Philosophy: aesthetics Books
Northwestern University Press Distributions of the Sensible
Book SynopsisJacques Rancière's work is increasingly central to several debates across the humanities. Distributions of the Sensible confronts a question at the heart of his thought: How should we conceive the relationship between the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics?
£103.55
Scarecrow Press Historical Dictionary of Aesthetics Historical
Book SynopsisTrade Review...helpful....something for the recommended reading list.... * s, Vol. 21, No. 6 (2007) *The entries are consistently clear and quite broadly accessible, helpfully peppered with much cross-referencing....Recommended. * CHOICE, March 2007 *Kant adopted it in his Critique of Judgment but who coined the term "aesthetics?" What role does horror play in recent theories of mass art? What are the rules that make up a standard of taste? Here Townsend (philosopher, Armstrong Atlantic State U.) makes it clear that the study of aesthetics goes far beyond determining what is beautiful, giving terms, great thinkers and artists, movements, classifications, means of analysis and appreciation and synopses of significant texts. The result, despite the complexities inherent in the study of aesthetics, is accessible enough for most general readers yet provides starting-points for those going deeper into the subject. He also supplies a bibliography sorted by topic, a chronology and an introduction providing a solid framework for the entries. Townsend brings in a number of theorists, Jung, Marx, Panofsky and Derrida among them, and explains the trickier terms in plain language. * Reference and Research Book News, November 2006 *Table of ContentsPart 1 Editor's Foreward Part 2 Reader's Note Part 3 Chronology Part 4 Introduction Part 5 THE DICTIONARY Part 6 Bibliography Part 7 About the Author
£107.10
Scarecrow Press The A to Z of Aesthetics
Book SynopsisAesthetics is not a factual discipline; there are no aesthetic facts. The word itself is derived from the Greek word for feeling and the discipline arises because of the need to find a place for the passions within epistemologythe branch of philosophy that investigates our beliefs. Aesthetics is more than just the study of beauty; it is a study of that which appeals to our senses, most often in connection with the classification, analysis, appreciation, and understanding of art. The A to Z of Aesthetics covers its history from Classical Greece to the present, including entries on non-western aesthetics. The book contains a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on the main concepts, terminology, important persons (philosophers, critics, and artists), and the rules and criteria we apply in making judgments on art. By providing concise information on aesthetics, this dictionary is not only accessible to students, but it pro
£42.75
University of Pennsylvania Press Quaker Aesthetics Reflections on a Quaker Ethic
Book SynopsisHow did Quakers reconcile their belief in plain living with their appreciation of fine material goods?Trade Review"This anthology of case studies . . . challenges conventional notions of the Society of Friends as theologically bound to plainness, showing the great variety of expression, decoration, and response to changing tastes as both makers and users of material goods." * Choice *
£49.30
Open Court What Art Is
Book SynopsisCultural icon Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was known as much for her philosophy as for her fiction. Her original theory of esthetics, which attacks many masterpieces of modernist art, is as combative and controversial as any of her work, but until now has received little serious scrutiny. In What Art Is, the authors demonstrate that Rand''s ideas are supported by evidence from other academic fields.
£14.39
Open Court Publishing Co ,U.S. The Aesthetic Turn Reading Eliot Deutsch on
Book SynopsisIt was the editorial eye of Eliot Deutsch that made the journal Philosophy East and West the voice of comparative philosophy within the Western academy, challenging the entrenched provincialism of Anglo-American philosophy. In these essays, Deutsch''s critics both praise and attack him, and he offers his thoughtful responses.
£27.89
Cricket Books, a division of Carus Publishing Co The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto
Book SynopsisArthur Danto is the Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University and the most influential philosopher of art in the last half century. As an art critic for The Nation for 25 years and frequent contributor to other widely read outlets such as the New York Review of Books, Danto also has become one of the most respected public intellectuals of his generation. He is the author of some two dozen important books, along with hundreds of articles and reviews which have been the center of both controversy and discussion. In this volume Danto offers his intellectual autobiography and responds to essays by 27 of the keenest critics of his thought from the worlds of philosophy and the arts. The book includes 16 pages of color art reproductions. Danto is the author dozens of books on art, philosophy, the philosophy of art, and art criticism. He is a rare philosopher who is also a public intellectual. Trade Review"Arthur Danto is the Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University and the most influential philosopher of art in the last half century. As an art critic for The Nation for 25 years and frequent contributor to other widely read outlets such as the New York Review of Books, Danto has also become one of the most respected public intellectuals of his generation. He is the author of some two dozen important books on art, philosophy, the philosophy of art, and art criticism, along with hundreds of articles and reviews which have been the center of both controversy and discussion. His article, "The Artworld" (1964) is one of the most influential writings on art of the past hundred years. "In The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto Danto offers his fascinating intellectual autobiography. In The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto, a monumental volume, Danto writes detailed replies to essays by twenty-seven of the keenest critics of his thought, from the worlds of philosophy and the arts. The illustrations, in both color and black-and-white, include works by Danto himself as well as by other artists exemplifying themes from his thought including 16 pages of color art reproductions." --sirreadalot.org "The series as a whole is the greatest philosophical 'journal' that has ever been published." -Edgar Sheffield Brightman
£56.79
The Catholic University of America Press Beauty and the Good Recovering the Classical
Book SynopsisPresents a richer alternative to the contemporary cult of beauty and appearance on the one hand, and to the concomitant decline of real beauty on the other hand. In addition to highlighting the centrality of beauty in the Aristotelian account of moral virtue, this volume will provide the metaphysical and theological grounding for beauty.
£60.00
MP-VIR Uni of Virginia The Forgotten Female Aesthetes
Book SynopsisIn this text, Schaffer analyzes writers such as Lucas Malet, Ouida, Alice Meynell, Rosamund Marriott Watson and Una Ashworth Taylor. These women used aestheticism to forge a compromise between the two models of female identity available to them - the New Woman and the Angel in the House.
