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An Aesthesia of Networks
by Anna MunsterToday almost every aspect of life for which data exists can be rendered as a network. Financial data, social networks, biological ecologies: all are visualized in links and nodes, linesconnecting dots. A network visualization of a corporate infrastructure could look remarkably similarto that of a terrorist organization. In An Aesthesia of Networks, Anna Munsterargues that this uniformity has flattened our experience of networks as active and relationalprocesses and assemblages. She counters the "network anaesthesia" that results from thispervasive mimesis by reinserting the question of experience, or aesthesia, into networked cultureand aesthetics. Rather than asking how humans experience computers and networks, Munster asks hownetworks experience -- what operations they perform and undergo to change andproduce new forms of experience. Drawing on William James's radical empiricism, she asserts thatnetworked experience is assembled first and foremost through relations, which make up its mostimmediately sensed and perceived aspect. Munster critically considers a range of contemporaryartistic and cultural practices that engage with network technologies and techniques, includingdatabases and data mining, the domination of search in online activity, and the proliferation ofviral media through YouTube. These practices -- from artists who "undermine" data tomusicians and VJs who use intranetworked audio and video software environments -- are concerned withthe relationality at the core of today's network experience.
Aesthetic Action
by Florian KlingerIn this new book, Florian Klinger gives readers a basic action-theoretical account of the aesthetic. While normal action fulfills a determinate concept, Klinger argues, aesthetic action performs an indeterminacy by suspending the action's conceptual resolution. Taking as examples work by Tino Sehgal, Kara Walker, Mazen Kerbaj, Marina Abramović, Cy Twombly, and Franz Kafka, the book examines indeterminacy in such instances as a walk that is at once leisurely and purposeful, a sound piece that is at once joyous and mournful and mechanical, or a sculpture that at once draws one in and shuts one out. Because it has irresolution as its point, aesthetic action presents itself as an unsettling of ourselves, our ways, our very sense of who we are. As performers of such action, we don't recognize one another as bearers of a shared human form as we normally would, but find ourselves tasked anew with figuring out what sharing a form would mean. In conversation with philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Anscombe; political thinkers such as Marx and Lorde; and contemporary interlocutors such as Michael Thompson, Sebastian Rödl, and Thomas Khurana, Klinger's book makes a case for a conception of the human form that systematically includes the aesthetic: an actualization of the form that is indeterminate and nevertheless rational. The book gives the project of Western philosophical aesthetics a long-overdue formulation for our present that aims to do justice to contemporary aesthetic production as it actually exists. It will appeal to those working in philosophy, art, and political thought.
The Aesthetic and Political Practices of Trans Women in Peru: Skins of Desire
by Paola Patiño RabinesThis book explores the political-aesthetic practices of transgender women in Lima, Peru, and how they use these to survive and fight for recognition and full citizenship, through drawing on ethnographic research and on decolonial feminist and aesthetic theories. Chapters analyze how the vulnerability and precariousness of trans women coexist with modes of feminist agency, resistance and resilience, as well as with proposals for political action to transform a heteropatriarchal society toward a more diverse and accepting one. Finally, the author draws on the Viennese artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s metaphor of the five skins, whereby the first skin is the epidermis; the second is the clothes; the third is the house; the fourth is identity, which refers to primary socialization spaces such as the neighbourhood; and the fifth is the world environment. The author uses this metaphor to analyze the corporal practices of trans women in a cumulative way, paying special attention to the different stages of their lives, to those skins that embody and accompany them from childhood to adulthood.This book will be of interest to scholars of transgender studies, decolonial feminist studies, and aesthetic, particularly those with a focus on gender and sexuality in Latin America.
Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism: Spectacle, Politics and History (Asia's Transformations)
by Hong KalWhile most studies on Korean nationalism centre on textual analysis, Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism offers a different approach. It looks at expositions, museums and the urban built environment at particular moments in both colonial and postcolonial eras and analyses their discursive relations in the construction of Korean nationalism. By linking concepts of visual spectacle, urban space and governmentality, this book explores how such notions made the nation imaginable to the public in both the past and the present; how they represented a new modality of seeing for the state and contributed to the shaping of collective identities in colonial and postcolonial Korea. The author further examines how their different modes were associated with the change in governmentality in Korea. In addressing these questions, the book interprets the politics behind the culture of displays and shows both the continuity and the transformation of spectacles as a governing technology in twentieth-century Korea. Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism is a significant contribution to a study of the politics of visual culture in colonial and postcolonial Korea. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of Korean Studies, Culture and Heritage Studies and Asian Studies.
