Philosophy: aesthetics Books

Book SynopsisHarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.''How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrid, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young If it was only the other way!''Wilde''s first and only published novel recounts the story of handsome Dorian Gray who upon having his portrait painted desires that it will age and grow ugly while he may remain eternally beautiful. The painting, which reflects each of Gray''s sins and transgressions in its hideousness, haunts him until it finally becomes unbearable. In this dark tale of duplicity and mortality, Wilde creates a world where art and reality collide.

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Air conditioning aspires to be unnoticed. Yet, by manipulating the air around us, it quietly conditions the baseline conditions of our physical, mental, and emotional experience. From offices and libraries to contemporary art museums and shopping malls, climate control systems shore up the fantasy of a comfortable, self-contained body that does not have to reckon with temperature. At the same time that air conditioning makes temperature a non-issue in (some) people's daily lives, thermoceptionor the sensory perception of temperatureis being carefully studied and exploited as a tool of marketing, social control, and labor management. Yet air conditioning isn't for everybody: its reliance on carbon fuels divides the world into habitable, climate-controlled bubbles and increasingly uninhabitable environments where AC is unavailable. Hsuan Hsu''s Air Conditioning<Trade ReviewA cool blast of discomforting brilliance, Air Conditioning examines the conditioning of our indoor and interior climates of work, domesticity, and consumption. It is not inward looking to the sealed boxes and bubbles of air-conditioned detachment, but focused on the complex exchanges and inequalities involved in sustaining comfortable places, cooled bodies and technologies by making other places, and other (often poor and racialised) lives, uncomfortable and unliveable. Hsu’s book hums, ventilating ideas in an insistent, vital tone to show how this ordinary object, submerged within walls and behind vents, has mattered so much to us. * Peter Adey, Royal Holloway University of London, and author of Air (2014) *Hsuan L. Hsu demonstrates how air conditioning has radically transformed how we think, feel, and relate to others. After reading this book, you'll never be as comfortable in an air-conditioned room again – and that's exactly the point. * Bharat Venkat, Associate Professor of Society & Genetics, History, and Anthropology, Director of the UCLA Heat Lab, and author of At the Limits of Cure (2021) *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Why Air Conditioning? 1. Thermal Comfort 2. Bubbles: A Partial Typology 3. Weathermaking; Vicious Cycles 4. Cold Storage 5. The Racialization of Cooling 6. Global AC and the Great Uncooled Conclusion: Bursting Our Bubbles Index

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Book SynopsisHarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics.The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.'When Basil Hallward paints the portrait of young, handsome Dorian Gray, he falls prey to his dazzling beauty. Afraid that his youth and looks will waste away, Dorian expresses a wish that his portrait, and not he, will age and fade over time. His wish is granted, and over the ensuing years, Dorian indulges in every kind of vice and pleasure, never ageing nor disfiguring. Only his portrait, hidden to the world, bears the marks of his actions, and as his soul grows ever more wasted and corrupted, devastatingconsequences lie in wait.The Picture of Dorian Gray is an exploration of the purpose of art, the superficial nature of youth and beauty, and the conflict between morality and intemperance. First published in its complete, uncensored form in 1891, it is Oscar Wilde's only novel.

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Book SynopsisBeauty today is a paradox. The cult of beauty is ubiquitous but it has lost its transcendence and become little more than an aspect of consumerism, the aesthetic dimension of capitalism. The sublime and unsettling aspects of beauty have given way to corporeal pleasures and 'likes', resulting in a kind of 'pornography' of beauty. In this book, cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han reinvigorates aesthetic theory for our digital age. He interrogates our preoccupation with all things slick and smooth, from Jeff Koon's sculptures and the iPhone to Brazilian waxing. Reaching far deeper than our superficial reactions to viral videos and memes, Han reclaims beauty, showing how it manifests itself as truth, temptation and even disaster. This wide-ranging and profound exploration of beauty, encompassing ethical and political considerations as well as aesthetic, will appeal to all those interested in cultural and aesthetic theory, philosophy and digital media.Trade Review"In this provocative analysis Han agitates against contemporary notions of smooth air-brushed beauty. Instead he pleads for an aesthetic based on a generative, creative, commitment to truth that can encompass negativity injury and disaster. Ranging from pornography to classical literature this tour de force of thinking about our understanding of beauty reminds us that philosophy can have teeth. Han writes with a compelling urgency about how we live in the here and now, but also how we could live better. Saving Beauty is an aesthetic call to arms; an example of how philosophy can militate for a better world and make us see anew." Karen Leeder, Oxford University “Thrilling… a passionate and engaging read on a notion of beauty that has lost its standing in a digitized world.”Philosophy TodayTable of Contents1. The Smooth 2. The Smooth Body 3. The Aesthetics of the Smooth 4. Digital Beauty 5. The Aesthetics of Veiling 6. The Aesthetics of Injury 7. The Aesthetics of Disaster 8. The Ideal of Beauty 9. Beauty as Truth 10. The Politics of Beauty 11. Pornographic Theatre 12. Lingering on Beauty 13. Beauty as Reminiscence 14. Giving Birth in Beauty Notes

