Difficult Beauty

Difficult Beauty
Author: Luis Alberto Ambroggio
Publisher: Cross Cultural Communications
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2009
Genre: Poetry
ISBN:

Poetry. Bilingual Spanish-English Edition. Edited by Yvette Neiser Moreno. "Reading DIFFICULT BEAUTY, one savors the shadows of [Ambroggio's] words as well as the heat of their emotion. One reads these poems for their gliding notes. It is as though the poet, as pilot, knows that the ship of his verse moves through a realm that is dazzling, fragile, and formidable. Ambroggio beckons us to take flight with him, to experience the world as he sees it with joy, awe, and striking reverence"--Oscar Hijuelos.

Easy Beauty

Easy Beauty
Author: Chloé Cooper Jones
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2023-04-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1982152001

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 * Vulture’s #1 Memoir of 2022 * A Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA TODAY, Time, BuzzFeed, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and New York Public Library Best Book of the Year From Chloé Cooper Jones—Pulitzer Prize finalist, philosophy professor, Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient—an “exquisite” (Oprah Daily) and groundbreaking memoir about disability, motherhood, and the search for a new way of seeing and being seen. “I am in a bar in Brooklyn, listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether my life is worth living.” So begins Chloé Cooper Jones’s bold, revealing account of moving through the world in a body that looks different than most. Jones learned early on to factor “pain calculations” into every plan, every situation. Born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis which affects both her stature and gait, her pain is physical. But there is also the pain of being judged and pitied for her appearance, of being dismissed as “less than.” The way she has been seen—or not seen—has informed her lens on the world her entire life. She resisted this reality by excelling academically and retreating to “the neutral room in her mind” until it passed. But after unexpectedly becoming a mother (in violation of unspoken social taboos about the disabled body), something in her shifts, and Jones sets off on a journey across the globe, reclaiming the spaces she’d been denied, and denied herself. From the bars and domestic spaces of her life in Brooklyn to sculpture gardens in Rome; from film festivals in Utah to a Beyoncé concert in Milan; from a tennis tournament in California to the Killing Fields of Phnom Penh, Jones weaves memory, observation, experience, and aesthetic philosophy to probe the myths underlying our standards of beauty and desirability and interrogates her own complicity in upholding those myths. “Bold, honest, and superbly well-written” (Andre Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name) Easy Beauty is the rare memoir that has the power to make you see the world, and your place in it, with new eyes.

Beautiful Ugliness

Beautiful Ugliness
Author: Mark William Roche
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2023-10-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0268207003

This book probes the intersection of the beautiful and the ugly, offering a systematic framework to understand, interpret, and evaluate how ugliness can contribute to beautiful art. Many great artworks include elements of ugliness: repugnant content, disproportionate forms, unresolved dissonance, and unintegrated parts. Mark William Roche’s authoritative monograph Beautiful Ugliness: Christianity, Modernity, and the Arts challenges current practices of the dominant aesthetic schools by exploring the role of ugliness in art and literature. Roche offers a comprehensive and unique framework that integrates philosophical and theological reflection, intellectual-historical analysis, and interpretations of a large number of works from the arts. The study is driven by the recognition that, though ugliness is usually understood as the opposite of beauty, ugliness nonetheless contributes significantly to the beauty of many artworks. Roche’s analysis unfolds in three parts. The first offers a refreshing conceptual analysis of ugliness in art. The second considers the history of ugliness in art and literature, with special attention to its role in Christian art and its central place in modern and contemporary art. The third synthesizes earlier material, offering a taxonomy of beautiful ugliness derived from Hegelian philosophical categories. Roche mesmerizes the reader with an extraordinary range of literary scholarship and expertise, with a particular focus on English, Latin, and German literature, and with a broad range of analyzed phenomena, including fine arts, architecture, and music. Including 63 color illustrations, Beautiful Ugliness will draw in readers from multiple disciplines as well as those from beyond the academy who wish to make sense of today’s complex art world.

The Aesthetic Value of the World

The Aesthetic Value of the World
Author: Tom Cochrane
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2021-11-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0192665073

In The Aesthetic Value of the World, Tom Cochrane defends Aestheticism, the claim that everything is aesthetically valuable and that a life lived in pursuit of aesthetic value can be a particularly good one. Furthermore, in distilling aesthetic qualities, artists have a special role to play in teaching us to recognize values; a critical component of virtue. Cochrane grounds his account upon an analysis of aesthetic value as 'objectified final value', which is underwritten by an original psychological claim that all aesthetic values are distal versions of practical values. This is followed by systematic accounts of beauty, sublimity, comedy, drama, and tragedy, as well as appendix entries on the cute, the cool, the kitsch, the uncanny, the horrific, the erotic, and the furious.

