Figuration Work

Figuration Work
Author: Gritt B. Nielsen
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2015-07-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1782387722

What role should students take in shaping their education, their university, and the wider society? These questions have assumed new importance in recent years as universities are reformed to become more competitive in the “global knowledge economy.” With Denmark as the prism, this book shows how negotiations over student participation — influenced by demands for efficiency, flexibility, and student-centered education — reflect broader concerns about democracy and citizen participation in increasingly neoliberalised states. Combining anthropological and historical research, Gritt B. Nielsen develops a novel approach to the study of policy processes and opens a timely discussion about the kinds of future citizens who will emerge from current reforms.

Figuration/Abstraction

Figuration/Abstraction
Author: Charlotte Benton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351567047

The notion that the practice of abstraction was confined to Western Europe while a stereotyped form of figuration defined the art of the Eastern bloc continues to dominate art historical accounts of public sculpture of the post-war period. This book offers a number of alternative readings, and demonstrates strategic uses of figuration and abstraction across East and West. Encompassing sites of memory (including war memorials and Holocaust memorials), state, civic and corporate sculpture, as well as temporary and unexecuted projects, the book shows that persuasive advocates of figuration were to be found in the West, while in the East imaginative experiments in abstraction were proposed in the name of Social Realism. Presenting fresh insights into sculptural practice in the period between 1945 and 1968, this book brings together a wide range of authors, some of whom have never before been published in English. Their essays are complemented by extracts from documentary texts, which give a flavour of contemporary debates, and a biographical section includes entries on many sculptors who will be unfamiliar to an English-speaking audience.

The Narrative Figuration

The Narrative Figuration
Author: Jean-Paul Ameline
Publisher: 5Continents
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2018-03-27
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9788874397761

A new kind of figurative art appeared during the 1960s in Europe and the United States. While in New York Pop Art offered a fresh perspective on an America in the throes of frenzied change, in Paris French painters and others from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany and Iceland also began exploiting images that had their origins in advertising, cinema and the popular press. Grouped under the umbrella term Narrative Figuration, they soon became the uncompromising critics of what was dubbed the consumer society. They were for the most part politically committed artists and many of them were actively involved in the political agitation that led up to the events of May 1968 in France. Once standard bearers, the Narrative Figuration artists have now been rediscovered by museums, which, like the Centre Pompidou, are dedicating increasing numbers of exhibitions to their work. Thanks to the acquisition of major works, the collection of the Fondation Gandur pour l'Art in Geneva now provides what is without doubt one of the most exhaustive selections of works by Adami, Aillaud, Arroyo, Erró, Fromanger, Jacquet, Klasen, Monory, Rancillac, Schlosser, Stämpfli, Télémaque and Voss, to name a few. Edited by Jean-Paul Ameline, who curated the Figuration narrative, Paris, 1960-1972 exhibition, held at the Grand Palais in 2008, this catalogue includes all its key works, with commentary and analysis by curators and art historians specializing in a movement that left an indelible mark on 1960s Europe.

Figurations

Figurations
Author: Claudia Castañeda
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2002-11-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822383896

Always in the process of becoming, inherently incomplete, the child is a remarkably malleable figure. In Figurations, Claudia Castañeda shows how this malleability is itself generated—how the child is "made" by different constituencies and how the resulting historically, geographically, and culturally specific figures are put to widely divergent uses, often to very powerful effect. Situated at the intersection of feminist, postcolonial, cultural, and science and technology studies, this book provides a remarkable map of the child's meaning and movement across transnational circuits of exchange. Castañeda investigates the construction of the child as both a natural and cultural body, the character of its embodiment, and its imaginative appeal in various settings. The sites through which she tracks the bodily production and deployment of the child include nineteenth-century developmental science; cognitive neuroscience in the late twentieth century; international adoption; rumors and media coverage of child-organ stealing; and poststructuralist theory. Her work reveals the extent to which the child's cultural significance and value lie in its status as a body whose incompleteness makes it "available" for such varied uses. Figurations establishes the child as a key figure for understanding and rethinking the politics of nature, culture, bodies, and subjects in changing "global" worlds.

Figuring out Figuration

Figuring out Figuration
Author: María Sandra Peña-Cervel
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2022-05-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027257795

This book combines explanatory breadth with analytical delicacy. It offers a comprehensive study of a broad array of traditional figures of speech by systematizing linguistic evidence of the cognitive processes underlying them. Such processes are explicitly linked to different communicative consequences, thus bringing together pragmatics and cognition. This type of study has allowed the authors to provide new definitions for all the figures while making their dependency relations fully explicit. For example, hypallage, antonomasia, anthimeria, and merism are studied as variants of metonymy, and analogy, paragon, and allegory as variants of metaphor. An important feature of the book is its special emphasis on the combinations of figures of speech into conceptually more complex configurations. Finally, the book accounts for the principles that regulate the felicity of figurative expressions. The result is a broad integrative framework for the analysis of figurative language grounded in the relationship between pragmatics and cognition.