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"What does it mean to say a painting thinks? The central claim of this invigorating book is not that a painting can show thought happening, as in depictions of melancholics musing, head on hand; nor that it can illustrate philosophical concepts. Nor does Hanneke Grootenboer want to argue that a painting is a way of working out a philosophical conundrum; nor even that it can prompt theorisation about the nature of reality, artifice and representation. She argues, instead, for something weirder–and more suggestive. . . . she asks: 'Do we, as viewers, find ourselves pondering these things, or is the painting as such pensive?' Grootenboer wants to affirm the latter." -- Kathryn Murphy * Apollo *"Ideas in Grootenboer’s sense are arresting, Benjaminian, and, therefore, fit for the still medium of painting, where, in her beautiful examples, they crystallize into dangling ribbons, inverted flowers, sliding dewdrops, and teetering gooseberries. . . . Though this book is full of beauty and pleasure, the adjective “pensive” is not, finally, the happiest to attach to the thinking subject—a person or work of art. In Grootenboer’s own words, the pensive image gives rise to an 'uneasy and indeterminate state of openness that allows for the unthought to surface.' As such, the pensive image extends an invitation to take a hard look at things." -- Amy Knight Powell * CAA Reviews *"This deeply thoughtful and compact book, like a self-aware image, also stimulates in its own right, prompting a reader toward unpredictable, wide-ranging pathways during engagement with it. Every sentence, every reference, gives pause, leading to other thoughts or thinkers about art, including contemporary art." -- Larry Silver * Sixteenth Century Journal *"Grootenboer opens up innumerable possible directions in which the reader’s mind could fruitfully err, juxtaposing different viewpoints and insights whose encounters incessantly ignite exciting intellectual sparks . . . one is then mesmerized by the exquisite profundity of some paintings, by the beauty of thinking crystallized into images and then 'melting' once again into a stream of contemplation, and by the lofty level of thinking attained through the collaboration, over centuries and continents, between a few brilliant artists and an attentive, insightful viewer who chose to work as an art historian, transforming visual thought into fine discursive language." -- Itay Sapir * Inquiries into Art, Art History, and the Visual *“Grootenboer’s book provides an accessible, clear, and innovating means of thinking about being by revealing a new philosophical subject: artworks.” * Phenomenological Reviews *“Is there a kind of thinking that painting, or photography, can do, which ‘thinking in words’ cannot? What kind of realm do viewers enter when they go somewhere with an image? Are there pictures that are especially good to think with? These are the questions of Grootenboer’s unflinching, generous book, and her conclusion is pungent: ‘Philosophy . . . needs art to say what it cannot say.’” -- T. J. Clark, author of Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come“Thinking with Grootenboer is an unequivocal delight. The Pensive Image recuperates the vibrant invitations to contemplate and reflect that lurk in the quiet corners of Dutch art. Grootenboer’s philosophical insight and deft eye for the unexamined detail meld in a book that is refreshingly original and truly engaging at every turn.” -- Marisa Bass, author of Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt“It’s wonderful to finally have this book. For nearly a century now, the history and philosophy of art have been gathering ideas about how pictures seem to embody thought, rather than simply announce narratives or messages. The literature on this subject is bewilderingly diverse, and this is the first book to bring together compatible insights from writers as diverse as Diderot, Winckelmann, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Damisch, Deleuze, Clark, Rancière, Marin, Mitchell, and Barthes. The result is a coherent account of the thought that sounds in ‘stilled images’ of all kinds.” -- James Elkins, coauthor of Visual Worlds: Looking, Images, Visual DisciplinesTable of ContentsArt as a Form of Thinking Part I | Defining the Pensive Image Chapter 1 | Theorizing Stillness Chapter 2 | Tracing the Denkbild Part II | Painting as Philosophical Reflection Chapter 3 | Room for Reflection: Interior and Interiority Chapter 4 | The Profundity of Still Life Chapter 5 |Painting as a Space for Thought Painting’s Wonder Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThrough an exploration of both practice and theory, this book investigates the relationship between listening and the theatrical encounter in the context of Western theatre and performance. Rather than looking to the stage for a politics or ethics of performance, Rajni Shah asks what work needs to happen in order for the stage itself to appear, exploring some of the factors that might allow or prevent a group of individuals to gather together as an ‘audience’. Shah proposes that the theatrical encounter is a structure that prioritises the attentive over the declarative; each of the five chapters is an exploration of this proposition. The first two chapters propose readings for the terms ‘listening’ and ‘audience’, drawing primarily on Gemma Corradi Fiumara’s writing about the philosophy of listening and Stanley Cavell’s writing about being-in-audience. The third chapter reflects on the work of Lying Fallow, the first of two practice elements which were part of this research, asking whether and how this project aligns with the modes of listening that I have proposed thus far, and introducing Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s writing about the preposition ‘beside’ in relation to being-in-audience. In the fourth chapter, I examine the role of invitation in setting up the parameters for being-in-audience, in relation to Sara Ahmed’s writing about arrival and encounter. And in the final chapter the second practice element, Experiments in Listening, operates to expand our thinking about where and how the work of being-in-audience takes place.Blending the boundaries of theoretical, creative and practice-based artistic work, this book is accompanied by a series of five zines. These describe an embodied experience of knowledge from a personal perspective, both playfully and seriously following a line of enquiry developed in each of the chapters.Trade ReviewExperiments in Listening is a critical, caring, poetic and generous gift to scholars invested in epistemic undoings of Euro-colonial conceptualisations of ‘theatre’ and ‘performance’. In this beautifully written book, Shah offers a philosophical recalibration of our fields by enabling readers to enter a mode of listening – an attentiveness to words, worlds and actions – through a ‘commitment to not-knowing’. By compellingly centring hitherto marginalised voices, perspectives and practices, the book demands a recognition of performance-making as a process through which iterative, non-linear and embodied knowledge-systems live and breathe. -- Royona Mitra, reader in dance and performance cultures, Brunel University LondonTable of ContentsAn Introduction0.1. Influences0.2. Contexts and key terms0.3. How to read this bookChapter One: ListeningPrelude1.1. Root structures1.2. Constructing listening1.3. Accommodating othernessChapter Two: AudiencePrelude2.1. Doing nothing2.2. Performing silence2.3. The choreography of attentionChapter Three: GatheringPrelude3.1. Theatre without a show3.2. Resisting visibility3.3. Failing to declare oneselfChapter Four: InvitationPrelude4.1. How we arrive4.2. The invitational frame4.3. An appropriate responseChapter Five: EncounterPrelude5.1. Experiments in Listening5.2. Listening to form5.3. Being in audience to listening5.4. Passing as friendsConclusionAppendix 1: Lying FallowAppendix 2: Experiments in ListeningBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Tanizaki captures in an amusing, flowing commentary on beauty, architecture, drama, food, feminine beauty, and many other aspects of Japanese life the uneasy mixing of two clashing esthetic traditions." --Edwin O. Reischauer, Harvard University

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Book SynopsisFrom the art of the Greeks to that of Renoir and Moore, this work surveys the ever-changing fashions in what has constituted the ideal nude as a basis of humanist form.Trade Review"Probably no one else alive today writes about art with Sir Kenneth Clark’s precise combination of intelligence, urbanity, and erudition, and certainly his talent has nowhere been better applied than in this volume. . . . This is an important book and a fascinating one." * The New Yorker *"A book which is as much a pleasure to read as it is informative and provocative. . . . [Clark's] command of the English language is rivaled only by the breadth of his curiosity and the sharpness of his visual memory." * New York Times *"[The Nude] is delightfully written." * Times Literary Supplement *