The Aesthetic Experience of Dying: The Dance to Death
by Veronica M. AdamsonStructured around a personal account of the illness and death of the author’s partner, Jane, this book explores how something hard to bear became a threshold to a world of insight and discovery. Drawing on German Idealism and Jane’s own research in the area, The Aesthetic Experience of Dying looks at the notion of life as a binary synthesis, or a return enhanced, as a way of coming to understand death. Binary synthesis describes the interplay between dynamically opposing pairs of concepts – such as life and death – resulting in an enhanced version of one of them to move forward in a new cycle of the process. Yet what relevance does this elegant word game have to the shocking diagnosis of serious illness? Struggling to balance reason with sense, thought with feeling, this book examines the experience of caring for someone from diagnosis to death and is illustrated with examples of the return enhanced. The concluding chapter outlines how the tension of Jane’s dying has been resolved as the rhythmic patterns of the lifeworld have been understood through the process of reflecting on the experience. This creative and insightful book will appeal to those interested in the medical humanities. It will also be an important reference for practising and student health professionals.
Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism (Dynamics of Virtual Work)
by Ana Sofia Elias Rosalind Gill Christina ScharffThis volume approaches questions about gender and the politics of appearance from a new perspective by developing the notion of aesthetic labour. Bringing together feminist writing regarding the 'beauty myth' with recent scholarship about new forms of work, the book suggests that in this moment of ubiquitous photography, social media, and 360 degree surveillance, women are increasingly required to be 'aesthetic entrepreneurs', maintaining a constant state of vigilance about their appearance. The collection shows that this work is not just on the surface of bodies, but requires a transformation of subjectivity itself, characterised by notions of personal choice, risk-taking, self-management, and individual responsibility. The book includes analyses of online media, beauty service work, female genital cosmetic surgery, academic fashion, self-help literature and the seduction community, from a range of countries. Discussing beauty politics, postfeminism, neoliberalism, labour and subjectivity, the book will be of interest to scholars and students with an interest in Gender, Media Studies, Cultural studies, Sociology, Social Psychology and Management Studies. "This highly engaging, smart, and wide-ranging collection analyzes how, under the self-governing mandates of neoliberalism, the demands that girls and women regulate and control their bodies and appearance have escalated to new, unforgiving levels. A special strength of the book is its emphasis on the rise of 'aesthetic labour' as a global, transnational and ever-colonizing phenomenon that seeks to sweep up women of all races, ages and locales into its disciplinary grip. Highly recommended. " -Susan J Douglas, University of Michigan, USA -Melissa Gregg, Intel Corporation, USA "This book incisively conceptualizes how neo-liberalist and postfeminist tendencies are ramping up pressures for glamour, aesthetic, fashion, and body work in the general public. In a moment when YouTube 'makeup how to' videos receive millions of hits; what to wear and how to wear it blogs clock massive followings; and staying 'on brand' is sold to us as the key to personal and financial success, 'aesthetic entrepreneurship' is bound to become a go-to concept for anyone seeking to understand the profound shifts shaping labor and life in the 21st century. " -Elizabeth Wissinger, City University of New York, USA
Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation
by Ato QuaysonFocusing primarily on the work of Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, and J. M. Coetzee, Ato Quayson launches a thoroughly cross-cultural, interdisciplinary study of the representation of physical disability. Quayson suggests that the subliminal unease and moral panic invoked by the disabled is refracted within the structures of literature and literary discourse itself, a crisis he terms "aesthetic nervousness." The disabled reminds the able-bodied that the body is provisional and temporary and that normality is wrapped up in certain social frameworks. Quayson expands his argument by turning to Greek and Yoruba writings, African American and postcolonial literature, depictions of deformed characters in early modern England and the plays of Shakespeare, and children's films, among other texts. He considers how disability affects interpersonal relationships and forces the character and the reader to take an ethical standpoint, much like representations of violence, pain, and the sacred. The disabled are also used to represent social suffering, inadvertently obscuring their true hardships.