£29.95
Taylor & Francis Aesthetics and Political Culture in Modern
Book SynopsisDo aesthetic appeals to senses and emotions in political debate necessarily marginalise political reason and reduce citizens to consumers thus dangerously undermining democracy? Or is sensuous-emotional engagement, on the contrary, a basic fact of the political process and a crucial precondition for revitalising democracy? Aesthetics and Political Culture in Modern Society investigates the current interrelationship between aesthetic practice and political practice in Western democracies, focusing on its impact on democratic political culture. Henrik Kaare Nielsen argues that aesthetic interventions in the political process do not by definition undermine politics' content of reason. Instead, a differentiation must be made between a multiplicity of aesthetic forms of intervention some of which tend to weaken the political judgement of citizens while other forms tend to stimulate competent judgement.This book will be of interest to scholars in the fields of political scTrade Review'A great deal of writing on art and politics these days is interested in arts only as a form of political resistance. Alternately, there is a strain of study which circumvents big P politics, concentrating on "community" and "conversation" and "process" as ends in themselves. In Aesthetics and Political Culture in Modern Society, Nielsen does something different. He reaches back to classical democratic and aesthetic theory to argue that art can facilitate the necessary conditions for democratic politics on a macro scale. For anyone interested in moving past resistance, or creating change that goes beyond micro-communities, this approach is essential.' - Stephen Duncombe, Co-Director of the Center for Artistic Activism and Professor of Media and Culture, New York University'Criticizing neoliberal technocratisation and the overall process of aestheticisation while at the same time showing the potentials of aesthetic practice in generating genuine political judgement, this book is an eye-opening analysis of different kinds of current aesthetic intervention within public space. Theoretically brilliant and powerful.' - Birger Steen Nielsen, Professor, Roskilde University, DenmarkTable of Contents1. Introduction 2. Politics and democracy 3. Public space and late modern forms of public practice 4. Political and aesthetic discursive practice 5. Power-oriented aesthetic interventions in politics 6. Artistic interventions in the field of political practice 7. Current developmental perspectives of public discourse
£128.25
Taylor & Francis Inc Tradition and Transformation in Christian Art
Book SynopsisTradition and Transformation in Christian Art approaches tradition and transculturality in religious art from an Orthodox perspective that defines tradition as a dynamic field of exchanges and synergies between iconographic types and their variants. Relying on a new ontology of iconographic types, it explores one of the most significant ascetical and eschatological Christian images, the King of Glory (Man of Sorrows). This icon of the dead-living Christ originated in Byzantium, migrated west, and was promoted in the New World by Franciscan and Dominican missions. Themes include tensions between Byzantine and Latin spiritualities of penance and salvation, the participation of the body and gender in deification, and the theological plasticity of the Christian imaginary. Primitivist tendencies in Christian eschatology and modernism place avant-garde interest in New Mexican santos and Greek icons in tradition.Table of ContentsList of Figures Preface Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Tradition and Iconographic Types Chapter 3: Iconicity and Eschatology Chapter 4: Ascetics in Prison Chapter 5: Sinaitic and Franciscan Theophanies Chapter 6: Byzantine Encounters with the Dead Christ Chapter 7: The Penitential Imagination Chapter 8: The King of Glory in Italy Chapter 9: Missionary Masses Chapter 10: The Mystical Colony Chapter 11: New Mexican Acheiropoietai Chapter 12: The Greek Icon Epilogue Bibliography
£142.50
John Wiley & Sons Seamus Heaney as Aesthetic Thinker
Book SynopsisSeamus Heaney's death in August 2013 brought to completion his body of work, and scholars are only now coming to understand the full scale and importance of his career. Much of the scholarship to date on Heaney has focused on his poetry. O'Brien's new work, however, focuses on Heaney's essays, book chapters, and lectures as it seeks to understand how Heaney explored the poet's role in the world.
£48.60
MP - University Of Minnesota Press The Tears of Things Melancholy and Physical
Book SynopsisConcerned in part with the act of collecting, this work is a collection of exemplary art objects. It reveals the object as the self's ultimate other. The author weaves together philosophical and psychoanalytical theory with artistic practice. He examines what is left over - debris and waste - and asks what art can make of these.
£20.89
MP - University Of Minnesota Press Against Affective Formalism Matisse Bergson
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Todd Cronan’s juggernaut is several books in one. In the first place, it historicizes a crucial question in contemporary esthetics, whether or not a beholder’s experience of a work of art can properly be understood as affective rather than as cognitive. Second, it offers a strong rereading of various writings by Henri Bergson—whose philosophy has often been associated with the art of Matisse—with respect to that and related issues, showing in the end that although Bergson was continually tempted by the affective position, he never quite definitely succumbed to it. Third and most important, Cronan tracks the interplay between the affective and cognitivist viewpoints in the theory and practice of one of the great painters of the twentieth century, Henri Matisse; this sets Cronan on a collision course—from which he does not flinch —with the almost uniformly affective bias of recent Matisse criticism. Against Affective Formalism is a major achievement, and I look forward with fascination to its reception by a field that is likely to be transformed by it." —Michael Fried, Johns Hopkins University "Matisse knows that sensations belong to - or alas have been detached from - particular human occasions, ways of being, forms of life. But the exacerbation of colour in Matisse speaks, dialectically, to the lack of particularity that makes us 'modern'. This to and fro of contraries is dealt with powerfully in a new book by Todd Cronan, Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism. Colour, for Matisse - pure sensation, the stuff of the senses - will make, will be, a form of life. And at the same time it will enact the extremity - the uncanniness - of the wish."- T. J. Clark, "The Urge to Strangle," The London Review of Books Table of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsList of IllustrationsIntroduction: Modernism against Representation1. Painting as Affect Machine2. Freedom and Memory: Bergson’s Theory of Hypnotic Agency3. The Influence of Others: Matisse and Personnalité4. Matisse and MimesisConclusion. From Art to Object: The Case of Paul ValéryNotesIndex
£21.59
University of Minnesota Press Mediators Aesthetics Politics and the City
Book SynopsisToward a theory of the city at the crossroads of aesthetics and politics
£9.00
The University of Alabama Press The Critical Double Figurative Meaning in
Book SynopsisOver 25 centuries ago, the Greek philosopher Protagoras declared: on every question there are two opposing answers, including this one. This work sets out to demonstrate that Protagoras' statement constitutes one of the fundamental principles of aesthetic and rhetorical theory.
£26.96
Peter Lang Group AG Gyoergy Lukacs and the Literary Pretext 5
Book SynopsisThis volume is an introduction to those works of György Lukács that have established him as a classic authority in literary criticism: his pre-Marxist The History of the Evolution of Modern Drama (1911), still not available in English, which Eva Corredor analyzes in the original Hungarian text and from which she provides extensive quotations in English; his Kantian collection of essays, Soul and Form (1910); his Hegelian The Theory of the Novel (1920); and his first Marxist work, History and Class Consciousness (1923), which best characterizes the Hungarian philosopher's problematic position between East and West. Lukács's Marxist theories are studied in the texts written during his exile in Stalinist Russia but published much later: Studies in European Realism (1950), The Historical Novel (1955) and Realism in Our Time (1957). The approach to Lukács's work is both selective, in the sense that the author chooses to introduce Lukács's literary theories with a focus on his views of French literature, but also global, in that she integrates these theories in the totality of his intellectual development. At each phase, the true motive of Lukács's interest in literature is revealed as a pretext to study reality. The detailed biographical data, up-to-date critical bibliography and helpful index contribute to the overall value of this work as a challenging and rewarding source of information on György Lukács's theories of literature.
£46.17
Peter Lang Publishing Inc George Lukacs and His World A Reassessment 9
Book SynopsisAn author engaged in ideological battles is rarely valued correctly during his lifetime. George Lukács died in 1971, hence a reassessment of his work is warranted. The essays published in this volume provide a philosophical evaluation of Lukács''s work according to the criterion of the consistency of his arguments dealing with Hegel, Marx, Alienation and Aesthetics.
£33.93
Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers Borges and Philosophy
Book SynopsisJorge Luis Borges is acknowledged as one of the great Spanish writers of the twentieth century. On the broader literary scene, he is recognized as a modern master. His fascination with philosophy especially metaphysics sets him apart from his contemporaries. Borges appreciated and formulated rigorous philosophical arguments, but also possessed the unique ability to present the most abstract ideas imaginatively in metaphors and symbols. Borges wandered among the great masters seeking a firm purchase that he could not find, and therefore expressed a nostalgia for metaphysics as he lost himself in his labyrinths. Borges and Philosophy traces Borges' philosophical concerns in his tales, essays, and poems and argues that despite his apparent skepticism in philosophical matters, a careful reading of Borges' texts reveals a coherent philosophical path that underlies his work.