Collected Works Of Samuel Alexander

Collected Works Of Samuel Alexander
Author: Samuel Alexander
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2000-02-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9781855068537

This 5-volume collection provides all the major philosophical writings of philosopher Samuel Alexander (1859-1938). Alexander was one of the most distinguished and interesting philosophers of the turn of the century, and among the few modern thinkers to develop a comprehensive metaphysical system. A pioneer in modernizing the discipline by recognizing the philosophical significance of contemporary developments in biology, psychology and evolutionary theory, much of his work is concerned with relating philosophy to discoveries in experimental science. He also wrote in later life on aesthetics and literature. A friend of some of the greatest names in philosophy at the time, F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, C. Lloyd Morgan, Leslie Stephen and G. F. Stout, Alexander nonetheless developed a bold and innovative philosophy of his own. The collection begins with Moral Order and Progress, in which Alexander develops a sophisticated evolutionary theory of ethics. Showing the influence of the idealism dominant in Oxford at the time, it is considered a landmark work in British moral theory. Alexander's move away from idealism towards Darwinian evolutionism found full expression in his major publication, Space, Time and Deity. In this detailed and comprehensive work of speculative metaphysics Alexander expounds the 'emergent evolution' theory for which he is best known, whereby existence is hierarchically arranged and emerges in an ongoing evolutionary process. Beauty and Other Forms of Value, the fourth volume in the set, is a collection of occasional papers and lectures on themes relating to aesthetics and ethics. It includes studies of Valuation, especially of Beauty and of Goodness. The set concludes with Philosophical and Literary Pieces, an excellent compilation of addresses and journal articles published after Alexander's death. Some of Alexander's most interesting philosophical work can be found here, such as 'The Mind of a Dog', 'Dr Johnson as a Philosopher', 'Art and Instinct', 'Value' and 'Spinoza and Time'. Edited by his executor John Laird, the volume includes his extensive Memoir, containing enlightening anecdotes and extracts from correspondence, and a bibliography of Alexander's writings. This collection provides a welcome opportunity to access Alexander's works, now surprisingly scarce on the second-hand market and even in major libraries. It includes a new introduction by leading twentieth-century philosophy scholar John Slater. --the first collected works edition of the main realist philosopher of his generation --important modernizing thinker, bridging philosophy and science --scarce works, hard to find second-hand or even in major libraries

Easy Beauty

Easy Beauty
Author: Chloé Cooper Jones
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2022-04-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 198215201X

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 * Vulture’s #1 Memoir of 2022 * A Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA TODAY, Time, BuzzFeed, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and New York Public Library Best Book of the Year From Chloé Cooper Jones—Pulitzer Prize finalist, philosophy professor, Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient—an “exquisite” (Oprah Daily) and groundbreaking memoir about disability, motherhood, and the search for a new way of seeing and being seen. “I am in a bar in Brooklyn, listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether my life is worth living.” So begins Chloé Cooper Jones’s bold, revealing account of moving through the world in a body that looks different than most. Jones learned early on to factor “pain calculations” into every plan, every situation. Born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis which affects both her stature and gait, her pain is physical. But there is also the pain of being judged and pitied for her appearance, of being dismissed as “less than.” The way she has been seen—or not seen—has informed her lens on the world her entire life. She resisted this reality by excelling academically and retreating to “the neutral room in her mind” until it passed. But after unexpectedly becoming a mother (in violation of unspoken social taboos about the disabled body), something in her shifts, and Jones sets off on a journey across the globe, reclaiming the spaces she’d been denied, and denied herself. From the bars and domestic spaces of her life in Brooklyn to sculpture gardens in Rome; from film festivals in Utah to a Beyoncé concert in Milan; from a tennis tournament in California to the Killing Fields of Phnom Penh, Jones weaves memory, observation, experience, and aesthetic philosophy to probe the myths underlying our standards of beauty and desirability and interrogates her own complicity in upholding those myths. “Bold, honest, and superbly well-written” (Andre Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name) Easy Beauty is the rare memoir that has the power to make you see the world, and your place in it, with new eyes.

The Beautiful and the Monstrous

The Beautiful and the Monstrous
Author: Amaleena Damlé
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2010
Genre: Aesthetics, French
ISBN: 9783039119004

"The articles that appear in this collection were presented as papers at the Cambridge Annual French Graduate Conference held at King's College, Cambridge in April 2008"--P. [xi].

Edge of the Sublime

Edge of the Sublime
Author: Jeannine J. Falino
Publisher: Hudson Hills
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2008
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781555952846

A beautifully illustrated catalogue of over 100 color plates, it addresses artist's lifework who first established his international reputation in 1986 when he produced enameled jewelry using unique, electroformed shapes.

Architecture and Ugliness

Architecture and Ugliness
Author: Wouter Van Acker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2020-01-09
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 135006825X

Whatever 'ugliness' is, it remains a problematic category in architectural aesthetics – alternately vilified and appropriated, used either to shock or to invert conventions of architecture. This book presents sixteen new scholarly essays which rethink ugliness in recent architecture – from Brutalism to eclectic postmodern architectural productions – and together offer a diverse reappraisal of the history and theory of postmodern architecture and design. The essays address both broad theoretical questions on ugliness and postmodern aesthetics, as well as more specific analyses of significant architectural examples dating from the last decades of the twentieth century. The book attends to the diverse relations between the aesthetic register of ugliness and closely connected aesthetic concepts such as the monstrous, the ordinary, disgust, the excessive, the grotesque, the interesting, the impure and the sublime. This volume does not simply document the history of a postmodern anti-aesthetic through case studies. Instead, it aims to shed light on aesthetic problems that have been largely overlooked in the agenda of architectural theory. This book answers in detail the questions: How did postmodern architects appropriate troublesome contradictions bound to the raw ugliness of the real? How have the ugly and the antiaesthetic been a productive force in postmodern architecture? How can ugliness be of value to architecture? And how can architecture make good use of ugliness?

The Face of Love

The Face of Love
Author: Ellen Zetzel Lambert
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1996-07-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780807065013

To see beauty as the face of love rather than the arbitrary gift of fortune is . . . to enlarge our sense of life's possibilities. A woman becomes beautiful when she believes that her appearance reflects her essential self. Ellen Zetzel Lambert explores the connection of physical appearance to self-esteem, through photography, literature, and life experience.