Aesthetic Order

Aesthetic Order
Author: Ruth Lorand
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 651
Release: 2002-11-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1134562624

Aesthetic Order challenges contemporary theories of aesthetics, offering the idea of beauty as quantitative yet different from the traditional discursive order. It will be of importance to all interested in aesthetic theory.

Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures

Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures
Author: Timothy Aubry
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 143
Release: 2018-09-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0674988965

In the wake of radical social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, literary studies’ embrace of politics entailed a widespread rejection of aesthetic considerations. For scholars invested in literature’s role in supporting or challenging dominant ideologies, appreciating literature’s formal beauty seemed frivolous and irresponsible, even complicit with the iniquities of the social order. This suspicion of aesthetics became the default posture within literary scholarship, a means of establishing the rigor of one’s thought and the purity of one’s political commitments. Yet as Timothy Aubry explains, aesthetic pleasure never fully disappeared from the academy. It simply went underground. From New Criticism to the digital humanities, Aubry recasts aesthetics as the complicated, morally ambiguous, embattled yet resilient protagonist in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first–century literary studies. He argues that academic critics never stopped asserting preferences for certain texts, rhetorical strategies, or intellectual responses. Rather than serving as the enemy of formalism and aesthetics, political criticism enabled scholars to promote heightened experiences of perceptual acuity and complexity while adjudicating which formal strategies are best designed to bolster these experiences. Political criticism, in other words, did not eradicate but served covertly to nurture reading practices aimed at achieving aesthetic satisfaction. Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures shows that literary studies’ break with midcentury formalism was not as clean as it once appeared. Today, when so many scholars are advocating renewed attention to textual surfaces and aesthetic experiences, Aubry’s work illuminates the surprisingly vast common ground between the formalists and the schools of criticism that succeeded them.

The Order of Forms

The Order of Forms
Author: Anna Kornbluh
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2019-11-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 022665334X

In literary studies today, debates about the purpose of literary criticism and about the place of formalism within it continue to simmer across periods and approaches. Anna Kornbluh contributes to—and substantially shifts—that conversation in The Order of Forms by offering an exciting new category, political formalism, which she articulates through the co-emergence of aesthetic and mathematical formalisms in the nineteenth century. Within this framework, criticism can be understood as more affirmative and constructive, articulating commitments to aesthetic expression and social collectivity. Kornbluh offers a powerful argument that political formalism, by valuing forms of sociability like the city and the state in and of themselves, provides a better understanding of literary form and its political possibilities than approaches that view form as a constraint. To make this argument, she takes up the case of literary realism, showing how novels by Dickens, Brontë, Hardy, and Carroll engage mathematical formalism as part of their political imagining. Realism, she shows, is best understood as an exercise in social modeling—more like formalist mathematics than social documentation. By modeling society, the realist novel focuses on what it considers the most elementary features of social relations and generates unique political insights. Proposing both this new theory of realism and the idea of political formalism, this inspired, eye-opening book will have far-reaching implications in literary studies.

Visual Thinking Strategies

Visual Thinking Strategies
Author: Philip Yenawine
Publisher: Harvard Education Press
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2013-10-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1612506119

2014 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice "What’s going on in this picture?" With this one question and a carefully chosen work of art, teachers can start their students down a path toward deeper learning and other skills now encouraged by the Common Core State Standards. The Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) teaching method has been successfully implemented in schools, districts, and cultural institutions nationwide, including bilingual schools in California, West Orange Public Schools in New Jersey, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It provides for open-ended yet highly structured discussions of visual art, and significantly increases students’ critical thinking, language, and literacy skills along the way. Philip Yenawine, former education director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and cocreator of the VTS curriculum, writes engagingly about his years of experience with elementary school students in the classroom. He reveals how VTS was developed and demonstrates how teachers are using art—as well as poems, primary documents, and other visual artifacts—to increase a variety of skills, including writing, listening, and speaking, across a range of subjects. The book shows how VTS can be easily and effectively integrated into elementary classroom lessons in just ten hours of a school year to create learner-centered environments where students at all levels are involved in rich, absorbing discussions.