The Aesthetic of Play (The\mit Press Ser.)
by Brian UptonA game designer considers the experience of play, why games have rules, and the relationship of play and narrative. The impulse toward play is very ancient, not only pre-cultural but pre-human; zoologists have identified play behaviors in turtles and in chimpanzees. Games have existed since antiquity; 5,000-year-old board games have been recovered from Egyptian tombs. And yet we still lack a critical language for thinking about play. Game designers are better at answering small questions (“Why is this battle boring?”) than big ones (“What does this game mean?”). In this book, the game designer Brian Upton analyzes the experience of play—how playful activities unfold from moment to moment and how the rules we adopt constrain that unfolding. Drawing on games that range from Monopoly to Dungeons & Dragons to Guitar Hero, Upton develops a framework for understanding play, introducing a set of critical tools that can help us analyze games and game designs and identify ways in which they succeed or fail.Upton also examines the broader epistemological implications of such a framework, exploring the role of play in the construction of meaning and what the existence of play says about the relationship between our thoughts and external reality. He considers the making of meaning in play and in every aspect of human culture, and he draws on findings in pragmatic epistemology, neuroscience, and semiotics to describe how meaning emerges from playful engagement. Upton argues that play can also explain particular aspects of narrative; a play-based interpretive stance, he proposes, can help us understand the structure of books, of music, of theater, of art, and even of the process of critical engagement itself.
Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women's Food Writing: The Innovative Appetites of M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas, and Elizabeth David (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)
by Alice McLeanThis book explores the aesthetic pleasures of eating and writing in the lives of M. F. K. Fisher (1908-1992), Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967), and Elizabeth David (1913-1992). Growing up during a time when women's food writing was largely limited to the domestic cookbook, which helped to codify the guidelines of middle class domesticity, Fisher, Toklas, and David claimed the pleasures of gastronomy previously reserved for men. Articulating a language through which female desire is artfully and publicly sated, Fisher, Toklas, and David expanded women’s food writing beyond the domestic realm by pioneering forms of self-expression that celebrate female appetite for pleasure and for culinary adventure. In so doing, they illuminate the power of genre-bending food writing to transgress and reconfigure conventional gender ideologies. For these women, food encouraged a sensory engagement with their environment and a physical receptivity toward pleasure that engendered their creative aesthetic.
Aesthetic Practices and Politics in Media, Music, and Art: Performing Migration
by Rocío G. DavisThis volume analyzes innovative forms of media and music (art installations, television commercials, photography, films, songs, telenovelas) to examine the performance of migration in contemporary culture. Though migration studies and media studies are ostensibly different fields, this transnational collection of essays addresses how their interconnection has shaped our understanding of the paradigms through which we think about migration, ethnicity, nation, and the transnational. Cultural representations intervene in collective beliefs. Art and media clearly influence the ways the experience of migration is articulated and recalled, intervening in individual perceptions as well as public policy. To understand the connection between migration and diverse media, the authors examine how migration is represented in film, television, music, and art, but also how media shape the ways in which host country and homeland are imagined. Among the topics considered are new mediated forms for representing migration, widening the perspective on the ways these representations may be analyzed; readings of enactments of memory in trans- and inter-disciplinary ways; and discussions of globalization and transnationalism, inviting us to rethink traditional borders in respect to migration, nation states, as well as disciplines.
The Aesthetic Thought and View of Art of Thomas Aquinas
by Zhiqing ZhangThis book examines Aquinas's aesthetic thought and view of art within the broader context of medieval aesthetics and the history of aesthetic development, emphasizing its profound influence on later aesthetics. The book not only elaborates on Aquinas's efforts to establish coherence between faith and reason, the transcendent and empirical, as well as its significance, but also discusses the main contents and characteristics of Aquinas's aesthetic thought from the three aspects of the ontology of beauty, the theory of form, and the theory of experience. By examining Aquinas's aesthetic thought and view of art in relation to modern aesthetics and twentieth-century aesthetics, this book reveals the immense vitality of Aquinas's aesthetic thought.
Aesthetic Violence and Women in Film: Kill Bill with Flying Daggers (Routledge Focus on Feminism and Film)
by Joseph H. KupferAesthetic Violence and Women in Film is a highly readable and timely analysis of the intersection of two recent cinematic trends in martial arts films: aesthetic violence and warrior women. Joseph Kupfer establishes specific categories of aesthetic film violence, including hyper-violence, a visual style that emphasizes the sensuous surface of physical destruction and surreal violence, when spectacular imagery and gravity-defying dance replace blood and gore. He then goes on to outline the ascendancy during the past decades of female characters to the status of hero in action films. Interweaving these two subjects, the book reveals how women warriors instigate and animate the models of aesthetic violence introduced. The hyper-violence of Kill Bill celebrates the triumphs of the Bride, whose maiming and dismemberment of enemies produce brilliant red plumes and silvered geysers of blood. The surrealistic violence in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The House of Flying Daggers creatively elevates violence from earthbound mayhem to an enchanting aerial display of female-dominated acrobatics. Both film-stories are driven by the plight and aspirations of female combatants, suggesting an affinity between women and the transfiguration of fighting wrought by surrealistic violence. By elevating the significance of violence in action films and linking it together with the growing popularity of central female characters in this genre, Aesthetic Violence and Women in Film will be of interest to students and scholars in film studies, popular culture, gender studies, aesthetics, and social philosophy.