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Book SynopsisThe zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture, dominating the look of its art and commodities as well as our ways of speaking about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this study Ngai offers an aesthetic theory for the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism.Trade ReviewSianne Ngai has written an important book which harks back to the heyday of the leftist literary theory of the 1980s, and is none the worse for that. Dense and demanding, occasionally meandering, [it is] equally at home with I Love Lucy and conceptual art, Theodor Adorno and Jim Carrey… Laudable and ambitious… In order for art to fulfill its role and for criticism to survive, ‘aesthetic theory’ needs to develop new and powerful concepts which reflect both art’s changing nature and its ubiquity. This challenging and important book takes the first steps in this task. -- Robert Eaglestone * Times Literary Supplement *It’s the type of book that contains ideas that are broadly provocative, even for the ‘merely interested.’ It is one of the most useful guides to the present I’ve read in a while, almost despite itself. It offers a way of thinking about so many forms of present-day self-expression, from the prevalence of first-person writing on the Internet to the ‘Like/Share’-this cheer of social networks. It helps explain a certain style of art (Tao Lin, for example) that advances on muted, subdued, contingent feelings. -- Hua Hsu * Slate *[Ngai’s] wide-ranging, synthetic approach is exactly the kind of criticism our ever-accreting culture deserves, and maybe even the criticism we need. By indexing the kinds of feeling-based judgments we make in our daily lives, Ngai opens up questions about how emotions can act in social contexts more generally, how our private experiences might shape our political and economic discourses. -- Rebecca Ariel Porte * Los Angeles Review of Books *Ngai argues that traditional aesthetic concepts of the beautiful and the sublime are inadequate in our post modern hyper-commodifed culture. She’s really on to something. -- David Collard * Times Literary Supplement *A book of immense interest. -- Benjamin Lytal * Daily Beast *Ngai argues that three aesthetic categories usually considered of minor importance are crucial to understanding contemporary culture. The categories in question, the zany, the cute, and the interesting, ‘are best suited for grasping how aesthetic experience has been transformed by the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism.’ In defense of this thesis, Ngai deploys a formidable grasp of the aesthetic theories of Schlegel, Nietzsche, Adorno, and Cavell, among many others. Her knowledge of more recent pop culture is equally wide ranging: readers will especially find illuminating her discussion of the zany Lucille Ball. Ngai aims to show how production, circulation, and consumption in contemporary capitalism are mirrored in the cultural world. She argues that the importance of the three marginal categories requires a revision of classical aesthetics. We need not abandon the beautiful and the sublime, but we need to give attention as well to what best enables us to understand today’s culture, thus lessening the gap between aesthetic theory and practice… Highly recommended for an academic audience interested in cultural and aesthetic theory. -- David Gordon * Library Journal *Sianne Ngai gives us once again a radiantly idiosyncratic study of that which we never thought to examine and that which we now understand to be crucial to our daily experience as social beings. Under Ngai’s quick eye and deft hand, the zany, the cute, and the merely interesting reveal their pertinence for the history and historicity of aesthetic development, the intimacy between quotidian materiality and philosophic inquiry, and the collisions among modernity, art, labor, and performing bodies. -- Anne A. Cheng, author of Second SkinSianne Ngai’s new book is a major work of aesthetic theory: challenging a beauty-based aesthetics, closing the gap between aesthetic theory and artistic practice, and offering irreverent categories that work across disciplines and periods to make better sense of our cultural experience. Our Aesthetic Categories takes up the mantle of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, and here Ngai becomes the leading cultural critic of our day. -- Jonathan Culler, Cornell UniversityThis wonderfully original book (I hesitate to call it ‘cute, zany, and interesting,’ but that wouldn’t be wrong) invents fresh and incisive new categories for that tired old study called aesthetics. Maybe such categories could even transform the field itself, but they certainly transform the way we look at contemporary literature and culture (which Sianne Ngai knows with startling extensiveness), and maybe they will also end up transforming our outlook on the art of the past as well. Our Aesthetic Categories is in any case one of the most exciting new theoretical books to come along in some time. -- Fredric Jameson, Duke UniversityWith unparalleled originality, ambition, and insight, Sianne Ngai reimagines aesthetic theory for our time. Building on her work in Ugly Feelings, Ngai insists on the significance of minor, ordinary aesthetic experience. Our Aesthetic Categories displaces the centrality of beauty in aesthetics and illuminates the social processes at work in ubiquitous and taken-for-granted acts of judgment. This book will make you feel the present differently. -- Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania

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Book SynopsisIncludes 90 documents, short essays, letters, statements and lectures, written by Rothko. This book includes annotation and a chronology of the artist's life and work. It presents a compilation of both published and unpublished writings from 1934-69, telling the importance of writing for an artist who many believed had renounced the written word.Trade Review"Gathering all of the artist's writings held in public collections as well as texts in Rothko's descendants' hands, this book brings to light many of his theoretical stances, practical considerations and personal revelations. . . . This book will change the way Rothko is understood and should be required reading for scholars of his era."—Publishers Weekly"Thanks to this rewarding book, it becomes possible to appreciate more fully than ever before, what [Rothko] thought his work as a painter and art educator were about. . . . A highly insightful look in to the ideas and beliefs that guided his professional painting career."—Burt Wasserman, Primetime A&E

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Book SynopsisFirst and foremost an outcry against injustice and inhumanity, Unto this Last is also a closely argued assault on the science of political economy, which dominated the Victorian period. Ruskin was a profoundly conservative man who looked back to the Middle Ages as a Utopia, yet his ideas had a considerable influence on the British socialist movement. And in making his powerful moral and aesthetic case against the dangers of unhindered industrialization he was strangely prophetic. This volume shows the astounding range and depth of Ruskin''s work, and in an illuminating introduction the editor reveals the consistency of Ruskin''s philosophy and his adamant belief that questions of economics, art and science could not be separated from questions of morality. In Ruskin''s words, ''There is no Wealth but Life.''Table of ContentsEdited with an Introduction and Notes by Clive WilmerIntroductionChronologyFurther ReadingThe King of the Golden RiverFrom The Stones of Venice, Volume IIThe Nature of GothicFrom The Two PathsThe Work of Iron, in Nature, Art, and PolicyFrom Modern Painters, Volume VThe Two BoyhoodsUnto This LastPrefaceEssay I: The Roots of HonourEssay II: The Veins of WealthEssay III: Qui Judicatis TerramEssay IV: Ad ValoremFrom The Crown of Wild OliveTrafficFrom Sesame and LiliesOf Kings' TreasuriesFrom Fors ClavigeraLetter 7: CharitasLetter 10: The Baron's GateNotes

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Book SynopsisOffers insights into both the disciplines of music and philosophy.Trade ReviewLike Hanslick, Professor Payzant is both musician and philosopher; and he has brought the knowledge and insights of both disciplines to this large undertaking. --Gordon Epperson, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

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Book SynopsisBlack is Beautiful identifies and explores the most significant philosophical issues that emerge from the aesthetic dimensions of black life, providing a long-overdue synthesis and the first extended philosophical treatment of this crucial subject. The first extended philosophical treatment of an important subject that has been almost entirely neglected by philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of art Takes an important step in assembling black aesthetics as an object of philosophical study Unites two areas of scholarship for the first time philosophical aesthetics and black cultural theory, dissolving the dilemma of either studying philosophy, or studying black expressive culture Brings a wide range of fields into conversation with one another from visual culture studies and art history to analytic philosophy to musicology producing mutually illuminating approaches that challenge some of the basic suppositions of each Well-bTrade Review"The greatest contribution of the book to analytic aesthetics is that by examining the black aesthetic tradition, Taylor invites us to rethink how aestheticians and philosophers of art have approached the aesthetic tradition in general." - Adriana Clavel-Vazquez, University of Hull - The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 59, Issue 2, April 2019 Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments vii 1 Assembly, Not Birth 1 1 Introduction 1 2 Inquiry and Assembly 3 3 On Blackness 6 4 On the Black Aesthetic Tradition 12 5 Black Aesthetics as/and Philosophy 19 6 Conclusion 26 2 No Negroes in Connecticut: Seers, Seen 32 1 Introduction 33 2 Setting the Stage: Blacking Up Zoe 35 3 Theorizing the (In)visible 36 4 Theorizing Visuality 43 5 Two Varieties of Black Invisibility: Presence and Personhood 48 6 From Persons to Characters: A Detour 51 7 Two More Varieties of Black Invisibility: Perspectives and Plurality 58 8 Unseeing Nina Simone 63 9 Conclusion: Phronesis and Power 69 3 Beauty to Set the World Right: The Politics of Black Aesthetics 77 1 Introduction 77 2 Blackness and the Political 80 3 Politics and Aesthetics 83 4 The Politics–Aesthetics Nexus in Black; or, “The Black Nation: A Garvey Production” 85 5 Autonomy and Separatism 87 6 Propaganda, Truth, and Art 88 7 What is Life but Life? Reading Du Bois 91 8 Apostles of Truth and Right 94 9 On “Propaganda” 98 10 Conclusion 99 4 Dark Lovely Yet And; Or, How To Love Black Bodies While Hating Black People 104 1 Introduction 105 2 Circumscribing the Topic: Definitions and Distinctions 107 3 Circumscribing the Topic, cont’d: Context and Scope 109 4 The Cases 110 5 Reading the Cases 115 6 Conclusion 129 5 Roots and Routes: Disarming Authenticity 132 1 Introduction 132 2 An Easy Case: The Germans in Yorubaland 134 3 A Harder Case: Kente Capers 136 4 Varieties of Authenticity 138 5 From Exegesis to Ethics 144 6 The Kente Case, Revisited 151 6 Make It Funky; Or, Music’s Cognitive Travels and the Despotism of Rhythm 155 1 Introduction 156 2 Beyond the How‐Possible: Kivy’s Questions 157 3 Stimulus, Culture, Race 159 4 Preliminaries: Rhythm, Brains, and Race Music 162 5 The Flaw in the Funk 168 6 (Soul) Power to the People 172 7 Funky White Boys and Honorary Soul Sisters 174 8 Conclusion 177 7 Conclusion: “It Sucks That I Robbed You”; Or, Ambivalence, Appropriation, Joy, Pain 182 Index 186