£60.39
Peter Lang Group AG Architectural Forms and Philosophical Structures
Book Synopsis
£31.21
Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers Heidegger on Truth and Myth A Rejection of
Book SynopsisTruth and myth are predominant themes in Martin Heidegger's thinking. Heidegger showed that ancient Greek understanding of truth as aletheia (unconcealment) can teach us about learning from the wisdom that is found in myths and can also enhance human existence. This book describes some of Heidegger's major insights concerning truth as aletheia and their implications. It also shows how Heidegger's thinking on truth discloses the shallowness and the disrespect for truth in the writings of four well-known postmodernist writers: Lyotard, MacIntyre, Rorty, and Derrida.
£45.27
Peter Lang Group AG The Aesthetics of Decay Nothingness Nostalgia and
Book SynopsisIn The Aesthetics of Decay, Dylan Trigg confronts the remnants from the fallout of post-industrialism and postmodernism. Through a considered analysis of memory, place, and nostalgia, Trigg argues that the decline of reason enables a critique of progress to emerge. In this ambitious work, Trigg aims to reassess the direction of progress by situating it in a spatial context. In doing so, he applies his critique of rationality to modern ruins. The derelict factory, abandoned asylum, and urban alleyway all become allies in Trigg's attack on a fixed image of temporality and progress. The Aesthetics of Decay offers a model of post-rational aesthetics in which spatial order is challenged by an affirmative ethics of ruin.
£69.89
Ohio University Press Placing Aesthetics
Book SynopsisExamining select high points in the speculative tradition from Plato and Aristotle through the Middle Ages and German tradition to Dewey and Heidegger, Placing Aesthetics seeks to locate the aesthetic concern within the larger framework of each thinkerâs philosophy.In
£25.19
Ohio University Press The Madness of Vision
Book SynopsisIn The Madness of Vision, Buci-Glucksmann asserts the important of embodied vision in nine studies of paintings, sculptures, and images. She integrates the work of Merleau-Ponty with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Renaissance studies in optics, and twentieth-century mathematics to make the case for the pervasive influence of the baroque.
£49.50
MJ - Ohio University Press The Madness of Vision On Baroque Aesthetics
Book SynopsisIn The Madness of Vision, Buci-Glucksmann asserts the important of embodied vision in nine studies of paintings, sculptures, and images. She integrates the work of Merleau-Ponty with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Renaissance studies in optics, and twentieth-century mathematics to make the case for the pervasive influence of the baroque.
£20.69
Ohio University Press Time Memory Institution
Book SynopsisThis is the first investigation of the relation between time and memory in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's thought as a whole and the first to explore in depth the significance of his concept of institution. It brings his views on the self and ontology into contemporary focus, arguing that the self is not a self-contained or self-determining identity.Trade Review“An important volume, both for bringing together some excellent pieces of Merleau-Ponty scholarship and for opening up an ontological perspective on the self, which definitely merits further research.” * Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (June 2020) *“Assembling some of the most important Merleau-Ponty scholars working today, Time, Memory, Institution may be the most important volume on Merleau-Ponty published in many, many years.”“The rich and impressive essays in Time, Memory, Institution make a new and significant contribution to the field, dealing with works of Merleau-Ponty’s that have only recently become available in English.”Table of Contents* Abbreviations for Works by Merleau-Ponty* Acknowledgments* Introduction*Part I: Memory and the Temporality of the Self*The Gift of Memory: Sheltering the I Kirsten Jacobson, University of Maine*The Depths of Time in the World's Memory of Self Glen A. Mazis, Penn State Harrisburg*Null-Body, Protean Body, Potent Body, Neutral Body, Wild Body Elizabeth A. Behnke, Study Project in Phenomenology of the Body*The Impossibilities of the I: Self, Memory, and Language in Merleau-Ponty and Derrida John Russon, University of Guelph*Part II: Expression, Institution, and Ontology*Memory-Of the Future: Institution and Memory in the Later Merleau-Ponty Robert Vallier, Sciences-Po Paris / DePaul University*Memory, Sedimentation, Self: The Weight of the Ideal in Bergson and Merleau-Ponty Donald A. Landes, Concordia University*Expression in Merleau-Ponty's Aesthetics, Philosophy of Nature, and Ontology Veronique M. Foti, Pennsylvania State University*"This Power to Which We Are Vowed": Subjectivity and Expression in Merleau-Ponty Scott Marratto, Michigan Technological University*The Origin of Corporeal Ipseity: Between Lag and Institution Caterina Rea, Universidade da Integracao da Lusofonia Afro-brasileira (Translated by Darian Meacham)*Part III: The Ontology of Time*The Subject as Time: Merleau-Ponty's Transition from Phenomenology to Ontology Michael R. Kelly, University of San Diego*Coming and Going of Time Bernhard Waldenfels, Ruhr University Bochum*The Presence of the Artwork, a Past That Is Not Past: Merleau-Ponty and Paul Klee Galen A. Johnson, University of Rhode Island*Edges of Time, Edges of Memory Edward S. Casey, Stony Brook University* Index
£59.40
Ohio University Press MerleauPonty Space Place Architecture
Book SynopsisPhenomenology has played a decisive role in the emergence of the discourse of place, and the contribution of Merleau-Ponty to architectural theory and practice is well established. This collection of essays by 12 eminent scholars is the first devoted specifically to developing his contribution to our understanding of place and architecture.Trade Review“An exceptionally impressive collection of provocative essays, all of which apply Merleau-Ponty’s ideas to new fields and frontiers. This book will probably be of most use and interest to those who are already familiar with Merleau-Ponty’s work, as well as those who are interested in the political implications which are expressed in or entailed by phenomenological concepts and techniques.” * Phenomenological Reviews *Merleau-Ponty: Space, Place, Architecture is a vanguard compilation of strong contributions by eminently capable scholars. It synthesizes the Merleau-Pontyian themes of dehiscence, chiasm, flesh, and space in a thoughtful, surprising, and fruitful manner…It opens new pathways for exciting and rewarding investigation, and the editors and contributors are to be commended. * Human Studies *Table of Contents* Introduction Patricia M. Locke*Part 1: Liminal Space*1. Hearkening to the Night for the Heart of Depth, Space and Dwelling Glen Mazis*2. Depth of Space and Depth of World: Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and Rembrandt's Nightwatch on a Modern Baroque Galen A. Johnson*3. Finding Architectural Edge in the Wake of Merleau-Ponty Edward S. Casey*4. Liquid Space of Matrixial Flesh: Reading Merleau-Ponty and Bracha L. Ettinger Poolside Randall Johnson*Part 2: Temporal Space*5: Spatiality, Temporality, and Architecture as a Place of Memory David Morris*6: In Search of Lost Time: Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and the Time of Objects Dorothea Olkowski*7: Inhabiting the House that Herman Built: Merleau-Ponty and the Pathological Space of Solitary Confinement Lisa Guenther*8: Stolen Space: The Perverse Architecture of Torture D. R. Koukal*Part 3: Shared Space*9: Through the Looking Glass: The Spatial Experience of Merleau-Ponty's Metaphors Rachel McCann*10: Sheltering Spaces, Dynamics of Retreat, and Other Hiding Places in Merleau-Ponty's Thought Suzanne Cataldi Laba*11: Dimensions of the Flesh in a Case of Twins with Which I Am Familiar: Actualizing the Potential for Shared Intentional Space Nancy Barta-Smith*12: Dwelling and Public Art: Serra and Bourgeois Helen Fielding* Contributors* Index
£59.40
Ohio University Press Motivation and the Primacy of Perception
