Philosophy: aesthetics Books

Book SynopsisThis compact, indispensable overview answers a vexed question: Why do so many works of modern and postmodern literature and art seem designed to appear ‘strange’, and how can they still cause pleasure in the beholder? To help overcome the initial barrier caused by this ‘strangeness’, the general reader is given an initial, non-technical description of the ‘aesthetic of the strange’ as it is experienced in the reading or viewing process. There follows a broad survey of modern and postmodern trends, illustrating their staggering variety and making plain the manifold methods and strategies adopted by writers and artists to ‘make it strange’. The book closes with a systematic summary of the theoretical underpinnings of the ‘aesthetic of the strange’, focussing on the ways in which it differs from both the earlier ‘aesthetic of the beautiful’ and the ‘aesthetic of the sublime’. It is made amply clear that the strangeness characteristic of modern and postmodern art has ushered in an entirely new, ‘third’ kind of aesthetic – one that has undergone further transformation over the past two decades. Beyond its usefulness as a practical introduction to the ‘aesthetic of the strange’, the present study also takes up the most recent, cutting-edge aspects of scholarly debate, while initiates are offered an original approach to the theoretical implications of this seminal phenomenon.Table of ContentsList of Colour Plates Introductory Note The Aesthetic of the Strange Not Beautiful, but Strange Not Sublime, but Strange The Aesthetic of the Strange The Strange Art and Literature of Modernism Radical Strangeness in Early Modernism Varieties of Strangeness in the Later Phase of Modernism The Strange Art and Literature of Postmodernism New Radicalness in the Early Phase of Postmodernism The Strange as Subtle Difference in the Later Phase of Postmodernism The Aesthetic of the Strange as the Aesthetic of Modernism and Postmodernism Theoretical Foundations of the Aesthetic of the Strange Works Cited

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Book SynopsisWho isn’t seduced by the idea of an affinity between aging and aesthetics? Yet, when does aging truly begin? What attributes does the aesthetic embrace? Looking into startling photographic art of the past three decades, this book is prompted by such questions and turns them into a meditation on how aesthetics mediates our relation to time. The photographic approach of the corporeal is at the center of the book. Within a phenomenological framework, Cristofovici brings into focus the physical and the psychic body to read aging as a process of change and becoming over time. Her understanding of aging sees beyond difference into larger patterns of perceptions that we share. Offering valuable insights into aging as a process of subject construction, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of visual culture, photography, art history, age studies, and theories of knowledge. This cross-disciplinary study that puts theory to the test of life’s and art’s paradoxes in an evocative style will also appeal to a wider readership interested in how photography and aging illuminate each other.Table of ContentsPlates Opening The Visible: Photographic Statements for an Aesthetics of Change Argument: Visualizing Different Age-Selves (In)Visibility: Photographs that Make a Change Argument: the Photographic Unconscious Jim Dine The In-visible: Spectral Visions, Transformative Perceptions Argument: Photography and Perception. Thierry Kuntzel; Janice Tanaka Duane Michals Photographic Aesthetics and the Fabric of the Subject Argument: The Inner Statue. Jacqueline Hayden Joyce Tenneson Performing Corpo-realities Argument: The Spectrum of Aging. Francesca Woodman; Donigan Cumming Francesca Woodman Coda Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisArchitecture and Philosophy: New Perspectives on the Work of Arakawa and Madeline Gins is a collection of essays on the work of artist-architects Arakawa and Madeline Gins and in particular their book Architectural Body (2000). The essays approach their cutting edge and ambitious project to design 'an architecture against death' from various angles and disciplines including aesthetics, architecture, linguistics, philosophy. The papers retrace the place of Architectural Body in the aesthetic landscape of art at the turn of the 21st century and assess the utopian stance of their work.Table of ContentsJean-Jacques Lecercle and Françoise Kral: Preface Jean-Jacques Lecercle: Gins and Arakawa, or The Passage to Materialism Jed Rasula: Endless House—Architectural Body Alan Prohm: Architecture and Poetic Efficacy: Architectural Poetics Fionn C. Bennett: “Autopoietic Event Matrices” in Architecture and in Literature: Wordsworth Talks to Arakawa and Gins Joshua Schuster: How Architecture Became Biotopian: From Meta-Biology to Causal Networks in Arakawa and Gins’ Architectural Body Françoise Kral: Architectural Body as Generative Utopia? Chris L. Smith: Preceding an Architectural Body Jondi Keane: A Bioscleave Report: Constructing the Perceiver Ronald Shusterman: Leafing Through a Universe: Architectural Bodies and Fictional Worlds Simone Rinzler: Arakawa and Gins’s Architectural Body: a Transgeneric Manifesto Linda Pillière: “No Mere Play on Words.” A stylistic Analysis of Architectural Body Authors Appendix