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Book SynopsisIn Anteaesthetics, Rizvana Bradley begins from the proposition that blackness cannot be represented in modernity's aesthetic regime, but is nevertheless foundational to every representation. Troubling the idea that the aesthetic is sheltered from the antiblack terror that lies just beyond its sanctuary, Bradley insists that blackness cannot make a home within the aesthetic, yet is held as its threshold and aporia. The book problematizes the phenomenological and ontological conceits that underwrite the visual, sensual, and abstract logics of modernity. Moving across multiple histories and geographies, artistic mediums and forms, from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema, to the contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art of Glenn Ligon, Mickalene Thomas, and Sondra Perry, Bradley inaugurates a new method for interpretation—an ante-formalism which demonstrates how black art engages in the recursive deconstruction of the aesthetic forms that remain foundational to modernity. Foregrounding the negativity of black art, Bradley shows how each of these artists disclose the racialized contours of the body, form, and medium, even interrogating the form that is the world itself. Drawing from black critical theory, Continental philosophy, film and media studies, art history, and black feminist thought, Bradley explores artistic practices that inhabit the negative underside of form. Ultimately, Anteaesthetics asks us to think philosophically with black art, and with the philosophical invention black art necessarily undertakes.Trade Review"Anteaesthetics is the study of black aesthetics I didn't know I sorely needed. Bradley offers a razor-sharp and sumptuous meditation on black aesthetics in, through, and vestibular to an anti-black world."—Alexander Ghedi Weheliye, Brown University"Rizvana Bradley's searching theory of black aesthesis traces black art's recursions through the violent origins of the aesthetic. Anteaesthetics opens a mode of reading for black art's non-instrumental exploration of abyssal descent. An incisive and energizing book through and through."—Rei Terada, University of California, Irvine"In this brilliantly conceived and exquisitely rendered study, Bradley offers a path-breaking analysis that will revolutionize how we approach, contest, and undo the Western visual field. Anteaesthetics offers an indispensable and undisciplined new frame for black feminist theorizing."—Huey Copeland, University of Pennsylvania"Incisive and compelling, Bradley's Anteaesthetics restores to thought and feeling a capacious sense of the aesthetic, revealing its tremendous and violent power as nothing less than foundational to a racially typified modern world."—Shane Denson, Stanford University"Anteaesthetics limns the depths of aesthetic and semiotic violence, refocusing our theoretical vision. This is an indispensable text—a tour de force."—Calvin Warren, Emory UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Toward a Theory of Anteaesthetics 2. The Corporeal Division of the World, or Aesthetic Ruination 3. Before the Nude, or Exorbitant Figuration 4. The Black Residuum, or That Which Remains 5. Unworlding, or the Involution of Value

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Book SynopsisAidan explores the ways in which Nietzsche's warning that 'the desert grows' has been taken up by Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze in their critiques of modernity, and the desert in literature ranging from T.S Eliot to Don DeLillo; from imperial travel writing to postmodernism; and from the Old Testament to salvagepunk.

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Who ponders the sock? This common object is something people tug on and take off daily with hardly a thought. Unraveling the garment's history, construction, and use, Kim Adrian's Sock reintroduces us to our own bodies vulnerable, bipedal, and flawed. Sock reminds us that extraordinary secrets live in mundane material realities, and shows how this floppy, often smelly, sometimes holey piece of clothing, whether machine-made or hand-knit, can also serve as an anatomy lesson, a physics primer, a love letter, a weapon, a fetish, and a fashion statement.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewKim Adrian's Sock is the darndest thing. Witty and sly, written with the highest tactile precision, it is at the same time stacked with erudite asides and unexpected perspectives. Adrian reminds us where the ground lies and how we move upon it—and what miraculous things we have encasing our feet as we do so. * Sven Birkerts, author of Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age *Fun, focused, and footloose! * Nicholson Baker, author of The Way the World Works: Essays *[This book] serves to entertain in its erudite approach to yet another unexpected subject. * The Bookbag *Through a discussion of the footwear's material, social and cultural evolution, Sock reflects on the brilliance present in the minutiae of our lives. With piercing wit, idiosyncratic humor and sharply insightful moments of personal examination, Adrian uses the most domestic of items as a lens through which to view the inelegance and wondrousness of humanity. Encompassing the utility of protecting an essentially vulnerable, uncomfortable body and the bonds mothers form with the objects that cover the delicate toes of their babies, Adrian's warm, insightful investigation will give this common object new prominence in any reader's mind. Sock delivers a detailed exploration of human nature through whimsically astute commentary on a common, closely held object. * Shelf Awareness *An utterly engaging investigation — not so much of [the sock], per se, as of human evolution, anatomy, physics, sexuality, fashion, painting, consumerism, manufacturing, and motherhood … illuminating, erudite, deeply intelligent. * Los Angeles Review of Books *If a book called Sock makes you think, 'Twenty-five-thousand words on socks? Uh, no,' then you’re unclear on the concept. You’re also missing out on a thoroughly delightful discussion. * Washington Independent Review of Books *A remarkable read, a perfectly satisfying balance of fact and quirk and charm. * Knitty *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Socks & Evolution 2. Socks & Desire 3. Socks & Industry Coda: Instructions for Darning a Sock Notes Index