Aesthetics across Cultures: Intertextuality, Intermediality and Interculturality
by Rosy SinghThis book critically examines the "mutual illuminations" between literature, religion, architecture, films, performative arts, paintings, woodworks, memes and masks cutting across time and space. Architecture is a good example where the eventual success of a project depends on the harmony between physical sciences and aesthetics, design and planning, knowledge of building material, the local climate and awareness of cultural sensibilities. This volume affirms that aesthetics and arts are deeply linked through existential issues of who I am. The chapters in this volume present diverse discursive structures highlighting the in-between spaces between various art forms and mediums, such as: • Architecture, literature and memory • Kafka in SoHo; Kafka and Bernhard • Kirchner’s woodcuts; pictorial and stage representations of E.T.A. Hoffmann • Hesse’s fairy tales; translations of Pañcatantra • Nietzsche, ritual arts and face masks; martyrdom in La chanson de Roland • Goethe and Hafiz; Indian thought in Martin Buber • Rhythms of the "Third" across cultures • Dadaism and contemporary memes This book examines these sublime linkages in a comparative and interdisciplinary way. Engaging and intersectional, this volume will appeal to students and scholars of arts and aesthetics, literature, philosophy, architecture, sociology, translation studies and readers who are interested in cultural, intertextual, intermedial and comparative studies.
The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness
by Diane Negra Joshua Paul Dale Joyce Goggin Julia Leyda Anthony P. McIntyreCuteness is one of the most culturally pervasive aesthetics of the new millennium and its rapid social proliferation suggests that the affective responses it provokes find particular purchase in a contemporary era marked by intensive media saturation and spreading economic precarity. Rejecting superficial assessments that would deem the ever-expanding plethora of cute texts trivial, The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness directs serious scholarly attention from a variety of academic disciplines to this ubiquitous phenomenon. The sheer plasticity of this minor aesthetic is vividly on display in this collection which draws together analyses from around the world examining cuteness’s fundamental role in cultural expressions stemming from such diverse sources as military cultures, high-end contemporary art worlds, and animal shelters. Pushing beyond prevailing understandings that associate cuteness solely with childhood or which posit an interpolated parental bond as its primary affective attachment, the essays in this collection variously draw connections between cuteness and the social, political, economic, and technological conditions of the early twenty-first century and in doing so generate fresh understandings of the central role cuteness plays in the recalibration of contemporary subjectivities.
Aesthetics and Anthropology: Cogitations
by Tarek ElhaikThis book focuses on the reconfiguration of aesthetic anthropology into an anthropological problem of cogitation, opening up a fascinating new dialogue between the domains of anthropology, philosophy, and art. Tarek Elhaik embarks on an inquiry composed of a series of cogitations based on fieldwork in an ecology of artistic and scientific practices: from conceptual art exhibitions to architectural environments; from photographic montages to the videotaping of spirit seances; from artistic interventions in natural history museums to ongoing dialogues between performance artists and marine scientists. The chapters examine the image-work, ethical demands, and aesthetic struggles of interlocutors including artists Mathias Goeritz, Mounir Fatmi, Silvia Gruner, Joan Jonas, and Patricia Lagarde.
Aesthetics and Marxism: Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and Their Western Contemporaries
by Liu KangAlthough Chinese Marxism--primarily represented by Maoism--is generally seen by Western intellectuals as monolithic, Liu Kang argues that its practices and projects are as diverse as those in Western Marxism, particularly in the area of aesthetics. In this comparative study of European and Chinese Marxist traditions, Liu reveals the extent to which Chinese Marxists incorporate ideas about aesthetics and culture in their theories and practices. In doing so, he constructs a wholly new understanding of Chinese Marxism. Far from being secondary considerations in Chinese Marxism, aesthetics and culture are in fact principal concerns. In this respect, such Marxists are similar to their Western counterparts, although Europeans have had little understanding of the Chinese experience. Liu traces the genealogy of aesthetic discourse in both modern China and the West since the era of classical German thought, showing where conceptual modifications and divergences have occurred in the two traditions. He examines the work of Mao Zedong, Lu Xun, Li Zehou, Qu Qiubai, and others in China, and from the West he discusses Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Marxist theorists including Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse. While stressing the diversity of Marxist positions within China as well as in the West, Liu explains how ideas of culture and aesthetics have offered a constructive vision for a postrevolutionary society and have affected a wide field of issues involving the problems of modernity. Forcefully argued and theoretically sophisticated, this book will appeal to students and scholars of contemporary Marxism, cultural studies, aesthetics, and modern Chinese culture, politics, and ideology.