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Book SynopsisThis book is the first essay collection on Richard Shusterman, the foremost representative of contemporary pragmatist aesthetics, a philosopher whose books have been translated into more than fifteen languages. The 12 essays, which cover the wide-ranging scope of Shusterman’s pragmatist thought, divide into three sections: Literary Theory and Philosophy of Art; Epistemology, Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics; and Somaesthetics. Written by an international group of authors from different philosophical perspectives, the book’s essays not only provide a good introduction to Shusterman’s innovative pragmatist theories, but show their useful applications to important and controversial topics in philosophy, politics, religious and gender studies, the arts, and somaesthetics. The book also includes two new texts by Shusterman: an introductory essay in which he explains the trajectory of his intellectual development and a detailed response to the other contributors, which closes the book.Trade Review"There are few contemporary thinkers in the tradition of American pragmatism as prolific or as creative as Richard Shusterman. His thought and work range from analytic aesthetics to political philosophy, from ethics to the importance of bodily habits in modern society. … Th[is] volume … highlights the remarkable international reception of Shusterman’s ideas. … [it] represents a valuable and unique contribution to contemporary pragmatism. No serious student of Dewey’s pragmatism or of Shusterman’s continually developing project of somaesthetics should be without this book on their shelves." – in: Journal of Aesthetic Education (2014) "the articles of the collection make up a nice read …" – in: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 28/4Table of ContentsDorota Koczanowicz and Wojciech Małecki: Introduction Richard Shusterman: A Pragmatist Path through the Play of Limits: from Literature to Somaesthetics Literary Theory and Philosophy of Art Anna Budziak: The Idea of Emotion in T. S. Eliot and in Richard Shusterman Kacper Bartczak: Neo-pragmatist Models of Self-Development and the Poetic Subjectivity in John Ashbery’s Poetry Wojciech Małecki: Challenging the Taboo of the Autobiographical Dorota Koczanowicz: “You Must Change Your Life”: Pragmatism and the Therapeutic Function of Art Epistemology, Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics Sami Pihlström: Philosophy and Life: Pragmatism, Wittgenstein, and Metaphysics Adam Chmielewski: Faith and the Limits of Fallibilism Don Morse: Erotic Pragmatism: Shusterman’s Deweyan Advances Jerold J. Abrams: Shusterman and the Paradoxes of Superhuman Self-Styling Somaesthetics Monika Bokiniec: “Body Trouble”? Somaesthetics and Feminism Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński: Aesthetics and Corporal Values Robert Dobrowolski: Sampling (No)Body Martin Jay: Somaesthetics and Democracy: Dewey and Contemporary Body Art Richard Shusterman: Continuing Connections: Comments on the Preceding Essays About the Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisArt has always been important for religion or spirituality. Secular art displayed in museums can also be spiritual, and it is this art that is the subject of this book. Many of the works of art produced by Wassily Kandinsky, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol, and Anselm Kiefer are spiritual in nature. These works reveal their own spirituality, which often has no connection to official religions. Wessel Stoker demonstrates that these artists communicate religious insights through images and shows how they depict the relationship between heaven and earth, between this world and a transcendent reality, thus clearly drawing the contours of the spirituality these works evince.Trade Review"Whoever wants to descend into the catacombs of the religious aspects of Rothko’s work and other artists will find a perfect and knowledgeable travel guide in Stoker’s Where Heaven and Earth Meet." – Joost Zwagerman, De Volkskrant "Stoker demonstrates how transcendence and spirituality play a role in secular art and provides a nuanced and differentiated outline of that role." – Marcel Barnard, Nederlands Theologisch Tijdschrift "… finely detailed and erudite chapters on Kandinsky, Rothko, Warhol, and Kiefer." – Anne Marijke Spijkerboer, VolZinTable of ContentsPreface Acknowledgements Introduction Art and Spirituality Introduction What Makes Secular Art Spiritual Art? A Heuristic Model Kandinsky: Art as Spiritual Bread Introduction “Expressive” Art: The Inner Sound Veiled‐Figurative Abstraction Geometric and Biomorphic Abstraction A Spirituality of Inwardness: Radical Immanence Rothko: The Tragedy of Human Existence Introduction Myths as the Expression of the Tragic Colour Fields: Filled or Empty? The Rothko Chapel Paintings A Spirituality of Silence Warhol: A Spiritual Business Artist Introduction The Last Supper: A Preliminary Exploration The Image: Simulacrum or Referential? A Spirituality of Everyday Kiefer: Can Heaven Bear the Weight of History? Introduction The Tear in Reality Transformation and Restoration A Spirituality of Concrete The Spiritual Image Introduction The Spiritual Image in Secular Art Spiritual Insights Bibliography Index of Subjects Index of Names List of Paintings