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Book SynopsisScience fiction is filled with spacecraft. On Earth, actual rockets explode over Texas while others make their way to Mars. But what are spacecraft, and just what can they teach us about imagination, ecology, democracy, and the nature of objects? Why do certain spacecraft stand out in popular culture?If ever there were a spacecraft that could be detached from its context, sold as toys, turned into Disney rides, parodied, and flit around in everyone's headthe Millennium Falcon would be it. Springing from this infamous Star Wars vehicle, Spacecraft takes readers on an intergalactic journey through science fiction and speculative philosophy, revealing real-world political and ecological lessons along the way. In this book Timothy Morton shows how spacecraft are never mere flights of fancy.Trade ReviewAs I read Morton’s account of his childhood engagement with space flight, I thought of my own, when my personal imaginary met world history, though I certainly didn’t think in those terms at the time. In pursuing Morton’s childhood, I’m not attempting to shoehorn Spacecraft into old-fashioned biographical criticism whereby one seeks to explain a text by finding its secrets in the author’s autobiography. It’s part of the story he’s telling, one common to many children whose imagination has been fired with visions of space travel. It’s a story born of a specific cultural imaginary common among children of the last decades of the previous century … Spacecraft, then, is a vehicle in which Morton meditates on futurality. The Millennium Falcon, along with hyperspace, is at the center of this meditation. * 3 Quarks Daily *Morton is the punk rock sci-fi geek artist philosopher of Now. In prose as precise and freewheeling as one of their flights-of-fancy spacecraft, this book takes us on a journey of the mind through the hyperspace of pop-culture and high thought, because It Is All Connected Can’t You See? I started reading this and lost a day but gained a light year. * Max Borenstein, screenwriter of Godzilla vs. Kong *This is a brilliantly provoking book about why spacecraft are not at all the same as spaceships, and how imaginary objects can transform our thinking. Morton offers an exuberant, acute, compact, and luminously uplifting guide to the ways in which human society might become a whole lot more progressive in the coming centuries. * Nicholas Royle, author of Veering: A Theory of Literature *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Ships and Craft 1. Garbage 2. Winnings 3. Luck 4. Lounge 5. Hyperspace 6. Anyone Index

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Book SynopsisTheodor Adorno (1903-69) was undoubtedly the foremost thinker of the Frankfurt School, the influential group of German thinkers that fled to the US in the 1930s, including such thinkers as Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer. His work has proved enormously influential in sociology, philosophy and cultural theory. Aesthetic Theory is Adorno's posthumous magnum opus and the culmination of a lifetime's investigation. Analysing the sublime, the ugly and the beautiful, Adorno shows how such concepts frame and distil human experience and that it is human experience that ultimately underlies aesthetics. In Adorno's formulation ‘art is the sedimented history of human misery'.Trade Review"...the fact that they [Continuum] are putting low price tags on works once published in expensive academic editions is something of which we can all be glad.." -Modern Painters, 2/05Table of ContentsTranslator's Acknowledgement \ Translator's Introduction \ 1. Art, Society, Aesthetics \ 2. Situation \ 3. On the Categories of the Ugly, the Beautiful, and Technique \ 4. Natural Beauty \ 5. Art Beauty: Apparition, Spiritualization, Intuitability \ 6. Semblance and Expression \ 7. Enigmaticalness, Truth Content, Metaphysics \ 8. Coherence and Meaning \ 9. Subject-Object \ 10. Toward a Theory of the Artwork \ 11. Universal and Particular \ 12. Society \ 13. Paralimpomena \ 14. Theories On the Origin of Art \ 15. Draft Introduction \ Editor's Afterword.

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Book SynopsisFeatures a dialogue between two of the most interesting thinkers working in philosophy and architecture. This work covers fundamental problems of politics, identity, and aesthetics as their exchange becomes an imaginative exploration of the possibilities of modern architecture and the future of modern life.Trade Review"A remarkable installment in Baudrillard's longstanding polemic about the modern object." - Semiotic Review of Books "Enormously suggestive... [The interviews] will leave those willing to wrestle with what is said here with a deeper understanding of the world we live in." - modernism/modernity"

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Book SynopsisDidacticism, romanticism, and classicism are the possible schemata for the knotting of art and philosophy, the third term in this knot being the education of subjects, youth in particular. What characterizes the century that has just come to a close is that, while it underwent the saturation of these three schemata, it failed to introduce a new one. Today, this predicament tends to produce a kind of unknotting of terms, a desperate dis-relation between art and philosophy, together with the pure and simple collapse of what circulated between them: the theme of education.Whence the thesis of which this book is nothing but a series of variations: faced with such a situation of saturation and closure, we must attempt to propose a new schema, a fourth type of knot between philosophy and art.Among these inaesthetic variations, the reader will encounter a sustained debate with contemporary philosophical uses of the poem, bold articulations of the specificity and prospects of Table of Contents@fmct:Contents @toc4:Translator's Note iii @toc2:1 Art and Philosophy 0 2 What is a Poem?, or, Philosophy and Poetry at the Point of the Unnamable 00 3 A French Philosopher Responds to a Polish Poet 00 4 A Philosophical Task: To be Contemporaries of Pessoa 000 5 A Poetic Dialectics: Labid ben Rabi'a and Mallarme 000 6 Dance as a Metaphor for Thought 000 7 Theses on Theater 000 8 The False Movements of Cinema 000 9 Being, Existence, Thought: Prose and Concept 000 10 Philosophy of the Faun 000 @toc4:Source Materials 000 Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: Aesthetics

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Book SynopsisIn premodern China, elite painters used imagery not to mirror the world around them, but to evoke unfathomable experience. Considering their art alongside the philosophical traditions that inform it, this book explores the "nonobject" - a notion exemplified by paintings that do not seek to represent observable surroundings.Trade Review"This is one of those rare, precious, and necessary books that, once you have completed a first reading, you realize you have only just begun." (Magazine Litteraire)"

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Book SynopsisStephen K. Levine's new book explores the nature of traumatic experience and the therapeutic role of the arts and arts therapies in responding to it. It suggests that by re-imagining painful and tragic experiences through art-making, we may release their fixity and negative hold on our lives and resist the temptation to assume the role of the victim. Among the many concerns that the book addresses is the damage done by the tendency to adopt stock methods of understanding and superficial explanations for the depths, complexities, wonders, and exasperations of human experience. The book explores the chaos and fragmentation inherent in both art and human existence and the ways in which memory and imagination can find meaning by acknowledging this chaos and embodying it in appropriate forms. The book builds on the important theories of Stephen K. Levine's previous book, Poiesis: The Language of Psychology and the Speech of the Soul, also published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. It challenges dominant psychological perspectives on trauma and provides a new framework for arts therapists, psychotherapists, psychologists and social scientists to understand the effectiveness of the arts therapies in responding to human suffering.Trade ReviewThis is a brilliant book...those who love to search for meaning in a meaningleess world will find much to ponder on in this book. -- The Independent PractitionerStephen K. Levine's TRAUMA, TRAGEDY, THERAPY: THE ARTS AND HUMAN SUFFERING provides a powerful exploration of the nature of trauma and how the arts and arts therapies can help...His challeneges popular psychological perspectives on trauma and provides a different framework for arts therapists and psychologists to understand its course and effectiveness. Health libraries strong in psychology will find this a fine pick. -- The Midwest Book ReviesDeeply prychological, Stephen Levine goes over being at the bottom of life, chaos, healing, and the human body. Trauma, Tragedy, Therapy is a top pick for addition to arts and psychology collections for community and college libraries. -- The Midwest Book ReviewsOn the whole, Levine makes an important contribution to the field of trauma study by identifying philosophical problems within the current field of trauma study. He then shows how a new discourse, a new imagination of the problem and of new possibilities, can be created through the expressive arts therapies...What Levine has done with Trauma, Tragedy, Therapy is an enormous gift to the literature on the psychology of trauma, and it lays the foundation for careful and productive new studies. -- PsycCRITIQUESThis is a stimulating and challenging book which deserves careful reading by all types of psychological therapist. It will augment the more familiar psychological literature and, perhaps, prompt re-evaluation of clinical practice. -- Clinical Psychology ForumTable of ContentsAcknowledgments. Foreword. Introduction. Part I. From Trauma to Tragedy. 1.. Going to the Ground: Reflections on the Foundations of Expressive Arts Therapy. 2. Mimetic Wounds: From Trauma to Tragedy. 3. Trauma, Therapy and the Arts: Towards a Dionysian Poiesis. Part II. Chaos Into Form. 4. Order and Chaos in Therapy and the Arts: An Encounter. 5. Is Order Enough? Is Chaos too Much? Art, Therapy and the Search for Wholeness - A Dialogue. 6. The Expressive Body: A Fragmented Totality. 7. The Second Coming: Beauty, Chaos and the Arts. 8. The Art of Despair: Therapy After Godot. Chapter 9. Researching Information - Imagining Research. 10. A Fragmented Totality? An Interview. Part III. Poiesis After Post-Modernism. 11. Poiesis and Praxis: Between Art and Action. 12. Be Like Jacques: Mimesis with a Difference. 13. What Can I Say Dear After I've Said Sorry? Poiesis After Post-Modernism. References.

