focusing, most palpably, on cinema’s power to evoke illusions: feeling like you’re flying through space, experiencing 3D without glasses, or even hallucinating. He argues that cinema is, first and foremost, a technology to modulate perception. He presents a theory of cinema as a proprioceptive technology: cinema becomes art by modulating viewers’ embodied sense of space. It works primarily not at the level of the intellect but at the level of the body. Richmond develops his theory through examples of direct perceptual illusion in cinema: hallucinatory flicker phenomena in Tony Conrad’s The Flicker, eerie depth effects in Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma, the illusion of bodily movement through onscreen space in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. In doing so he combines insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and James J. Gibson’s ecological approach to perception. The result is his distinctive ecological phenomenology, which allows us to refocus on the cinema’s perceptual, rather than representational, power. Arguing against modernist habits of mind in film theory and aesthetics, and the attendant proclamations of cinema’s death or irrelevance, Richmond demonstrates that cinema’s proprioceptive aesthetics make it an urgent site of contemporary inquiry.
Download Decadence in the Age of Modernism in PDF by Kate Hext Full Book and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-07-16 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first holistic reappraisal of the significance of the decadent movement, from the 1900s through the 1930s. Decadence in the Age of Modernism begins where the history of the decadent movement all too often ends: in 1895. It argues that the decadent principles and aesthetics of Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, and others continued to exert a compelling legacy on the next generation of writers, from high modernists and late decadents to writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Writers associated with this decadent counterculture were consciously celebrated but more often blushingly denied, even as they exerted a compelling influence on the early twentieth century. Offering a multifaceted critical revision of how modernism evolved out of, and coexisted with, the decadent movement, the essays in this collection reveal how decadent principles infused twentieth-century prose, poetry, drama, and newspapers. In particular, this book demonstrates the potent impact of decadence on the evolution of queer identity and self-fashioning in the early twentieth century. In close readings of an eclectic range of works by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence to Ronald Firbank, Bruce Nugent, and Carl Van Vechten, these essays grapple with a range of related issues, including individualism, the end of Empire, the politics of camp, experimentalism, and the critique of modernity. Contributors: Howard J. Booth, Joseph Bristow, Ellen Crowell, Nick Freeman, Ellis Hanson, Kate Hext, Kirsten MacLeod, Kristin Mahoney, Douglas Mao, Michèle Mendelssohn, Alex Murray, Sarah Parker, Vincent Sherry
Download The nouveau roman and Writing in Britain After Modernism in PDF by Adam Guy Full Book and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nouveau roman and Writing in Britain After Modernism recovers a neglected literary history. In the late 1950s, news began to arrive in Britain of a group of French writers who were remaking the form of the novel. In the work of Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Robert Pinget, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon, the hallmarks of novelistic writing—discernible characters, psychological depth, linear chronology—were discarded in favour of other aesthetic horizons. Transposed to Britain's highly polarized literary culture, the nouveau roman became a focal point for debates about the novel. For some, the nouveau roman represented an aberration, and a pernicious turn against the humanistic values that the novel embodied. For others, it provided a route out of the stultifying conventionality and conformism that had taken root in British letters. On both sides, one question persisted: given the innovations of interwar modernism, to what extent was the nouveau roman actually new? This book begins by drawing on publishers' archives and hitherto undocumented sources from a wide range of periodicals to show how the nouveau roman was mediated to the British public. Of central importance here is the publisher Calder & Boyars, and its belief that the nouveau roman could be enjoyed by a mass public. The book then moves onto literary responses in Britain to the nouveau roman, focusing on questions of translation, realism, the end of empire, and the writing of the project. From the translations of Maria Jolas, through to the hostile responses of the circle around C. P. Snow, and onto the literary debts expressed in novels by Brian W. Aldiss, Christine Brooke-Rose, Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson, Alan Sheridan, Muriel Spark, and Denis Williams, the nouveau roman is shown to be a central concern in the postwar British literary field.
Download Techno-Magism in PDF by Orrin N. C. Wang Full Book and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-04 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Techno-Magism explores how British Romantic literature abuts and is organized around both print and non-print media. The book explores not only the print, pictorial art, and theater of early nineteenth-century England and Europe but also communicative technologies invented after the British Romantic period, such as photography, film, video, and digital screens. This proleptic abutting points to one way we can understand the implicit exceptionality wagered by reading Romanticism through media studies and media theory. Techno-Magism argues that both media studies and the concept of mediation in general can benefit from a more robust confrontation with, or recovery of, the arguments of deconstruction, an unavoidable consequence of thinking about the relationship between Romanticism and media. The book thinks that relationship through the catachrestic practice of a techno-magism, a technics of inscription always outside the causalities of a dialectical economy. The book further pursues two interrelated ideas: the structural incommensurability of the cut and the unapologetic presentism of the constellation. Marked by its late capitalist moment of composition, the book explores the continuity between the social character of Romantic and post-Romantic media, in terms of commodity culture, revolution, and the ecological devastation of the anthropocene.