Book SynopsisBridging phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and epistemology, Peter Antich asserts that the latter has long been hampered by an inadequate phenomenology of knowledge. However, a careful description of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenon of motivation can offer compelling new ways to think about knowledge and longstanding epistemological questions.Trade Review“Antich’s book demonstrates the difference made to epistemological debates and perplexities when we understand perception as motivating knowledge. It does this with great lucidity and insight, enriched by examples drawn from empirical studies, literature and art—all of which make for a compelling read. Because of its clarity and its commendable development of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of perceptual motivation, it will be very useful not only to scholars but also to graduate students and senior undergraduates in philosophy.”“An erudite and seminal contribution to phenomenology studies, Motivation and the Primacy of Perception must be considered as a core and unreservedly recommended addition to college and university library contemporary philosophy collections and epistemic supplemental studies. It should be noted for the personal reading lists of students, academia, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject that [the title] is also readily available in a digital book format.” * Midwest Book Review *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations xi Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction Part I. Defining the Account 1 Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Motivation 2 The Primacy of Perception Part II. Defending the Account 3 Empirical Judgments 4 Universal and A Priori Judgments 5 Perceptual Faith Part III. Motivation and Pure Reason 6 Transcendental Justification 7 Metaphysical Judgments and Self-Consciousness Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
£67.15
Duke University Press Five Faces of Modernity
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsPreface to the Second Edition xi Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 3 The Idea of Modernity Modern Dwarfs on the Shoulders of Ancient Giants 13 The Problem of Time: Three Eras of Western History 19 It Is We Who Are the Ancients 23 Comparing the Moderns to the Ancients 26 From Modern to Gothic to Romantic to Modern 35 The Two Modernities 41 Baudelaire and the Paradoxes of Aesthetic Modernity 46 Modernity, the Death of God, and Utopia 58 Literary and Other Modernisms 68 Comparing the Moderns to the Contemporaries 86 The Idea of the Avant-Garde From Modernity to the Avant-Garde 95 The "Avant-Garde" Metaphor in the Renaissance: A Rhetorical Figure 97 The Romantic "Avant-Garde": From Politics to the Politics of Culture 100 Some Mid-Nineteenth-Century Writers and the Avant-Garde 108 Two Avant-Gardes: Attractions and Repulsions 112 Avant-Garde and Aesthetic Extremism 116 The Crisis of Avant-Garde's Concept in the 1960s 120 Avant-Garde, Dehumanization, and the End of Ideology 125 Avant-Garde and Postmodernism 132 Intellectualism, Anarchism, and Stasis 144 The Idea of Decadence Versions of Decadence 151 From "Decadence" to "Style of Decadence" 157 The Decadent Euphoria 171 Nietzsche on "Decadence" and "Modernity" 178 The Concept of Decadence in Marxist Criticism 195 Il Decadentismo 211 Kitsch Kitsch and Modernity 225 Kitsch, Camp, and High Art 229 Etymology, Contexts of Usage, and the "Law of Aesthetic Inadequacy" 232 Kitsch and Romanticism 237 Bad Taste, Ideology, and Hedonism 240 Some Stylistic Considerations 249 Kitsch and Cultural Industrialization 255 The "Kitsch-Man" 259 On Postmodernism (1986) A New Face of Modernity 265 Epistemology and Hermeneutics: From Modernity to Postmodernity 269 The Silence of the Avant-Garde 275 The Novelty of the Past: The View from Architecture 279 Critiques of Postmodernism 288 Literary Postmodernism: The Shaping of a Corpus 296 Postmodernist Devices and Their Significance 302 Notes 313 Selected Critical Bibliography 365 Index 387
£21.59
Duke University Press Eros Ideologies
Book SynopsisLaura E. Pérez analyzes Latina art to explore a new notion of decolonial thought and love based on the integration of body, mind, and spirit that offers a means to creating a more democratic and just present and future.Trade Review“Laura E. Pérez renews the precepts of 1950s Third World liberation and extends the contemporary politics of women-of-color freedom fighters into the future. She speaks with many voices—the learned scholar, the analyst, the teacher, the maker of new aesthetics, the poet, the dreamer, and the guide—and offers her readers a multitude of routes for crossing academic and subjective terrains to find new possibilities for thinking, doing, and being. An outstanding work of decolonial writing by one of the great Chicana feminist philosophers of our time, Eros Ideologies is exactly the book I have needed to best teach my undergraduate and graduate students.” -- Chela Sandoval, author of * Methodology of the Oppressed *“Laura E. Pérez’s newest book is a tour de force that integrates the mind-body-spirit through a series of writings that weave together the theoretical and poetical within the context of decolonization. She explores the works of artists like Gloria Anzaldúa, Ester Hernández, and Consuelo Jiménez Underwood as she crosses disciplines to bring the embodied psyche to bear on questions of the erotic and the spiritual.” -- Amalia Mesa-Bains, Professor Emerita, California State University, Monterey Bay"Pérez eloquently reflects on activism, art, philosophy, poetry, politics, and selfhood. She offers radical reappraisals of the art of Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, Esther Hernández, and Liliana Wilson, among many artists whose histories have been obfuscated by Eurocentric ideas and whose praxes she creatively reexamines. This cross-disciplinary study powerfully recombines theoretical and literary sources that speak to academic practice, lived experience, and poetic meditation. Writing in multiple authorial voices, Pérez shatters the high/low art dichotomy that has often segregated Latinx art history from mainstream US culture. Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty." -- L. Estevez * Choice *"Readers unfamiliar with Latina, especially Chicana, art and politics are treated to eye-opening beauty mixed with expressions of suffering and resistance. Readers already immersed in the culturally rich world of protest art foregrounding gender and eroticisim will find new ways into the multilayered visionaries featured here." -- Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer * Religion *"Eros Ideologies is a teacherly text: Pérez shows us not only how to look at, but also how to be with, art of the Americas.… Certainly, the use of personal prose in scholarly publications is not unprecedented in the discourses of ethnic studies, anthropology, history, literature, art, and cultural studies; but Pérez's approach is tactical as readers enter her classroom—a space of 'heart and hearth'—where she interweaves decades of close study of theoretical and spiritual texts, lifelong contemplations of artwork, and the conversations she has maintained with the many artists who made them." -- Ella Maria Diaz * Latino Studies *"Eros Ideologies can serve as an approachable and valuable introduction to very urgent concerns." -- Andrew William Lee * Religion and the Arts *"It is Pérez’s mindful contributions of eros, agape, philia, In lak’ech, love, and respect for art that mark this book as a starting point in discussion of works by people of color, mostly Latinx and women artists. . . . As beautiful as Pérez’s writings on the subjects can be, as rich with historical connections calling upon syncretism and community care, these analyses are primers for further work to be done." -- Helman Alejandro Sosa * Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations xi Preface xv Acknowledgments xxi 1. The Social Body of Love: Crafting Decolonial Methodologies 1 2. Eros Ideologies and Methodology of the Oppressed 17 3. Long Nguyen: Flesh of the Inscrutable 24 4. Hidden Avant-Gardes: Contemporary U.S. Latina/o Art 27 5. Freedom and Gender in Ester Hernández's Libertad 34 6. 'Ginas in the Atelier 40 7. The Poetry of Embodiment: Series and Variation in Linda Arreola's Vaguely Chicana 52 8. Art and Museums 56 9. The@-Erotics in Alex Donis's My Cathedral 70 10. Con o sin permiso (With or without Permission): Chicana Badgirls: Las hociconas 77 11. Maestrapeace: Picturing the Power of Women's Histories of Creativity 82 12. Decolonizing Self-Portraits of Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, and Yreina D. Cervántez 91 13. Undead Darwinism and the Fault Lines of Neocolonialism in Latina/o Art Worlds 112 14. The Inviolate Erotic in the Paintings of Liliana Wilson 126 15. The Performance of Spirituality and Visionary Politics in the Work of Gloria Anzaldúa 133 16. Daughters Shaking Earth 147 17 Fashioning Decolonial Optics: Days of the Dead Walking Altars and Calavera Fashion Shows in Latina/o Los Angeles 155 18. On Jean Pierre Larochette and Yael Lurie's Water Songs 174 19. Prayers for the Planet: Reweaving the Natural and the Social: Consuelo Jimenez Underwood's Welcome to Flower-Landai 179 20. "Undocu Nation," Creativity, Integrity 192 21. Writing with Crooked Lines 201 Notes 211 References 245 Index 263