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Book SynopsisArt has the capacity to shape and alter our identities. It can influence who and what we are. Those who have had aesthetic experiences know this intimately, and yet the study of art’s impact on the mind struggles to be recognized as a centrally important field within the discipline of psychology. The main thesis of Art and Identity is that aesthetic experience represents a prototype for meaningful experience, warranting intense philosophical and psychological investigation. Currently psychology remains too closed-off from the rich reflection of philosophical aesthetics, while philosophy continues to be sceptical of the psychological reduction of art to its potential for subjective experience. At the same time, philosophical aesthetics cannot escape making certain assumptions about the psyche and benefits from entering into a dialogue with psychology. Art and Identity brings together philosophical and psychological perspectives on aesthetics in order to explore how art creates minds.Trade Review"Art and Identity is a book any scholar working the field of art or psychology should read. Those invested in the visual arts and the psychology of emotions and experience will find in it a wealth of sources and material. For those invested in literature, this book will prove resourceful as a stepping stone to further their research." - Aleksandar Kordis, in: The European Legacy, 21:5-6Table of ContentsTone Roald and Johannes Lang: Introduction Mark Johnson: Identity, Bodily Meaning, and Art Ciarán Benson: Acts not Tracts! Why a Complete Psychology of Art and Identity Must Be Neuro-cultural Gerald C. Cupchik: I Am, Therefore I Think, Act, and Express both in Life and in Art Simo Køppe: Sense, Modality, and Aesthetic Experience Judy Gammelgaard: Reading Proust: The Little Shock Effects of Art Kasper Levin: Becoming Worthy of What Happens to Us: Art and Subjectivity in the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze Bjarne Sode Funch: Art and Personal Integrity Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: Steady Admiration in an Expanding Present: On Our New Relationship to Classics List of Contributors Index Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisThe book presents five philosophical and axiological studies devoted to the relationship between aesthetics and politics. It shows this relationship throughout the works of some avant-gardists, pragmatists, and postmodernists. It is also a voice in the discussion about the meaning of the fine arts and aesthetics in the context of the political aims and norms. This voice claims that the political dimension of art and aesthetics should be studied much more seriously than it has been till today, and needs more courageous re-interpretations and re-readings.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Preface Santayana and the Avant-garde: Visual Arts in the Context of Democracy, Norms, Liberty, and Social Progress Style as the Tool of Tyranny in Gombrowicz: An Avant-gardist as a Forerunner of Postmodernism Facial Images as a Way for the Articulation of Values in the Avant-garde’s Aesthetics of Deformation. Another Prelude to Postmodernism The Interrelation between Politics and Aesthetics in Classic American Pragmatism: Democracy and Aesthetic experience in William James Aesthetic Persuasion and Political Compulsion: Literary Philosophy in Light of Richard Rorty’s Ideas of Democratic Liberalism and Cultural Politics Final Remarks Bibliography About the Author Index

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Book SynopsisDecentring the Avant-Garde presents a collection of articles dealing with the topography of the avant-garde. The focus is on different responses to avant-garde aesthetics in regions traditionally depicted as cultural, geographical and linguistic peripheries. Avant-garde activities in the periphery have to date mostly been described in terms of a passive reception of new artistic trends and currents originating in cultural centres such as Paris or Berlin. Contesting this traditional view, Decentring the Avant-Garde highlights the importance of analysing the avant-garde in the periphery in terms of an active appropriation of avant-garde aesthetics within different cultural, ideological and historical settings. A broad collection of case studies discusses the activities of movements and artists in various regions in Europe and beyond. The result is a new topographical model of the international avant-garde and its cultural practices.Table