Aesthetics and Politics: A Nordic Perspective on How Cultural Policy Negotiates the Agency of Music and Arts (New Directions in Cultural Policy Research)
by Ole Marius Hylland Erling BjurströmThrough comparative and integrated case studies, this book demonstrates how aesthetics becomes politics in cultural policy. Contributors from Norway, Sweden and the UK analyse exactly what happens when art is considered relevant for societal development, at both a practical and theoretical level. Cultural policy is seen here as a mechanism for translating values, that through organized and practical aesthetical judgement lend different forms of agency to the arts. What happens when aesthetical value is reinterpreted as political value? What kinds of negotiations take place at a cultural policy ground level when values are translated and reinterpreted? By addressing these questions, the editors present an original collection that effectively centralises and investigates the role of aesthetics in cultural policy research.
The Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger
by Anastasia Ulanowicz Manisha BasuThis collection investigates modern imperialist practices and their management of hunger through its punctuated distribution amongst asymmetrically related marginal populations. Drawing on relevant material from Egypt, Ireland, India, Ukraine, and other regions of the globe, The Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger is a rigorously comparative study made up of ten essays by well-established scholars from universities around the world. <P><P>Since modernity, we have been inhabitants of a globe increasingly connected through discourses of equal access for all humans to the resources of the planet, but the volume emphasizes alongside this reality the flagrant politicization of those same resources. <P>From this emphasis, the essays in the volume place into relief the idea that ideological and aesthetic discourses of hunger could inform ethical thinking and practices about who or what constitutes the figure of the modern historical human.
The Aesthetics and Politics of the Online Self: A Savage Journey into the Heart of Digital Cultures
by Donatella Della Ratta Geert Lovink Teresa Numerico Peter SarramThis volume investigates our dissonant and exuberant existences online. As social media users we know we’re under surveillance, yet we continue to click, like, love and share ourselves online as if nothing was. So, how do we overcome the current online identity regime? Can we overthrow the rule of Narcissus and destroy the planetary middle class subject? In this catalogue of strategies, the reader will find stories on hacker groups, gaming platforms in the occupied territories, art objects, selfies, augmented reality, Gen Z autoethnographies, love and life. The authors of this anthology believe we cannot simply put vanity aside and a rational analysis of platform capitalism is not going to convince the youngs on TikTok nor liberate us from Zuckerbergian indentured servitude. Do we really need to wade through the subjective mud and ‘learn more’ about online aesthetics? The answer is yes.Writing by Wendy Chun, Franco Berardi “BIFO”, Julia Preisker, Katherine Behar, Rebecca Stein, Fabio Cristiano, Emilio Distretti, Natalie Bookchin, Ana Peraica, Mitra Azar, Donatella Della Ratta, Gabriella Coleman, Marco Deseriis, Alberto Micali, Daniel de Zeeuw, Giovanni Boccia Artieri, Jodi Dean.
Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: Comparative Perspectives
by Prabha Shankar DwivediThis volume brings together the finest research on aesthetics and the philosophy of art by stalwart critics and leading scholars in the field. It discusses various themes, such as the idea of aesthetic perception, the nature of aesthetic experience, attitude theory, the relation of art to morality, representation in art, and the association of aesthetics with language studies in the Indian tradition. It deliberates over the theories and views of Aristotle, Freud, Plato, Immanuel Kant, T. S. Eliot, George Dickie, Leo Tolstoy, R. G. Collingwood, Michael H. Mitias, Monroe C. Beardsley, and Abhinavagupta, among others. The book offers a comparative perspective on Indian and Western approaches to the study of art and aesthetics and enables readers to appreciate the similarities and differences between the conceptions of aesthetics and philosophy of art on a comparative scale detailing various aspects of both. The first of its kind, this key text will be useful for scholars and researchers of arts and aesthetics, philosophy of art, cultural studies, comparative literature, and philosophy in general. It will also appeal to general readers interested in the philosophy of art.