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Though we try to imagine otherwise, waste is every object, plus time. Whatever else an object is, it’s also waste—or was, or will be. All that is needed is time or a change of sentiment or circumstance. Waste is not merely the field of discarded objects, but the name we give to our troubled relationship with the decaying world outside ourselves. Waste focuses on those waste objects that most fundamentally shape our lives and also attempts to understand our complicated emotional and intellectual relationships to our own refuse: nuclear waste, climate debris, pop-culture rubbish, digital detritus, and more. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewFascinating, thought-provoking, and necessary, Brian Thill’s Waste is about not just our present but our future. You can’t read it and come out of the experience unchanged. * Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times-Bestselling Author of The Southern Reach trilogy *If 'waste,' as Brian Thill points out, is any object plus time, then Waste is waste plus spirited curiosity and tremendous intelligence. With a gaze full of vigor and heart, Thill looks at the fate of what we discard—from space junk to horse corpses to bird bellies split open from plastic—and illuminates invisible margins we’d often rather forget. I read the whole book in one sitting, spellbound. * Leslie Jamison, New York Times-Bestselling Author of The Empathy Exams *Waste is the finest filth around—or really the finest mediation of it I can think of: Thill looks deeply into how what we waste controls us at the level of the personal and the public—our discards become our fate and home both—and finds treasure. * Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night *Waste pluralizes, names a condition into which objects fall, takes us beachcombing, dumpster diving. ‘Waste is every object, plus time’… The true aim of Brian Thill’s book, however, is… that non-place to which waste is sent. We cannot afford… to believe in such a zone any longer. Of course, we never really could or did — out of sight was simply out of mind. Waste always kept coming back. -- Julian Yates * Los Angeles Review of Books *Table of ContentsThe beach that speaks Trash familiars/Tabflab Pigs in space Million-year panic Ruinism Splinter, shard, and stone Where the hoard is Lake Carbamazepine Acknowledgements Illustrations Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The veil can be an instrument of feminist empowerment, and veiled anonymity can confer power to women. Starting from her own marriage ceremony at which she first wore a full veil, Rafia Zakaria examines how veils do more than they get credit for. Part memoir and part philosophical investigation, Veil questions that what is seen is always good and free, and that what is veiled can only signal servility and subterfuge. From personal encounters with the veil in France (where it is banned) to Iran (where it is compulsory), Zakaria shows how the garment's reputation as a pre-modern relic is fraught and up for grabs. The veil is an object in constant transformation, whose myriad meanings challenge the absolute truths of patriarchy. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewRafia Zakaria, journalist and author, unravels the complex nexus of attitudes, policies, and histories revolving around this object in her fascinating new book, Veil. She demonstrates how the object can serve as a moral delineator, a disciplinary measure, a signifier of goodness, or as a means to subvert or rebel social norms. Through personal narratives and detailed analysis of various social and political conditions Zakaria offers an engaging and nuanced assessment of the veil in the contemporary context. * New Books Network *An intellectually bracing, beautifully written exploration of an item of clothing all too freighted with meaning. * Molly Crabapple, artist, journalist, and author of Drawing Blood (2015) *Rafia Zakaria’s Veil shifts the balance away from white secular Europe toward the experience of Muslim women, mapping the stereotypical representations of the veil in Western culture and then reflecting, in an intensely personal way, on the many meanings that the veil can have for the people who wear it … Zakaria’s more personal, philosophical approach is intended to contest the singular meaning that the veil has acquired in much of the West. By exploring the subjective experiences of the veil, we begin to see how both wearing it and not wearing it have profound psychic resonances for those who make these choices, as well as for those who regard it with hostility or even just curiosity … [Veil is] useful and important, providing needed insight and detail to deepen our understanding of how we got here—a necessary step for thinking about whether and how we might be able to move to a better place. * Joan W. Scott, The Nation *I admired Rafia Zakaria’s Veil months even before I read it … Her engaging prose is just what I hoped to find inside this little book, which is composed of short vignettes on the veil rather than a sustained philosophical treaty. * Reading Religion *Slim but formidable. * London Review of Books *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Submission 2. Purity, Necessity Unity 3. Rebellion 4. Feminism 5. Submissive or Submersive Epilogue Index

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Book SynopsisIn light of current discourses on AI and robotics, what do the various experiences of art contribute to the rethinking of technology today?Art and Cosmotechnics addresses the challenge of technology to the existence of art and traditional thought, especially in light of current discourses on artificial intelligence and robotics. It carries out an attempt on the cosmotechnics of Chinese landscape painting in order to address this question, and further asks: What is the significance of shanshui (mountain and water) in face of the new challenges brought about by the current technological transformation? Thinking art and cosmotechnics together is an attempt to look into the varieties of experiences of art and to ask what these experiences might contribute to the rethinking of technology today.Trade Review "This book opens the way to rethinking technology beyond Gestell, by exploring the obscure paths of the experience of art."—Augustin Berque, author of Thinking Through Landscape "Art and Cosmotechnics is a must-read, especially for Westerners, to unlock the transformative potential of art vis-à-vis technologies."—Neural "Yuk Hui has played a key role in creating a framework within which current art-historical discourse regarding this vital subject can thrive."—Leonardo Reviews

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Book SynopsisPresents the last major work of Gilles Deleuze, translated into English.