of ContentsPer Bäckström / Benedikt Hjartarson: Rethinking the Topography of the International Avant-Garde. Introduction Rethinking the Dichotomy of Centre-Periphery Partha Mitter: Modern Global Art and Its Discontents Éva Forgács: Romantic Peripheries. The Dynamics of Enlightenment and Romanticism in East-Central Europe Daina Teters: Peculiarities in the Use of the Concepts Centre and Periphery in Avant-Garde Strategies Laura Winkiel: Postcolonial Avant-Gardes and the World System of Modernity / Coloniality Piotr Piotrowski: Avant-Garde Art in Post-Communist Central Europe Impact of the Periphery on the Centre Malte Hagener: Mushrooms, Ant Paths and Tactics. The Topography of the European Film Avant-Garde Thomas Hunkeler: Claiming Dada for the French Vojtěch Lahoda: Migration of Images. Private Collections of Modernism and Avant-Garde and the Search for Cubism in Eastern Europe Thomas Hackner: Worlds Apart? The Japan-Europe Historical Avant-Garde Relationship Central Role(s) of the Periphery Lisa Otty: “An Eccentric Homespun Avant-Gardist”. Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘Northern’ Radicalism, and the Scottish Renaissance Movement Hanna Horsberg Hansen: Sami Artist Group 1978–1983. Otherness or Avant-Garde? Benedikt Hjartarson: Anationalism and the Search for a Universal Language. Esperantism and the European Avant-Garde Konstantin Dudakov-Kashuro: Revising the Aporias of the Avant-Garde Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisThis is the first collection in English devoted exclusively to pragmatist aesthetics. Its main aim is to employ the resources of that rich and exciting tradition in studying artistic phenomena such as film, sculpture, bio-art, poetry, the novel, cuisine, and various body arts. But it also attempts to provide a wider background for such studies by sketching the history of pragmatist reflection on the aesthetic and by discussing some of the main positions that this history has produced: the aesthetic conceptions of C.S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Joseph Margolis, Richard Shusterman (somaesthetics in particular), and others.Trade ReviewEnvironmental Philosophy: A Revaluation of Cosmopolitan Ethics from an Ecocentric Standpoint calls for a new approach to ethics. Starting from the necessity for all life of air, water, and food, the book revalues the relation of ethics and environmentalism. Using insights of the environmental ethicists, environmental ethics becomes the model for ethics as a whole. Humans are part of a larger environment. Cosmopolitanism should be revised in accord with environmental ethics. The book applies a new theory of values to the relation of value and obligation, and of duty, rights and virtue, to accord with ecocentrism. The book also critically evaluates Utilitarianism and the self interest theory. Other chapters address population, species preservation and a practical program for environmental policy.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Wojciech Małecki: Pragmatist Aesthetics: History and Hope Part One: Rethinking (Pragmatist) Aesthetics Richard Shusterman: The Invention of Pragmatist Aesthetics: Genealogical Reflections on a Notion and a Name Scott R. Stroud: The Art of Experience: Dewey on the Aesthetic Roberto Frega: Pragmatic Objectivity and the Grounds of Validity of Aesthetic Judgments Alexander Kremer: Understanding, Interpretation, Art, and Neopragmatism Part Two: Rethinking the Arts Krystyna Wilkoszewska: John Dewey and 20th-Century Art Giovanni Maddalena: Writing as Complete Gesture: A Pragmatist View of Creativity Kacper Bartczak: Wallace Stevens’s Pragmatist Poetics of Plenitude Jerold J. Abrams: Pragmatist Aesthetics and Cinematic Experience: Emerson, Dewey, and Shusterman Else Marie Bukdahl: Embodied Creation and Perception in Visual Art Monika Bakke: Practicing Aesthetics among Nonhuman Somas in the Age of Biotech Barbara Formis: Eating as an Aesthetic Experience Dorota Koczanowicz: Somaesthetics and the Art of Eating Satoshi Higuchi: Somaesthetics in Japan as Practicing Pragmatist Aesthetics About the Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisThis book addresses the interrelations between aesthetics, ethics, and politics in the framework of pragmatist aesthetics, offering a comprehensive panorama of the ways and fields in which pragmatist aesthetics ties in with vital social and ethical problems of modernity. Most of the contributors refer to the model propounded by Richard Shusterman. Following in Dewey’s footsteps, Shusterman has elaborated and expanded his concept, adding new dimensions to it. The most important supplement is the idea of aesthetic experience being constituted by our bodiliness. In somaesthetics, pragmatism has acquired a new dimension – a fully developed, comprehensive aesthetic theory. Pragmatist aesthetics with its essential notion of the body engages in critical dialogue with many key concepts of modernity which locate the body in social and cultural frameworks. The articles collected in this volume illustrate the complex range of pragmatist aesthetics and its