It's Figuration, Groundly

It's Figuration, Groundly
Author: John McGreal
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2017-02-21
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1788036433

John McGreal's three new books – It’s Abstraction, Concretely, It’s Figuration, Groundly and It’s Representation, Really – continue the ‘It’ Series published by Matador since 2010. They constitute another stage in an artistic journey exploring the visual and audial dialectic of mark, word and image that began over 25 years ago. Emerging out of the first books on the Bibliograph published in 2016, initiated with It’s Nothing, Seriously, these new texts retain some of the same structural features. The Bibliographs contain the same focus on repetition and variation in meaning of their dominant motifs of representation, abstraction and figuration which have framed philosophical discourse on epistemology and ontology in aesthetics; their chance placement in each Bibliograph interspersed with one another displaying and enhancing similarities and differences. At the same time these works constitute a development in the aesthetic form of the Bibliograph. In earlier works on Nothing, Absence and Silence, it was just a question of finding and transferring given textual references from their source to construct their Bibliographs, with the focus being on the strategic position of the latter within each book. In these new works, the concern has been with working on the line and shape of the references themselves, with their enhanced spacial form as well as that of each Bibliograph as a whole. In shaping and spacing the referential images, the place of words and letters became as important as their semantic & syntactical role. Expansion and contraction of whole words was used to enhance this process. Under such detailed attention their breakdown into particles of language, into part-words and single letters was a result. The recombination of elements produced new words in a process of restrangement with new sequences of letters having visual rather than semantic value. The play on prefixes of dominant motifs yielded new words as did tmesis. This concern with the form of referential images does not preclude an equal commitment to their content. The aleatory character of textual entries in each Bibliograph encourage the reader to let his or her mind go; to read in a new way on diverse contemporary issues across conventional boundaries in the arts and sciences at several levels of physical, psychical and social reproduction.

Modern Artists on Art

Modern Artists on Art
Author: Robert L. Herbert
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2012-04-26
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0486146006

16 of the 20th century's leading artistic innovators talk forcefully about their work: Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Henry Moore, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, El Lissitzky, Fernand Léger, and more.

Productive Imagination

Productive Imagination
Author: Saulius Geniusas
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2018-05-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1786604329

Although the concept of productive imagination plays a fundamental role in Kant, German Idealism, Romanticism, Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, the meaning of this central concept remains largely undetermined. The significance of productive imagination is therefore all-too-often either inflated or underrated. The articles collected in this volume trace the development of productive imagination through the history of philosophy, identify the different meanings this concept has been ascribed in different philosophical frameworks, and raise the question anew concerning this concept’s philosophical significance. Special attention is given to the historical background that underlies the emergence of productive imagination in modernity, to Kant’s concept of productive imagination, to the further development of this concept in German Idealism, Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Ricoeur. A group of leading scholars present a systematic and comprehensive reference tool for anyone working in the firsl of social imaginaries.

Intrigues

Intrigues
Author: Gabriel Riera
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2006
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0823226719

This book examines the possibility of writing the other and explores whether an ethical writing that preserves the other as such is possible. It also discusses what the implications are for an ethically inflected criticism.Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, whose works constitute the most thorough contemporary exploration of the question of the other and of its relation to writing, are Riera's main focus.Critics in recent years have discussed an ethical moment or turncharacterized by the other's irruption into the order of discourse. The other becomes a true crossroads of disciplines, since it affects several aspects of discourse: the constitution of the subject, the status of knowledge, the nature of representation, and what that representation represses (gender, power).Through close readings of texts by Heidegger, Levinas, and Blanchot, this book examines how the question of the other engages the very limits of philosophy, rationality, and power.

The Routledge Handbook for Global South Studies on Subjectivities

The Routledge Handbook for Global South Studies on Subjectivities
Author: Sebastian Thies
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2024-05-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1003860508

The Routledge Handbook for Global South Studies on Subjectivities provides a series of exemplary studies conjoining perspectives from Asian, African, and Latin American Studies on subjectivity in the Global South as a central category of social and cultural analysis. The contestation of the Northern myth of the autonomous subject—the dispositive that contests subject formation in the South by describing it as fragmented, incomplete, delayed or simply deviant, has been a cornerstone of theory production from the South over the years. This volume’s contributions offer an interdisciplinary and transarea dialogue, reframing issues of selfhood and alterity, of personhood, of the human, of the commons and contesting the North’s presumption in determining what kind of subjectivities abide by its norms, whose voices are heard, who is recognised as a subject, and, by extension, whose lives matter. In the context of the shifting dynamics of today’s manifold crises, they raise questions regarding how subjectivities act on or resist such forms of contestation, contingency, and indeterminacy. A major contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the Global South, this handbook will be an essential resource for students, scholars, researchers and instructors in literature, media and culture studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, law, politics, visual arts and art history.