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Book SynopsisThis is the third volume of Maurice Blanchot’s war-time Literary Chronicles. Written in 1943, they appeared during the darkest days of the war yet also at a time when real hope for victory was becoming possible. Against the grain of any simple optimism, Blanchot identifies in ruin and disaster a sign and a chance for a mode of human relation that will truly guarantee the future.Trade Review"Maurice Blanchot's writings during the Vichy years (1941-44) may be the most crucial of his long career, particularly when read against his controversial political writings of the 1930s. Although to all appearances occasional pieces, these literary essays and reviews are also projects of self-transformation in which Blanchot becomes an increasingly distanced and even invisible observer of the disaster of Occupied France, as well as a writer whose critiques of the conventions of the novel look forward to his later experiments in fragmentary writing and the materializations of language." -- -Gerald L. Bruns University of Notre Dame "Writing from one world in ruins to another, Blanchot comes to us today to pose the question of what, if anything, deserves to survive the collapse of an established order of meaning. Through the richness and precision of Michael Holland's presentation of these texts, and the elegance and rigour of his translations, we meet with new understanding one of recent history's most stringent explorations of the possibilities and limitations of thought in the face of disaster. If the now-forgotten subjects of many of these essays might suggest that they have little to say to our present day, Holland helps us to see that nothing could be further from the truth. Blanchot is not writing to us, no doubt. But he is most certainly writing for us." -- -Martin Crowley Queens' College "...what makes Blanchot's critical essays so important is the depth of his engagement with writing as a concept and the experience of writing fiction that he brings to the task. An essential Blanchotian theme treated in this volume, as throughout his work, is the ambiguity of literary language. Blanchot conceives of literature as having a unique power to put language itself in question, exposing the reader or writer to what lies beyond meaning, knowledge, and all familiar relations... Holland has rendered readers a service by stressing the importance of historical context in interpreting Blanchot's writings, and by extension 20th-century French thought, more generally." -- -Calum Watt Review 31 / Kings College "How did Maurice Blanchot transform himself from journeyman reviewer to the theorist of narrative whose work transformed the intellectual landscape of the postwar era? This collection of reviews from a single, harrowing year, 1943, provides answers. Expertly introduced, annotated, and translated by leading Blanchot scholar Michael Holland, A World in Ruins provides a unique entry into making of literature under Nazi occupation." -- -Alice Kaplan Yale UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction by Michael Holland Nicholas of Cusa The Correspondence of Madame de Lafayette The Book Novels of the Land Tocqueville's Recollections Symbolism and the Poets of Today On Montherlant's Play The Romance of Marie Dorval and Vigny Novels Machiavelli Eloquence and Literature On Jouhandeau's Work The Thirteen Forms of a Novel From Praise to Sovereignty Religious Poetry Novels French Suite Hoffman's Fantastic On the Song of Roland Kierkegaard and AEsthetics The Art of the Short Story Women Novelists of Today A History of French Literature The Influence of the American Novel The Mysticism of Angelus Silesius Autobiographical Narratives History and the Masterpiece A Study of the Apocalypse La Fontaine Without the Fables The Pure Novel The Novel of the Gaze Tradition and Surrealism A World in Ruins Index

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Book SynopsisRobert Pfaller advances a general theory of interpassivity as the wish for delegated consumption and enjoyment in both art and in everyday life, tackling a vast range of phenomena: culture, art, sports and religion.Trade Review'New concepts are rare in social thinking and interpassivity is arguably the only true concept to have emerged in the last two decades... So let's not beat around the bush, Interpassivity is simply one of the great founding texts of social thought, on a par with classic works by Max Weber - Slavoj Zizek

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Book SynopsisOriginally delivered as the prestigious Mellon Lectures on the Fine Arts in 1995, After the End of Art remains a classic of art criticism and philosophy, and continues to generate heated debate for contending that art ended in the 1960s. Arthur Danto, one of the best-known art critics of his time, presents radical insights into art's irrevocable deTrade ReviewWinner of the 1998 Eugene M. Kayden National University Press Book Prize, University of Colorado at Boulder "If you are seriously attentive to contemporary art, you are already aware of Danto and his general positions, and owe it to yourself to read this book. If you are not, but are genuinely curious, you would do well to follow him... Throughout it is clear and direct; at best, it is brilliantly crystalline... I know of no more useful single book on art today."--Michael Pakenham, Baltimore Sun "Is Danto gloomy about the end of art? Not in the slightest... Danto is nothing if not cheered by the prospect of an art world in which everything is permitted."--Roger Copeland, Wilson Quarterly "... the need for critical works such as this one--learned, discerning and refreshingly open-minded--is perhaps greater than ever."--Publishers Weekly "In this, Dr. Danto's best book yet, he helps us make sense of the times we are living in."--Richard Dorment, The Art Newspaper "Required reading for anyone seriously interested in late-modern and contemporary art."--Library Journal "Danto was and remains the high priest of pluralism, and arch-critic of the view that art has a distinctive essence... The chapters in this book are a challenging read, but a good one, because they take us to the heart of a living and profoundly interesting contemporary debate."--A.C. Grayling, Financial Times "Danto makes a lively and stimulating case [about the end of art]... The source ... of all ths mental labor is Andy Warhol, or more precisely his Brillo box sculpture... The utter banality of the piece sent 600 years of art history crashing to the ground in ruins."--Boston Book ReviewTable of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Foreword to the Princeton Classics Edition xi Preface xvii Acknowledgments xxi CHAPTER ONE Introduction: Modern, Postmodern, and Contemporary 3 CHAPTER TWO Three Decades after the End of Art 21 CHAPTER THREE Master Narratives and Critical Principles 41 CHAPTER FOUR Modernism and the Critique of Pure Art: The Historical Vision of Clement Greenberg 61 CHAPTER FIVE From Aesthetics to Art Criticism 81 CHAPTER SIX Painting and the Pale of History: The Passing of the Pure 101 CHAPTER SEVEN Pop Art and Past Futures 117 CHAPTER EIGHT Painting, Politics, and Post-Hisotrical Art 135 CHAPTER NINE The Historical Museum of Monochrome Art 153 CHAPTER TEN Museums and the Thirsting Millions 175 CHAPTER ELEVEN Modalities of History: Possibility and Comedy 193 Index 221

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Book SynopsisBeauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference. In this Very Short Introduction the renowned philosopher Roger Scruton explores the concept of beauty, asking what makes an object - either in art, in nature, or the human form - beautiful, and examining how we can compare differing judgements of beauty when it is evident all around us that our tastes vary so widely. Is there a right judgement to be made about beauty? Is it right to say there is more beauty in a classical temple than a concrete office block, more in a Rembrandt than in last year''s Turner Prize winner? Forthright and thought-provoking, and as accessible as it is intellectually rigorous, this introduction to the philosophy of beauty draws conclusions that some may find controversial, but, as Scruton shows, help us to find greater sense of meaning in the beautiful objects that fill our lives.ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.Trade ReviewMouthwatering design-compact, colorful, sturdy. Can travel in one's pocket. * Walks of Art, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju *Table of ContentsPreface ; 1. Judging beauty ; 2. Human beauty ; 3. Natural beauty ; 4. Everyday beauty ; 5. Artistic beauty ; 6. Taste and order ; 7. Art and Eros ; 8. The flight from beauty ; 9. Concluding thoughts ; Notes and Further Reading

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Book SynopsisIf art and science have one thing in common, it's a hunger for the new - new ideas and innovations, new ways of seeing and depicting the world. The author takes us on a tour of more than two millennia of thinking about the problem of the new, from the puzzles of the pre-Socratics all the way up to the art world of the 1960s and '70s.Trade Review"Novelty is an indispensable account of the extraordinary persistence and power of ideas about novelty and the new in our culture. It is very well researched, clearly written, and above all sustains a compelling narrative. Michael North surveys a wide field of intellectual and cultural history, and provides pithy, often witty, summaries of complex ideas. The result is a book that is bold in its claims, and sure to stimulate discussion." -Peter Middleton, University of Southampton"

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Book SynopsisChristopher Bartel is Professor of Philosophy at Appalachian State University, USA.