impact on the understanding of crucial issues in social and moral philosophy.Table of Contents“Beauty and Action”, Leszek Koczanowicz and Katarzyna Liszka Part One: Politics, Community, and the City “Somaesthetics and Politics: Incorporating Pragmatist Aesthetics for Social Action”, Richard Shusterman “Embodied Communities”, Leszek Koczanowicz “Ostentation and Agoraphobia in the City”, Adam Chmielewski Part Two: Aesthetic Experience “‘Anything Goes’ vs. ‘Who Touches this Book Touches a Man’: William James and Paul Feyerabend on Metaphysical, Ethical, and Aesthetic ‘Abundance’”, Sami Pihlström “Aesthetics as Duty or Aesthetics as Faith: Notes on Richard Shusterman’s Pragmatist Aesthetics, with Reference to Adorno and Castoriadis”, David Schauffler Part Three: Ethics, Humanism, and Social Hope “The Linguistic World: Rorty’s Aesthetic Meliorism”, Rosa M. Calcaterra “The Concept of Man in the Shadow of the Shoah: Geras, Rorty and Shusterman in Dialogue”, Katarzyna Liszka “Experience and Judgment: Political and Aesthetic”, John Ryder “Somaesthetic Encounter with Oneself and the Other”, Robert Dobrowolski Part Four: Art of Living and Life Politics “Making the Pragmatist Art of Living Explicit”, Emil Višnovský “The Aesthetic Cosmopolitan from a Neo-Pragmatist Perspective: Themes and Challenges in Shusterman”, Michael Rings “Philosophical Anthropology in Life Politics of Today”, Hans-Peter Krüger About the Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisThis collection is a timely reflection on the momentous concept of transculturalism. With its historical roots in globalization, transculturation, oriented to (new) aesthetics, seeks new cultural formations, and, with its heterogeneous author- and readership, enlists active participation by the individual. The volume focuses on the interplay between and lapses within interrelated domains of study – postcolonial, diaspora, and world-literary – which attend to the material and discursive circumstances of the literary work. The various readings argue for a situated mode of reading that attends to literary meaning emerging from transaction across, struggle between, and appropriation of cultures, both intra- and internationally, and, by definition, not tied exclusively to a colonial historical paradigm. The overarching themes – ambivalence, power, and literature – are approached transculturally and aesthetically with four distinct concerns in mind: theorization of transculturation; diaspora and migration; the African legacies of colonial slavery and its global aftermath; and localized topics that diversify the interpretation and definition of transculturation and its relation to an (emerging) aesthetic that goes beyond nationally constrained (geographical, cultural, linguistic, literary, etc.) boundaries. Themes range from literary representations of archaeological sites to the contest over meaning that follow efforts to exhume the past, from the ethics of queer love in diaspora to the effects of global literary marketing, from the development of transcultural identities in the colonial encounter to domestication and foreignization in the translation of Aboriginal texts. Authors discussed include Michael Ondaatje, Vernon Anderson, Barry Unsworth, Salman Rushdie, Yvonne Vera, Chiang Hsun, Sally Morgan, Doris Pilkington, Sarfraz Manzoor, Sathnam Sanghera, Yasmin Hai, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Timothy Wangusa, Fred D’Aguiar, Amitav Ghosh, and Jack Kerouac.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Erik Falk and Joel Kuortti: Introduction I. Theorizing Transculturation Gesa Mackenthun: Digging Far and Deep: Archaeological Sites, Dislocations, and Heterotopoi in Postcolonial Writing Joel Kuortti: Salman Rushdie’s Transcultural ‘Jesture’ in The Enchantress of Florence II. Diasporic and Immigrant Literatures Erik Falk: Transculturation, Postcolonial Literature, and the Global Literary Market: The Case of Yvonne Vera’s American Literary Career Fred Chih-Wei Chang: The Erotics of Queer Diaspora in Chiang Hsun’s Yu ai shu: xie gei Ly’s M (Epistles of Eros: Letters to Ly’s M) Ulla Rahbek: Dual Lives? Constructing Individuality in Contemporary British Multicultural Memoirs III. African Legacies Dominica Dipio: Negotiating Transcultural Identities in African Literature: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s The River Between and Timothy Wangusa’s Upon This Mountain Vicki Briault Manus: The Aesthetics of Indigenization in Post-Apartheid Black South African Literature Željka Švrljuga: “In this time brown did not stick around”: Fred D’Aguiar’s Poetics of Slavery IV. Localized Readings Danica Čerče and Oliver Haag: Australian Aboriginal Literature on the European Market Arnaud Barras: The Aesthetics of the Tide: The Ecosystem as Matrix for Transculturation in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide Michael J. Prince: “Whither goest thou, America?” Deterritorialization, Identity, and the Fellahin Ideal in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road Notes on Contributors Index

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