£80.10
Duke University Press Rancières Sentiments
Book SynopsisAttending to diverse practices of everyday living and doing—of form, style, and scenography—in Jacques Rancière’s writings, Davide Panagia explores Rancière’s aesthetics of politics as it informs his radical democratic theory of participation.Trade Review“To understand Rancière, Panagia argues, is to set aside the search for prescriptive constructs and instead embrace the aesthetic sensibilities that create the world. Recommended.” -- L. A. Wilkinson * Choice *"Davide Panagia has written a complex and pathbreaking book that engages the work of democratic theorist Jacques Rancière in order to redefine what it means to practice democracy. Rancière’s Sentiments is not an introduction to Rancière’s oeuvre, but rather a book that grapples with his most difficult ideas in order to challenge established assumptions about how politics comes to be known, felt, and practiced." -- Elisabeth Anker * Perspectives on Politics *"Rancière’s Sentiments is a whistle-stop tour of aesthetics in the work of Jacques Rancière. . . . Davide Panagia skillfully meshes a scenic narrative, wending his way through four chapters, each exploring a different line of division that Rancière’s writing puts into question." -- Clare Woodford * Review of Politics *"I would recommend Davide Panagia's Rancière's Sentiments without hesitation to any researcher in literature, political science, or philosophy who seeks an articulate presentation of Rancière's very particular manner of thinking and arguing. Panagia has done a superb job of navigating through and illuminating the various constellations that characterize Rancière's thought, while maintaining the sense and the feel of a manner of thinking that elide closure." -- David F. Bell * H-France, H-Net Reviews *Table of ContentsPreface vii Acknowledgments xiii Introduction. The Manner of Impropriety 1 1. Rancière's Partager 19 2. Rancière's Police Poetics 40 3. Rancière's Style 63 4. Rancière's Democratic Realism 85 Conclusion. Demotic Modernisms, Popular Occupations 99 Notes 105 Bibliography 129 Index 137
£67.15
MD - Duke University Press Rancières Sentiments
Book SynopsisAttending to diverse practices of everyday living and doingof form, style, and scenographyin Jacques Rancière's writings, Davide Panagia explores Rancière's aesthetics of politics as it informs his radical democratic theory of participation.Trade Review“To understand Rancière, Panagia argues, is to set aside the search for prescriptive constructs and instead embrace the aesthetic sensibilities that create the world. Recommended.” -- L. A. Wilkinson * Choice *"Davide Panagia has written a complex and pathbreaking book that engages the work of democratic theorist Jacques Rancière in order to redefine what it means to practice democracy. Rancière’s Sentiments is not an introduction to Rancière’s oeuvre, but rather a book that grapples with his most difficult ideas in order to challenge established assumptions about how politics comes to be known, felt, and practiced." -- Elisabeth Anker * Perspectives on Politics *"Rancière’s Sentiments is a whistle-stop tour of aesthetics in the work of Jacques Rancière. . . . Davide Panagia skillfully meshes a scenic narrative, wending his way through four chapters, each exploring a different line of division that Rancière’s writing puts into question." -- Clare Woodford * Review of Politics *"I would recommend Davide Panagia's Rancière's Sentiments without hesitation to any researcher in literature, political science, or philosophy who seeks an articulate presentation of Rancière's very particular manner of thinking and arguing. Panagia has done a superb job of navigating through and illuminating the various constellations that characterize Rancière's thought, while maintaining the sense and the feel of a manner of thinking that elide closure." -- David F. Bell * H-France, H-Net Reviews *Table of ContentsPreface vii Acknowledgments xiii Introduction. The Manner of Impropriety 1 1. Rancière's Partager 19 2. Rancière's Police Poetics 40 3. Rancière's Style 63 4. Rancière's Democratic Realism 85 Conclusion. Demotic Modernisms, Popular Occupations 99 Notes 105 Bibliography 129 Index 137
£17.99
Fordham University Press Hand to Hand Listening to the Work of Art
Book SynopsisShows how talking hands of painters and the secretly lucid voices of poets confront the finitude of the human body. In this title, the author uses poetry and painting to explore a theme that runs through all of his work: how human life is shaped by the experience of call and response.Trade Review"[Chretien] has written a luminous meditation on various works of art-among them paintings by Rembrandt, Delacroix and Manet-in which he advocates for a 'solitary act of listening' on the part of the viewer." -- -Karl Pohrt Shaman Drum Bookshop
£27.90
ME - Fordham University Press Heidegger H246lderlin and the Subject of Poetic
Book SynopsisIn the context of Holderlin's poetics of alienation, exile, and wandering, Gosetti-Ferencei poses a phenomenologically sensitive theory of poetic language and a "new poetics of Dasein," or being there.Trade Review"The book is a state-of-the-art discussion of Heidegger ... The reader emerges from this book with a tremendous sense of possibility-of new avenues opened up, and of old debates unclogged." -- -Nicholas Birns New School University "The perennially interesting complex of topics--Heidegger's thought, Holderlin's thought and poetry, Heidegger's reading of Holderlin's poetry--is here enriched by a fourth meditation, written against the grain: Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei reads Heidegger's thought in the light of Holderlin's poetry and theoretical writings. The outcome is a defense and justification of poetic subjectivity at once subtle and exhilarating. Heidegger, Holderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language is composed with admirable passion, erudition, and conceptual flair. It will be indispensable for students of continental philosophy, literature, and literary theory." -- -Stanley Corngold Princeton University
£62.90
Fordham University Press Heidegger H246lderlin and the Subject of Poetic
Book SynopsisIncluding Heidegger's nationalist valorization of the German language and sense of nationhood, or Heimat, the author argues that Heidegger has overlooked central elements in Hlderlin's poetics, such as a Kantian understanding of aesthetic subjectivity and a commitment to Enlightenment ideals.Trade Review"The book is a state-of-the-art discussion of Heidegger ... The reader emerges from this book with a tremendous sense of possibility-of new avenues opened up, and of old debates unclogged." -- -Nicholas Birns New School University "The perennially interesting complex of topics--Heidegger's thought, Holderlin's thought and poetry, Heidegger's reading of Holderlin's poetry--is here enriched by a fourth meditation, written against the grain: Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei reads Heidegger's thought in the light of Holderlin's poetry and theoretical writings. The outcome is a defense and justification of poetic subjectivity at once subtle and exhilarating. Heidegger, Holderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language is composed with admirable passion, erudition, and conceptual flair. It will be indispensable for students of continental philosophy, literature, and literary theory." -- -Stanley Corngold Princeton University
£27.90
Fordham University Press The Ground of the Image
Book SynopsisWhat powers lie hidden in images? Nancy explores the complicated effects of the visual on culture, truth, and meaning. Writings on the power hidden in the depth of an image.Trade Review"Offers more recent and more focused reflections on the nature of representation and art, especially painting." -Book Forum "...A series of discrete analyses and reflections ...the best pieces make noteworthy contributions to themes connected with images, imagination, representation, aesthetics, and with direct and indirect relevance to thinking about religion." -Journal of American Academy of Religion "This collection of nine chapter-essays, translated from those published in French in 2003-4 describes Nancy's recent work on images and visual art." -Art Book News Annual
£27.90
Fordham University Press Ecce Monstrum Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice
