Aesthetic Hysteria

Aesthetic Hysteria
Author: Ankhi Mukherjee
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 142
Release: 2013-02-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135860521

Aesthetic Hysteria is a deconstructive psychoanalytic study of hysteria, using literary texts to foreground a telling encounter between two growing discourses within English studies: that of emotion/affect and trauma studies. It brings together several academic foci - the history of medicine, aesthetic theory, speech act theory, feminism, and gender and performance studies. The study uses its theoretical and philosophical questioning of a cultural phenomenon to interrogate the politics and ends of theory, and is timely in addressing similar anxieties dominating contemporary critical and cultural theory.

The Aesthetic Clinic

The Aesthetic Clinic
Author: Fernanda Negrete
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2020-10-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1438480229

In The Aesthetic Clinic, Fernanda Negrete brings together contemporary women writers and artists well known for their formal experimentation—Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Lygia Clark, Marguerite Duras, Roni Horn, and Clarice Lispector—to argue that the aesthetic experiences afforded by their work are underwritten by a tenacious and uniquely feminine ethics of desire. To elaborate this ethics, Negrete looks to notions of sublimation and feminine sexuality developed by Freud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Nietzsche, and their reinvention with and after Jacques Lacan, including in the schizoanalysis of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. But she also highlights how psychoanalytic theory draws on writing and other creative practices to conceive of unconscious processes and the transformation sought through analysis. Thus, the "aesthetic clinic" of the book's title (a term Negrete adopts from Deleuze) is not an applied psychoanalysis or schizoanalysis. Rather, The Aesthetic Clinic privileges the call and constraints issued by each woman's individual work. Engaging an artwork here is less about retrieving a hidden meaning through interpretation than about receiving a precise transmission of sensation, a jouissance irreducible to meaning. Not only do art and literature serve an urgent clinical function in Negrete's reading but sublimation itself requires an embrace of femininity.

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon
Author: Gilles Deleuze
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780826479303

Francis Bacon is Deleuze's long-awaited work on Bacon, widely regarded as the one of the most radical painters of the twentieth century. The book presents a deep engagement with Bacon's work and the nature of art. Deleuze analyses the distinctive innovations that came to mark Bacon's style while introducing a number of his own famous concepts. Deleuze links Bacon's work to Cezanne's notion of a "logic" of sensation, which reaches its summit in colour. Investigating this logic, Deleuze explores Bacon's crucial relation to past painters such as Velasquez, Cezanne, and Soutine, as well as Bacon's rejection of expressionism and abstract painting.

Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts

Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts
Author: Johanna Braun
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2021-06-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030663604

Hysteria is alive and well in our present time and is apparently spreading contagiously: especially the second decade of the twenty-first century has displayed an ever-increasing interest in the term. A quick Google search opens the gates to sheer endless swathes of discussions on hysteria, covering almost every aspect of public discourses. The arts—as it is often in such cases—seem conspicuously involved in and engaged with this hysterical discourse. Surprisingly, while the strong academic interest in hysteria throughout the twentieth century and most prominently at the turn of the century is well known and much discussed, the study of how these discourses have continued well into twenty-first-century art practices, is largely pressing on a blind spot. It is the aim of this volume to illustrate how hysteria was already well established within the arts alongside and at times even separately from the much-covered medical studies, and reveal how those current artistic practices very much continue a century spanning cross-fertilization between hysteria and the arts.

Constructing the Viennese Modern Body

Constructing the Viennese Modern Body
Author: Nathan Timpano
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2017-05-25
Genre: Art
ISBN: 131541368X

This book takes a new, interdisciplinary approach to analyzing modern Viennese visual culture, one informed by Austro-German theater, contemporary medical treatises centered on hysteria, and an original examination of dramatic gestures in expressionist artworks. It centers on the following question: How and to what end was the human body discussed, portrayed, and utilized as an aesthetic metaphor in turn-of-the-century Vienna? By scrutinizing theatrically “hysterical” performances, avant-garde puppet plays, and images created by Oskar Kokoschka, Koloman Moser, Egon Schiele and others, Nathan J. Timpano discusses how Viennese artists favored the pathological or puppet-like body as their contribution to European modernism.