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewAesthetics as Phenomenology is an important and potentially major contribution to the philosophy of art. * Phenomenological Reviews *Table of ContentsTranslator's ForewordIntroductionChapter One: Art, Philosophically1. Why Art?2. Which Art?3. Philosophy of Art and AestheticsChapter Two: Beauty4. Free Play5. Appearances and Things6. Showing and Self-ShowingChapter Three: Art Forms7. Arts8. Essential Determinations9. MixturesChapter Four: Nature10. Oppositions11. Limits and Inclusions12. Primordial AppearanceChapter Five: Space13. Places14. Emptiness15. HereBibliographyIndex of Names and SubjectsIndex of Terms

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Book SynopsisTwo representative and important works in one volume by one of the greatest German philosophers.The Birth of Tragedy (1872) was Nietzsche''s first book. Its youthful faults were exposed by Nietzsche in the brilliant Attempt at a Self-Criticism which he added to the new edition of 1886. But the book, whatever its excesses, remains one of the most relevant statements on tragedy ever penned. It exploded the conception of Greek culture that was prevalent down through the Victorian era, and it sounded themes developed in the twentieth century by classicists, existentialists, psychoanalysts, and others.The Case of Wagner (1888) was one Nietzsche''s last books, and his wittiest. In attitude and style it is diametrically opposed to The Birth of Tragedy. Both works transcend their ostensible subjects and deal with art and culture, as well as the problems of the modern age generally.Each book in itself gives us an inadequate idea of its author; together, they furnish a striking image of Nietzsche''s thought. The distinguished translations by Walter Kaufmann superbly reflect in English Nietzsche''s idiom and the vitality of his style. Professor Kaufmann has also furnished running footnote commentaries, relevant passages from Nietzsche''s correspondence, a bibliography, and, for the first time in any edition, an extensive index to each book.

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Book SynopsisIn this ground-breaking and influential study Fredric Jameson explores the complex place and function of literature within culture. At the time Jameson was actually writing the book, in the mid to late seventies, there was a major reaction against deconstruction and poststructuralism. As one of the most significant literary theorists, Jameson found himself in the unenviable position of wanting to defend his intellectual past yet keep an eye on the future. With this book he carried it off beautifully. A landmark publication, The Political Unconscious takes its place as one of the most meaningful works of the twentieth century.century.Trade Review'Every now and then a book appears which is literally ahead of its time ...The Political Unconscious is such a book ... it sets new standards of what a classic work is.' - Slavoj Zizek

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Book SynopsisIn his new book, acclaimed science writer Matt Ridley looks to the peculiar mating rituals of birds to better understand the rich origins and ongoing significance of Darwin''s sexual selection theory.''FASCINATING'' The TimesMatt Ridley is one of our finest science writers A treat for bird lovers and evolutionary biologists alike' Richard DawkinsAnimals rarely treat sex as a simple or mutually beneficial transaction. Choosing a mate is often a transcendent event to be approached with reverence, suspicion, angst and quite a bit of violence. For Matt Ridley, nowhere is this more acute than in birds.From a freezing hide on the Pennine moors at dawn, Ridley closely studies the rare Black Grouse. He is there for the lek an elaborate courtship ritual of squabbling and strutting males. They dance and sing for hours each day to attract a mate over several months. With most males leaving exhausted and unsuccessful, Ridley looks at how females make their choice to cast fresh light on how such rituals have evolved and why.His pursuit follows five generations of biologists from Darwin and Wallace to the present day, uncovering how they have grappled with the implications of sexual selection as an eccentric, gonzo form of evolution. While most Victorian scientists found it impossible to believe female birds could select mates, Darwin was obsessed with the idea of sexual as well as natural selection.Drawing on his own lifelong passion, Ridley eavesdrops on the elaborate displays of bird species around the world, from the complex art installations made by Bowerbirds in Australia to the bubbling calls of Curlews in the UK's declining moorlands. In a wonderful blend of nature writing and elegant exploration of recent evolutionary theory, Birds, Sex and Beauty shows not only how mate choice has shaped the natural world, including humans, but how the song and plumage of birds can be thrillingly, breathtakingly beautiful.Clear and entertaining Ridley explains all this history with lucidity and wit'New StatesmanMost of this fascinating and accessible book is about birds Ridley, very clearly, loves birds and the enthusiasm is infectious'The TimesThis is a fascinating story told with wit, scholarship and the passion of a true conversationist. Lord Ridley writes in the best tradition of great British naturalists' Country LifeBirds, Sex & Beauty is a good read. It is a compelling history of sexual selection, rather than a synthesis that moves the field forwards'Nature

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Book SynopsisDeath-Devoted Heart explodes the established interpretation of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, proving the drama to be more than just a sublimation of the composer's love for Wesendonck or a wistful romantic dream. Scruton boldly attests that Tristan and Isolde has profound religious meaning and remains as relevant today as it was to Wagner's contemporaries.Trade Reviewsuperb book....can still teach much even to those who think they long ago grasped the secret of this masterpiece. * Simon Heffer, Literary Review *(Roger Scruton's book is a deep and daunting) 'study of the most important single composition in Western music ... Scruton's examination is highly original and delves into aspects which have seldom been explored so rigorously' * Peter Porter, The Independent Books, *a very, very, scholarly work... * Tony Hall, Royal Opera House CEO in FT Magazine *superb analysis... * Michael Portillo, New Statesman *Table of Contents1. Wagner and Religion ; 2. The Story of Tristan ; 3. Wagner's Treatment of the Story ; 4. The Music of Tristan ; 5. The Philosophy of Love ; 6. Tragedy and Sacrifice ; 7. Love, Death, and Redemption ; EPILOGUE From Romance to Ritual ; APPENDIX Table of Motives ; NOTES ; SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ; INDEX

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Book SynopsisJohn Ruskin was born in London in 1819. He became a towering literary figure in the nineteenth century, known for his writings on both art and on political economy. He became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University in 1869. John Ruskin died in 1900.

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Book SynopsisNo philosopher has held a higher opinion of art than Hegel, yet nor was any so profoundly pessimistic about its prospects - despite living in the German golden age of Goethe, Mozart and Schiller. For if the artists of classical Greece could find the perfect fusion of content and form, modernity faced complicating - and ultimately disabling - questions. Christianity, with its code of unworldliness, had compromised the immediacy of man''s relationship with reality, and ironic detachment had alienated him from his deepest feelings. Hegel''s Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics were delivered in Berlin in the 1820s and stand today as a passionately argued work that challenged the ability of art to respond to the modern world.Table of ContentsThe range of aesthetic defined, and some objections against the philosophy of art refuted; methods of science applicable to beauty and art; the conception of artisitc beauty; historical deduction of the true idea of art in modern philosophy; division of the subject.

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