Book SynopsisIn the 1930s, Georges Bataille proclaimed a ferociously religious sensibility characterized by simultaneous ecstasy and horror. This book investigates the content and implications of this religious sensibility by examining Bataille's insistent linking of monstrosity and the sacred.Trade Review"In this superb study of Bataille, Jeremy Biles navigates between Bataille's fascination with the horrible and the monstrous on the one hand, and his insistence on the possibility of the sacred in the modern world on the other. With erudition and level-headed admiration, Biles shows how Bataille's work is a meditation, willfully combining horror and ecstasy, joy in the face of death, and sacrifice as a necessary antidote to form. Biles reads Bataille on four principle thinkers: Hegel, Nietzsche, Simone Weil, and Andre Breton.The reader emerges from this study understanding, not only the importance to modernity of Bataille himself, but also the extent to which Bataille's project provides a certain modernist trajectory the ramifications of which are increasingly clear today." -- -Francoise Meltzer University of Chicago "All in all, among recent studies on Bataille, Biles's book is the one that perhaps approaches best Bataille's thought while proposing new interpretations of his work." -H-Net Reviews "Biles demonstrates an excellent grasp of the critical commentary on, and the cultural context of Georges Bataille. The stakes of Bataille's work in the areas of intellectual history, literary history, and modern, and postmodern, art are clearly explored. Wonderfully informative and stimulating." -- -Allan Stoekl Pennsylvania State University "One is struck by Biles's erudition: not only has he read, with patience and great sensitivity, the entirety of Bataille's writings along with his principal commentators, but he writes insightfully also about the works of the many figures (Hegel, Nietzsche, Simone Weil, Andre Breton) in relation to whom he situates Bataille." -- -Peter Tracey Connor Barnard College
£66.30
ME - Fordham University Press Listen
Book SynopsisExamines what the role of the listener is, and has been, through the centuries. The author explains his love of musical arrangement (since arrangements allow him to listen to someone listening to music), and wonders whether it is possible in other ways to convey to others how we ourselves listen to music.Trade Review"Swerving away from the grand abstractions of late-deconstructive theory, the book has no labyrinthine close-readings, no world-historical announcements, and ties itself in no tortured linguistic knots." -Current Musicology "Szendy's meditation on listening and on music is a dreamlike mixture of philosophy, personal memoir, and intellectual history. Listening is not hearing (perception or sensation), but neither is it understanding ("entendre"), as opera especially makes clear, in those ecstatic moments when the libretto is least important, and the human voice suspends all sense, but holds the listener most. What subject is brought into being in such moments, beyond the interiority of the person, as a relation to the world and to others with whom one shares (or disputes about) this experience? And how has the history and transmission of such listening, especially in music, been caught in the great questions of law and copyright, citation, quotation, reproduction and sampling, original text and its "translation" in performance (a secondary repetition without which music cannot exist)? How are the questions of instrumentation and mechanical reproduction, so dear to Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno and other theorists of modernity, played out in the economy of the listening ear? And how are these issues aggravated today by advertizing and media that sample and distribute, but also copyright and turn into property even those random noises -- the sound of a car engine or the tone of a cell phone -- which become the identifying markers or signatures of multinational corporations, where the border between music and noise is negotiated. From Lizst and Beethoven to Schoenberg and Stravinsky, from Charlie Parker and Bill Evans to more recent experiments in digital sampling, Szendy takes us across a wide territory with an ease and lightness that are beautifully rendered in Charlotte Mandell's translation." -- -Charles Shepherdson University at Albany, State University of New York "Every child knows about the right to speak, and when to shut up and listen. But do we know what listening is? In this book Peter Szendy asks who has the right to listen when it comes to music. It turns out that listening is a species of theft disguised under polite terms like transcription and arrangement, but it is mischief all the same. There may be no such thing as a work of music. Szendy gives us a rogue's history of the ear, filled with splendid and hilarious anecdotes about the things we do to music, and the uncanny machines we have used on it, tin ears among them. Read this book and find out what you have an ear for." -- -Gerald Bruns University of Notre Dame
£62.90
ME - Fordham University Press Listen
Book SynopsisExamines what the role of the listener is, and has been, through the centuries. The author explains his love of musical arrangement (since arrangements allow him to listen to someone listening to music), and wonders whether it is possible in other ways to convey to others how we ourselves listen to music.Trade Review"Swerving away from the grand abstractions of late-deconstructive theory, the book has no labyrinthine close-readings, no world-historical announcements, and ties itself in no tortured linguistic knots." -Current Musicology "Szendy's meditation on listening and on music is a dreamlike mixture of philosophy, personal memoir, and intellectual history. Listening is not hearing (perception or sensation), but neither is it understanding ("entendre"), as opera especially makes clear, in those ecstatic moments when the libretto is least important, and the human voice suspends all sense, but holds the listener most. What subject is brought into being in such moments, beyond the interiority of the person, as a relation to the world and to others with whom one shares (or disputes about) this experience? And how has the history and transmission of such listening, especially in music, been caught in the great questions of law and copyright, citation, quotation, reproduction and sampling, original text and its "translation" in performance (a secondary repetition without which music cannot exist)? How are the questions of instrumentation and mechanical reproduction, so dear to Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno and other theorists of modernity, played out in the economy of the listening ear? And how are these issues aggravated today by advertizing and media that sample and distribute, but also copyright and turn into property even those random noises -- the sound of a car engine or the tone of a cell phone -- which become the identifying markers or signatures of multinational corporations, where the border between music and noise is negotiated. From Lizst and Beethoven to Schoenberg and Stravinsky, from Charlie Parker and Bill Evans to more recent experiments in digital sampling, Szendy takes us across a wide territory with an ease and lightness that are beautifully rendered in Charlotte Mandell's translation." -- -Charles Shepherdson University at Albany, State University of New York "Every child knows about the right to speak, and when to shut up and listen. But do we know what listening is? In this book Peter Szendy asks who has the right to listen when it comes to music. It turns out that listening is a species of theft disguised under polite terms like transcription and arrangement, but it is mischief all the same. There may be no such thing as a work of music. Szendy gives us a rogue's history of the ear, filled with splendid and hilarious anecdotes about the things we do to music, and the uncanny machines we have used on it, tin ears among them. Read this book and find out what you have an ear for." -- -Gerald Bruns University of Notre Dame
£25.19
ME - Fordham University Press Wittgensteins House