Constructing the Viennese Modern Body

Constructing the Viennese Modern Body
Author: Nathan Timpano
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 483
Release: 2017-05-25
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1315413671

This book takes a new, interdisciplinary approach to analyzing modern Viennese visual culture, one informed by Austro-German theater, contemporary medical treatises centered on hysteria, and an original examination of dramatic gestures in expressionist artworks. It centers on the following question: How and to what end was the human body discussed, portrayed, and utilized as an aesthetic metaphor in turn-of-the-century Vienna? By scrutinizing theatrically “hysterical” performances, avant-garde puppet plays, and images created by Oskar Kokoschka, Koloman Moser, Egon Schiele and others, Nathan J. Timpano discusses how Viennese artists favored the pathological or puppet-like body as their contribution to European modernism.

Performing Hysteria

Performing Hysteria
Author: Johanna Braun
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2020-11-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 946270211X

We seem to be living in hysterical times. A simple Google search reveals the sheer bottomless well of “hysterical” discussions on diverse topics such as the #metoo movement, Trumpianism, border wars, Brexit, transgender liberation, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, and climate change, to name only a few. Against the backdrop of such recent deployments of hysteria in popular discourse––particularly as they emerge in times of material and hermeneutic crisis––Performing Hysteria re-engages the notion of “hysteria”. Performing Hysteria rigorously mines late 20th- and early 21st-century (primarily visual) culture for signs of hysteria. The various essays in this volume contribute to the multilayered and complex discussions that surround and foster this resurgent interest in hysteria––covering such areas as art, literature, theatre, film, television, dance; crossing such disciplines as cultural studies, political science, philosophy, history, media, disability, race and ethnicity, and gender studies; and analysing stereotypical images and representations of the hysteric in relation to cultural sciences and media studies. Of particular importance is the volume's insistence on taking the intersection of hysteria and performance seriously.

Necklines

Necklines
Author: Ewa Lajer-Burcharth
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 1999-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780300074215

This book examines the crucial period in the painter's career as he struggled to save his neck and recast his identity in the aftermath of the Reign of Terror. Burcharth assesses his works in the context of the larger cultural and social formations emerging in France concluding with an interpretation of the unfinished portrait of Juliette Recamier.

Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Postmodernists

Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Postmodernists
Author: Christopher Kul-Want
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2010-06-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231526253

Here, for the first time, Christopher Kul-Want brings together twenty-five texts on art written by twenty philosophers. Covering the Enlightenment to postmodernism, these essays draw on Continental philosophy and aesthetics, the Marxist intellectual tradition, and psychoanalytic theory, and each is accompanied by an overview and interpretation. The volume features Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh's shoes and the meaning of the Greek temple; Georges Bataille on Salvador Dalí's The Lugubrious Game; Theodor W. Adorno on capitalism and collage; Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes on the uncanny nature of photography; Sigmund Freud on Leonardo Da Vinci and his interpreters; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva on the paintings of Holbein; Freud's postmodern critic, Gilles Deleuze on the visceral paintings of Francis Bacon; and Giorgio Agamben on the twin traditions of the Duchampian ready-made and Pop Art. Kul-Want elucidates these texts with essays on aesthetics, from Hegel and Nietzsche to Badiou and Rancière, demonstrating how philosophy adopted a new orientation toward aesthetic experience and subjectivity in the wake of Kant's powerful legacy.

Exploring the Black Venus Figure in Aesthetic Practices

Exploring the Black Venus Figure in Aesthetic Practices
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2019-07-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 900440791X

Tracing the figure of Black Venus in literature and visual arts from different periods and geographies, Exploring the Black Venus Figure in Aesthetic Practices discusses how aesthetic practices may restore the racialized female body in feminist, anti-racist and postcolonial terms.