Aesthetics and the Revolutionary City: Real and Imagined Havana (Studies of the Americas)
by James Clifford KentAesthetics and the Revolutionary City engages in alternative ways of reading foreign visual representations of Havana through analysis of advertising images, documentary films, and photographic texts. It explores key narratives relating to the projection of different Havana imaginaries and focuses on a range of themes including: pre-revolutionary Cuba; the dream of revolution; and the metaphor of the city “frozen-in-time.” The book also synthesizes contemporary debates regarding the notion of Havana as a real and imagined city space and fleshes out its theoretical insights with a series of stand-alone, important case studies linked to the representation of the Cuban capital in the Western imaginary. The interpretations in the book bring into focus a range of critical historical moments in Cuban history (including the Cuban Revolution and the “Special Period”) and consider the ways in which they have been projected in advertising, documentary film and photography outside the island.
Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art (Routledge Revivals)
by Janet WolffFirst published in 1983, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art provides a lucid account of two divergent tendencies in the study of aesthetics. At the one extreme, traditional aestheticians have assumed that art and literature are wholly independent, following only the laws and inspirations of artists and artistic movements, and that the question of aesthetic value is accordingly unproblematic. At the other extreme, some sociologists have treated works of art as no more than manifestations of the socio-economic circumstances which produce them, arguing that aesthetic value is therefore entirely relative matter. Janet Wolff shows how both the extreme positions are untenable, and argues convincingly that we must accept that the conceptions and criteria of aesthetic value are socially constructed and inevitably ideological, while stopping short of the reductionist alternative which fails to recognise the irreducible questions of pleasure and of aesthetic discourse. This book provides an invaluably clear guide both to old debates and to otherwise obscure modern controversies, which will be welcomed both by students and scholars in the sociology of art, in aesthetics, in art history, and in literary criticism.
Aesthetics in Grief and Mourning: Philosophical Reflections on Coping with Loss
by Kathleen Marie HigginsA philosophical exploration of aesthetic experience during bereavement. In Aesthetics of Grief and Mourning, philosopher Kathleen Marie Higgins reflects on the ways that aesthetics aids people experiencing loss. Some practices related to bereavement, such as funerals, are scripted, but many others are recursive, improvisational, mundane—telling stories, listening to music, and reflecting on art or literature. Higgins shows how these grounding, aesthetic practices can ease the disorienting effects of loss, shedding new light on the importance of aesthetics for personal and communal flourishing.
The Aesthetics of Antifascist Film: Radical Projection (Routledge Advances in Film Studies)
by Jennifer Lynde BarkerThrough a series of detailed film case histories ranging from The Great Dictator to Hiroshima mon amour to The Lives of Others, The Aesthetics of Antifascist Film: Radical Projection explores the genesis and recurrence of antifascist aesthetics as it manifests in the WWII, Cold War and Post-Wall historical periods. Emerging during a critical moment in film history—1930s/1940s Hollywood— cinematic antifascism was representative of the international nature of antifascist alliances, with the amalgam of film styles generated in émigré Hollywood during the WWII period reflecting a dialogue between an urgent political commitment to antifascism and an equally intense commitment to aesthetic complexity. Opposed to a fascist aesthetics based on homogeneity, purity and spectacle, these antifascist films project a radical beauty of distortion, heterogeneity, fragmentation and loss. By juxtaposing documentation and the modernist techniques of surrealism and expressionism, the filmmakers were able to manifest a non-totalizing work of art that still had political impact. Drawing on insights from film and cultural studies, aesthetic and ethical philosophy, and socio-political theory, this book argues that the artistic struggles with political commitment and modernist strategies of representation during the 1930s and 40s resulted in a distinctive, radical aesthetic form that represents an alternate strand of post-modernism.
The Aesthetics of Degradation
by Adrian Nathan WestPornography keeps getting more extreme. Manufacturers, defenders and consumers of porn rely on a mix of wilful ignorance and bad faith to avoid serious discussion. When we do talk about violence against women in the porn world, the debate all too often becomes technical, complicated by legalities and outrage.But what are the moral and psychological consequences of the mercantilization of abuse?In this studied and ruthless examination of the place of pornography in contemporary life, translator and critic Adrian Nathan West treads dangerous literary and social ground, transcending cliches about free expression and the demands of the market to look at the moral discomfort of violent pornography from the perspective of the viewer.Collapsing distinctions between novel, memoir, and essay, this book will not make for light reading. But at its core is an extraordinarily brave and honest concern for the women and men who have been hurt in the name of sexual gratification.