Book SynopsisArguing that the practice of architecture occupies not just a historical position between Stonborough-Wittgenstein's early and late philosophy, this book demonstrates that Wittgenstein's practice of architecture constitutes a fundamental component in the development of his philosophy of language from its early to late phases.Trade Review"This book opens new and unexpected vistas into the complex landscape - or perhaps I should say the complex architecture and spatiality - of Wittgenstein's philosophy. In that sense, it makes an important, dual contribution to the history of philosophy and to the history of modern architecture." -- -Mark Jarzombek Massachusetts Institute of Technology " ... An interesting and thought-provoking work, one that adds to the corpus of writings on Wittgenstein's ideas about architecture and aesthetics." -Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics "Accessible...Brings forward the virtues of applied abstraction through keen and historical treatment of both the writings and the Stonborough project." -- -Tom Conley Harvard University "A strikingly brilliant and lucid piece of work. Last shows how Wittgenstein's entanglements of philosophy and architecture become the necessary prologue to his accomplishment in the Investigations. Wittgenstein's House takes what is often considered a marginal or extraneous interlude in his work and demonstrates how it in fact forms the indispensable pivot of a major reorientation in Wittgenstein's thought." -- -Bruce Clarke Texas Tech University " ... Reveals heretofore unseen and unsuspected edifying relations between architecture and philosophy and their distinctive ways of seeing and thinking." -Postmodern Culture "A noteworthy synthesis of Wittgenstein's philosophy with the subject of architecture." -wittgenstein-news.org
£62.05
Fordham University Press Wittgensteins House Language Space and
Book SynopsisArguing that the practice of architecture occupies not just a historical position between Stonborough-Wittgenstein's early and late philosophy, this book demonstrates that Wittgenstein's practice of architecture constitutes a fundamental component in the development of his philosophy of language from its early to late phases.Trade Review"This book opens new and unexpected vistas into the complex landscape - or perhaps I should say the complex architecture and spatiality - of Wittgenstein's philosophy. In that sense, it makes an important, dual contribution to the history of philosophy and to the history of modern architecture." -- -Mark Jarzombek Massachusetts Institute of Technology " ... An interesting and thought-provoking work, one that adds to the corpus of writings on Wittgenstein's ideas about architecture and aesthetics." -Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics "Accessible...Brings forward the virtues of applied abstraction through keen and historical treatment of both the writings and the Stonborough project." -- -Tom Conley Harvard University "A strikingly brilliant and lucid piece of work. Last shows how Wittgenstein's entanglements of philosophy and architecture become the necessary prologue to his accomplishment in the Investigations. Wittgenstein's House takes what is often considered a marginal or extraneous interlude in his work and demonstrates how it in fact forms the indispensable pivot of a major reorientation in Wittgenstein's thought." -- -Bruce Clarke Texas Tech University " ... Reveals heretofore unseen and unsuspected edifying relations between architecture and philosophy and their distinctive ways of seeing and thinking." -Postmodern Culture "A noteworthy synthesis of Wittgenstein's philosophy with the subject of architecture." -wittgenstein-news.org
£25.19
Fordham University Press Noli me tangere On the Raising of the Body
Book SynopsisProvides an account of the author's ideas about God.Trade Review"Translation of writings by the French philosopher on Christianity." -The Chronicle of Higher Education "This collection presents some of Nancy's best thinking on the matter of Christianity and religion, from wide-ranging speculation in a give -and-take with 'the public' to the incisive title essay focused on a charged encounter between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. This latter is a particularly bold and searching reading, far more engaged than is the case with most Biblical interpretation by those who profess themselves attentive to scripture. The attention to painting's response to the scene is deeply impressive, certainly revelatory for the general reader and probably even for art historians. The deft and elegant translation, as a real bonus, captures the layered texture of Nancy's thinking in exemplary fashion." -- -Ian Balfour York University
£62.70
Fordham University Press Musical Meaning and Human Values
Book SynopsisMusical understanding has evolved dramatically, principally through an appreciation of musical meaning in its social, cultural, and philosophical dimensions. This book examines the open and active circle between the values and valuations placed on music by individuals and societies, and the discovery, through music, of what and how to value.Trade Review"With star turn after star turn, Musical Meaning and Human Values unleashes a vast sprawl of keywords-Fantasy, Devotion, Performance, Eden, Evil, Law, Nature, Modernity-into an adventurous variety of musics and critical maneuvers, including close readings, open analyses, transdisciplinary encounters, Narratives Lost and Found. Rarely does a collection of essays so diverse stay so closely in tune with itself: the hermeneutic enterprise as realized by Lawrence Kramer over the past quarter century still exerts gravity enough to allow these lively spirits their multifarious orbits." -- -Scott Burnham Princeton University "Musical Meaning and Human Values is a stimulating and multihued collection that will be valuable to anyone engaged in criticism. Its essays together offer ample demonstration that, as one of its editors says, "making music is always making values," whether in sixteenth-century madrigals, in recordings of Brahms, or hidden unexpectedly in "embarrasing" half-forgotten works. While variously exploring the meanings of "fantasy," or of nature as a cultural construct, or of music's own judgment of evil characters represented on stage, at the same time the volume contemplates aspects of modernity along the way, illuminating many of the values the essays explore." -- -Ruth A. Solie editor of Musicology and Difference, author of Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations "... This interesting collection focuses on the inherent value and meaning within music and examines topics such as how music produces value and what the editors label 'moments of transformative reflection... An interesting and unusual collection indeed. Recommended." -Choice "This remarkable collection of essays, which grew out of a symposium on Lawrence Kramer's work, shares his bold vision of musicology as an enterprise rooted in the world of human interactions, alert to the historical constitution of meaning while avoiding historicist relativism. Although traditional aesthetics had linked works of art to human values by portraying the beautiful as a symbol of the morally good, these essays complicate that linkage by seeing the construction of values as a site of ambivalence and contestation. The interdisciplinary scope of the essays will appeal to readers far beyond the confines of any single field." -- -Kevin Korsyn Author of Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research "A precious contribution to both music and letters that transends purely musical concerns." -- -Byron Adams University of California, Riverside "Brings to fruition the advances in richness and complexity in our thinking about music for which over two decades of groundbreaking scholarship in the New Musicology have prepared the field." -- -Gary C. Thomas University of Minnesota
£62.90
Fordham University Press Musical Meaning and Human Values