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic
Author: Monique Roelofs
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2014-04-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1472522249

Aesthetic desire and distaste prime everyday life in surprising ways. The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic casts much-needed light on the complex mix of meanings our aesthetic activities weave into cultural existence. Anchoring aesthetic experience in our relationships with persons, places, and things, Monique Roelofs explores aesthetic life as a multimodal, socially embedded, corporeal endeavor. Highlighting notions of relationality, address, and promising, this compelling study shows these concepts at work in visions of beauty, ugliness, detail, nation, ignorance, and cultural boundary. Unexpected aesthetic pleasures and pains crop up in sites where passion, perception, rationality, and imagination go together but also are in conflict. Bonds between aesthetics and politics are forged and reforged. Cross-disciplinary in outlook, and engaging the work of theorists and artists ranging from David Hume to Theodor W. Adorno, Frantz Fanon, Clarice Lispector, and Barbara Johnson, The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic lays open the interpretive web that gives aesthetic agency its vast reach.

Reflexive Modernization

Reflexive Modernization
Author: Ulrich Beck
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 1994
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780804724722

Three prominent social thinkers discuss how modern society is undercutting its formations of class, stratum, occupations, sex roles, the nuclear family, and more. Reflexive modernization, or the way one kind of modernization undercuts and changes another, has wide ranging implications for contemporary social and cultural theory, as this provocative book demonstrates.

Process and Aesthetics

Process and Aesthetics
Author: Ondřej Dadejík
Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2021-04-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 8024647265

While Alfred North Whitehead did not dedicate any books or articles to aesthetics specifically, aesthetic motifs permeate his entire philosophical opus. Despite this, aestheticians have devoted little attention to Whitehead; most attempts to reconstruct Whitehead’s aesthetics have come from process philosophers, and even in that context aesthetics has never occupied a central position. In this book, four scholars of aesthetics provide another angle from which Whiteheadian aesthetics might be reconstructed. Paying special attention to the notion of aesthetic experience, the authors analyze abstraction versus concreteness, immediacy vs. mediation, and aesthetic contextualism vs. aesthetic isolationism. For their interpretation of Whiteheadian aesthetics, the concepts of creativity and rhythm are crucial. Using these concepts, the book interprets the motif of the processes by which experience is harmonized, the sensation of the quality of the whole, and directedness towards novelty. The first chapter introduces Whitehead’s philosophical method of descriptive generalization. This method assumes that every philosophical system is based on a particular entry point. We show that for Whitehead this entry point was aesthetics. Chapter Two compares Whitehead and Dewey’s philosophies to show that both viewed aesthetic experience in terms of complex rhythms; this helps us better understand the differences and the continuities between everyday experience and art. Chapter Three compares Whitehead’s ideas with those of Henri Bergson, showing the way art reveals the form of immediate experience and how the aesthetic experience of art relates to truth. The final chapter details the processes that constitute aesthetic experience in a narrower sense, analyzing aesthetic experience from the perspective of the types of abstractive processes it involves and the complex types of experience it produces.

Aesthetic Revelation

Aesthetic Revelation
Author: Oleg V. Bychkov
Publisher: CUA Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2010
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0813217318

*Presents a rigorous reexamination of von Balthasars interpretation of major ancient and medieval texts*

Aisthesis

Aisthesis
Author: Jacques Ranciere
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2013-06-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1781680892

Composed in a series of scenes, Aisthesis–Rancière’s definitive statement on the aesthetic–takes its reader from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarmé to the Folies-Bergère, attend a lecture by Emerson, visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow and Hollywood. Rancière uses these sites and events—some famous, others forgotten—to ask what becomes art and what comes of it. He shows how a regime of artistic perception and interpretation was constituted and transformed by erasing the specificities of the different arts, as well as the borders that separated them from ordinary experience. This incisive study provides a history of artistic modernity far removed from the conventional postures of modernism.

The Aesthetic Border

The Aesthetic Border
Author: Brantley Nicholson
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2022-05-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1684483654

This groundbreaking study examines how modern Colombian literature—from Gabriel García Márquez to Juan Gabriel Vásquez—reflects one of the world’s most tumultuous entrances into globalization. While these literary icons, one canonical, the other emergent, bookend Colombia’s fall and rise on the world stage, the period between the two was inordinately violent, spanning the Colombian urban novel’s evolution into narco-literature. Marking Colombia’s cultural and literary manifestations as threefold, this book explores García Márquez’s retreat to a rural romanticism that paradoxically made him a global literary icon; the country’s violent end to the twentieth century when its largest economic export was narcotics; and the contemporary period in which a new major author has emerged to create a “literature of national reconstitution.” Harkening back to the Regeneration movement and extending through the early twenty-first century, this book analyzes the cultural implications of Colombia’s relationship to the wider world.