Book SynopsisMusical understanding has evolved dramatically, principally through an appreciation of musical meaning in its social, cultural, and philosophical dimensions. This book examines the open and active circle between the values and valuations placed on music by individuals and societies, and the discovery, through music, of what and how to value.Trade Review"With star turn after star turn, Musical Meaning and Human Values unleashes a vast sprawl of keywords-Fantasy, Devotion, Performance, Eden, Evil, Law, Nature, Modernity-into an adventurous variety of musics and critical maneuvers, including close readings, open analyses, transdisciplinary encounters, Narratives Lost and Found. Rarely does a collection of essays so diverse stay so closely in tune with itself: the hermeneutic enterprise as realized by Lawrence Kramer over the past quarter century still exerts gravity enough to allow these lively spirits their multifarious orbits." -- -Scott Burnham Princeton University "Musical Meaning and Human Values is a stimulating and multihued collection that will be valuable to anyone engaged in criticism. Its essays together offer ample demonstration that, as one of its editors says, "making music is always making values," whether in sixteenth-century madrigals, in recordings of Brahms, or hidden unexpectedly in "embarrasing" half-forgotten works. While variously exploring the meanings of "fantasy," or of nature as a cultural construct, or of music's own judgment of evil characters represented on stage, at the same time the volume contemplates aspects of modernity along the way, illuminating many of the values the essays explore." -- -Ruth A. Solie editor of Musicology and Difference, author of Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations "... This interesting collection focuses on the inherent value and meaning within music and examines topics such as how music produces value and what the editors label 'moments of transformative reflection... An interesting and unusual collection indeed. Recommended." -Choice "This remarkable collection of essays, which grew out of a symposium on Lawrence Kramer's work, shares his bold vision of musicology as an enterprise rooted in the world of human interactions, alert to the historical constitution of meaning while avoiding historicist relativism. Although traditional aesthetics had linked works of art to human values by portraying the beautiful as a symbol of the morally good, these essays complicate that linkage by seeing the construction of values as a site of ambivalence and contestation. The interdisciplinary scope of the essays will appeal to readers far beyond the confines of any single field." -- -Kevin Korsyn Author of Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research "A precious contribution to both music and letters that transends purely musical concerns." -- -Byron Adams University of California, Riverside "Brings to fruition the advances in richness and complexity in our thinking about music for which over two decades of groundbreaking scholarship in the New Musicology have prepared the field." -- -Gary C. Thomas University of Minnesota
£25.19
Fordham University Press The Reinvention of Religious Music
Book SynopsisOn the basis of a careful analysis of Olivier Messiaen's work, this book argues for a renewal of our thinking about religious music. Addressing his notion of a "hyper-religious" music of sounds and colors, it aims to show that Messiaen has broken new ground.Trade Review"Labeled "philosophy" by the publisher, this book contains neither musical examples (either in score or CD form) nor an index, but it does offer 40 pages of notes and an extensive bibliography that includes Augustine, Eduard Hanslick, Heidegger, Kant, and Kierkegaard. The writings of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Jean-Luc Marion serve as points of departure and scrutiny. Positing that listening to Messiaen's music requires more than aesthetics, theology, musicology, or theory, musicologist Sander van Maas investigates whether the "musical experience of the work of Messiaen merely results from ingenious rhetorical techniques" or whether there is something more. Is the music, as Messiaen himself believed, a "breakthrough toward the beyond" (i.e., an inner "dazzlement" or religious experience)? Or, in the contrary view, is this "breakthrough" a nonreligious "adoration of music"? According to the author, Messiaen "situates the listener at once inside and outside faith." Not meant for casual reading, the book includes sentences such as "Thinking about the phenomenon in terms of objectivity mystifies the original phenomenality of the phenomenon." Those who do embark on the book will likely find Messiaen's The Technique of My Musical Language (Eng. tr., 1956) and a CD of "La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jesus-Christ" useful aids. Summing Up: Recommended. Researchers, faculty, professionals." -Choice "A penetrating and thought-provoking exploration of what might be entailed by Messiaen's musical 'breakthrough to the beyond'. The Reinvention of Religious Music provides us with a wealth of fresh and original perspectives on this complex, endlessly fascinating musician." -- -Jeremy Begbie Duke University "In his eloquent and detailed study, van Maas discusses the theological meaning of Messiaen's music and the ways in which this unique sound world seeks to configure and even evangelize Messiaen's Christian thought. Maas presents an absorbing and provocative insight into Messiaen's faith in music that will enhance appreciation of this often misunderstood composer and his work." -- -Andrew Shenton Boston University "If the idea that religious music is a thing of the past helps you sleep better, Sander van Maas' provocative book should wake you up. Did you ever think that an ear could be circumcised? From the Bible to Messiaen and Derrida, he radically rethinks the relationships between ear and flesh." -- -Peter Szendy Universite de Paris X Nanterre "Examines the religious dimension of this composer's music." -Publishers Weekly
£25.19
Fordham University Press Musically Sublime Indeterminacy Infinity
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Contemporary philosophy is badly in need of a new philosophical vocabulary enabling it to shed new light on old problems. This book proves clear that no notion will be more successful here than that of the sublime. And that the sublime is best exemplified by the experience of music. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth wrote a superior book on a fascinating theme. Her book will be landmark in contemporary philosophy." -- -Frank Ankersmit University of Groningen "An excellent textbook on the complex history of the philosophical sublime and an innovative rethinking of musical aesthetics." -- -Peter Szendy University of Paris X, Nanterre "Analyzing critical and philosophical writing from the mid-eighteenth century on, Wurth moves from Burke through Kant and Schopenhauer to Lyotard to posit a complex, multifaceted notion of the sublime, citing music as its crucial source." -- -Annette Richards Cornell University "Wurth does better than merely document the history of the sublime in music. By engaging with the term in its various incarnations, she offers the reader a full sense of the complexities of the term, the scope of various theories, and finally, offers a strong theory of the postmodern sublime." -- -Benjamin Downs Music Research Forum "In the history of Western aesthetics, the beautiful and the sublime have maintained an antipodal relationship: beauty is pleasing and sublime is overpowering, with the former in a dominant position. During the 18th century that position changed because instrumental music became predominant and aestheticians increasingly noted its expressive qualities. The sonata, symphony, and many other purely instrumental forms were expanding rapidly. Without an accompanying text, this music seemed "meaningless" yet full of expressive features. For much music, the sublime might be a more adequate definition if one could expand and enhance its definition. Wurth (comparative literature, Univ. of Utrecht) traces the changing concept of sublime beginning with its classical use in pseudo-Longinus; continuing to important treatises by Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, Freidrich Nietzsche, Arthur Seidl, et al.; and on to the work of postmodernist philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard. The author presents her own theory of the sublime, using subtexts--"indeterminacy," "infinite," "irresolvability"--as guideposts not only to analysis of today's postmodern music but to music of the late-18th and particularly the 19th century. Readers should have some background in philosophy and music aesthetics to understand this study, which unfortunately lacks an index. Summing Up: Recommended. With reservations. Graduate students, researchers." -Choice "Juxtaposes analysis of instrumental music against 18th-and 19th-century ideas of the infinite, the divided self, and unconscious drives." -The Chronicle of Higher Education
£23.39
Fordham University Press God Justice Love Beauty Four Little Dialogues
Book SynopsisTrade Review" ...[The reader] will learn much about how a great thinker tries, without any technical jargon or presupposed set of common references, to approach subjects as significant and challenging as the nature of justice, love, and beauty." -- -Michael Naas DePaul University
£62.90
Fordham University Press God Justice Love Beauty Four Little Dialogues
Book SynopsisTrade Review" ...[The reader] will learn much about how a great thinker tries, without any technical jargon or presupposed set of common references, to approach subjects as significant and challenging as the nature of justice, love, and beauty." -- -Michael Naas DePaul University
£19.79
