Philosophy: aesthetics Books

Book SynopsisIn this new book, Florian Klinger gives readers a basic action-theoretical account of the aesthetic. While normal action fulfills a determinate concept, Klinger argues, aesthetic action performs an indeterminacy by suspending the action's conceptual resolution. Taking as examples work by Tino Sehgal, Kara Walker, Mazen Kerbaj, Marina Abramović, Cy Twombly, and Franz Kafka, the book examines indeterminacy in such instances as a walk that is at once leisurely and purposeful, a sound piece that is at once joyous and mournful and mechanical, or a sculpture that at once draws one in and shuts one out. Because it has irresolution as its point, aesthetic action presents itself as an unsettling of ourselves, our ways, our very sense of who we are. As performers of such action, we don't recognize one another as bearers of a shared human form as we normally would, but find ourselves tasked anew with figuring out what sharing a form would mean. In conversation with philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Anscombe; political thinkers such as Marx and Lorde; and contemporary interlocutors such as Michael Thompson, Sebastian Rödl, and Thomas Khurana, Klinger's book makes a case for a conception of the human form that systematically includes the aesthetic: an actualization of the form that is indeterminate and nevertheless rational. The book gives the project of Western philosophical aesthetics a long-overdue formulation for our present that aims to do justice to contemporary aesthetic production as it actually exists. It will appeal to those working in philosophy, art, and political thought. Trade Review"With ingenious, stunning readings, Klinger breaks new ground in aesthetics. This is a philosophy of art with which thinkers and scholars will contend for years to come."—Henry W. Pickford, Duke University"Aesthetic Action offers a highly original and substantial outline of a new understanding of aesthetics. This is an important and rigorous contribution to emerging conversations in philosophy, of highest interest for readers interested in giving an account of contemporary art."—Rüdiger Campe, Yale University"Klinger gives us an entirely new way of understanding the indeterminacy of our encounters with art. In his incisive analyses he offers a truly fresh view of art, one that opens the fields of interaction each work creates."—Niklaus Largier, University of California, Berkeley"This book rethinks action through aesthetics and aesthetics through action, providing us with a new insight into the kind of unsettling that the aesthetic is and affords."—María del Rosario Acosta López, University of California, RiversideTable of ContentsPreface ONE. The Unsettling 1. The Thought of Aesthetic Distinction 2. Life Form and Settledness 3. Aesthetic Unsettling 4. The Use of Unsettling 5. The Account TWO. Accounting for Ourselves 1. Determinacy 2. The Original Scene of Self-Determination 3. Form as Answer: Hegel's Conception of the Aesthetic as Determinacy 4. Form as Question: A Conception of the Aesthetic as Indeterminacy 5. The Task of a Unified Accounting THREE. A Three-Way Capacity 1. Rationality and Indeterminacy 2. A Rational Capacity 3. Failed Attempts at Conceiving Indeterminacy 4. Indeterminacy as Part of Our Form 5. Indeterminacy as Such FOUR. Logical Account of Aesthetic Action: Aspectual Irresolution 1. The Concept of Aesthetic Action 2. Distinction through Aspectual Irresolution 3. Internal Unity in Crisis 4. Aesthetic Indeterminacy 5. External Unity with Action at Large FIVE. Material Account of Aesthetic Action: Bond without Terms 1. Logical and Material Accounting 2. Bond without Terms 3. Aesthetic Interaction 4. Life as Such 5. The Question of Who We Are SIX. Aesthetic Transformation 1. Aesthetic Action as Transformation 2. Performance without Resources 3. The Work of Aspectual Irresolution 4. Transformation That Includes Its Terms 5. The Aesthetic Self SEVEN. The Use of the Aesthetic 1. The Political as Example 2. Our Form as Political Task 3. Tino Sehgal: Genus Politics 4. Kara Walker: Politics of Difference 5. Mazen Kerbaj: Politics of Life as Such Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisAmid the turmoil of economic crisis, Greece has become the first European experiment of left rule in a sea of neoliberalism. What happens when a government of the Left, committed to social justice and the reversal of austerity, is blackmailed into following policies it has fought against and strongly opposes? What can the experience of the Syriza government tell us about the prospects for the Left in the twenty-first century? In this engaging and provocative book, Costas Douzinas uses his position as an 'accidental politician', unexpectedly propelled from academia into the world of Greek politics as a Syriza MP, to answer these urgent questions. He examines the challenges facing Syriza since its ascent to power in 2015 and draws out the theoretical and political lessons from one of the boldest and most difficult experiments in governing from the Left in an age of neoliberalism and austerity.Trade Review"What a rare and wonderful book! Douzinas reflects with searing honesty on the challenges facing left parties trying to govern and protect embattled nations in an age of financialization and globalization. Because he is one of the most perspicacious critical legal and political theorists of our time, he has also offered a brilliant set of political theoretical meditations. By turns ironic, tragic, caustic and moving, Syriza in Power is essential reading for serious leftists everywhere." Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley "While the Syriza government, elected in 2015 in Greece, was teaching the world a lesson of courage and fidelity, Costas Douzinas, its "professor elect", was teaching a lesson of lucidity, intelligence and imagination. Above all, he makes plain that, in the darkest hour, history is not finished, because the resistance is rooted in the life and ideals of the people itself. Whether one entirely agrees or not with Douzinas' "left Euroscepticism that can save Europe", his politics of truth will prove immensely helpful." Étienne Balibar, Kingston UniversityTable of Contents Prologue: The Accidental Politician A. Resistance Rising 1. From Utopia to Dystopia and Resistance, a Short Run 2. Hunger Strikers and Hunger Artists 3. Radical Philosophy Encounters Syriza 4. A Philosophy of Resistance B. Syriza Agonistes 5. A Very European Coup 6. Contradiction is the Name of the Governing Left C. Reflections on Life as Politician 7. Welcome To The Desert Of Disorderly Order 8. Learning from Ideology 9. The Curious Incident of the Missing TV Licenses D. The Moral Advantage of the Left 10. The Ethos of the Left 11. Greeks or Europeans? 12. The Euro, the Sacred and the Holy E. Left History 13. The Left and the Philosophy Of History 14. 1949, 1969, 1989: The Cycles of History F. From Grexit to Brexit 15. Putting the Demos On Stage 16. Grexit and Brexit, Oxi and Leave 17. Brexit and Euroscepticism G. Finis Europae 18. Finis Europae? 19. The Left and the Future of Europe H. Cities of Refuge 20. Europe Between Two Infant Deaths 21. Human Rights For Martians Notes

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Book SynopsisAmid the turmoil of economic crisis, Greece has become the first European experiment of left rule in a sea of neoliberalism. What happens when a government of the Left, committed to social justice and the reversal of austerity, is blackmailed into following policies it has fought against and strongly opposes? What can the experience of the Syriza government tell us about the prospects for the Left in the twenty-first century? In this engaging and provocative book, Costas Douzinas uses his position as an 'accidental politician', unexpectedly propelled from academia into the world of Greek politics as a Syriza MP, to answer these urgent questions. He examines the challenges facing Syriza since its ascent to power in 2015 and draws out the theoretical and political lessons from one of the boldest and most difficult experiments in governing from the Left in an age of neoliberalism and austerity.Trade Review"What a rare and wonderful book! Douzinas reflects with searing honesty on the challenges facing left parties trying to govern and protect embattled nations in an age of financialization and globalization. Because he is one of the most perspicacious critical legal and political theorists of our time, he has also offered a brilliant set of political theoretical meditations. By turns ironic, tragic, caustic and moving, Syriza in Power is essential reading for serious leftists everywhere." Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley "While the Syriza government, elected in 2015 in Greece, was teaching the world a lesson of courage and fidelity, Costas Douzinas, its "professor elect", was teaching a lesson of lucidity, intelligence and imagination. Above all, he makes plain that, in the darkest hour, history is not finished, because the resistance is rooted in the life and ideals of the people itself. Whether one entirely agrees or not with Douzinas' "left Euroscepticism that can save Europe", his politics of truth will prove immensely helpful." Étienne Balibar, Kingston University"Costas Douzinas’ Syriza in Power carries a wondrous resemblance to Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince... Both works scrutinise without moralization the world of politics at a critical historical juncture… As they set out to expose the tensions between the logic of moral rectitude and the demands of public action, they advance positions that are in direct conflict with the dominant doctrines of the time. The insights into the world of politics are invariably delivered with flair and erudition that simultaneously seduce and intimidate."Open DemocracyTable of Contents Prologue: The Accidental Politician A. Resistance Rising 1. From Utopia to Dystopia and Resistance, a Short Run 2. Hunger Strikers and Hunger Artists 3. Radical Philosophy Encounters Syriza 4. A Philosophy of Resistance B. Syriza Agonistes 5. A Very European Coup 6. Contradiction is the Name of the Governing Left C. Reflections on Life as Politician 7. Welcome To The Desert Of Disorderly Order 8. Learning from Ideology 9. The Curious Incident of the Missing TV Licenses D. The Moral Advantage of the Left 10. The Ethos of the Left 11. Greeks or Europeans? 12. The Euro, the Sacred and the Holy E. Left History 13. The Left and the Philosophy Of History 14. 1949, 1969, 1989: The Cycles of History F. From Grexit to Brexit 15. Putting the Demos On Stage 16. Grexit and Brexit, Oxi and Leave 17. Brexit and Euroscepticism G. Finis Europae 18. Finis Europae? 19. The Left and the Future of Europe H. Cities of Refuge 20. Europe Between Two Infant Deaths 21. Human Rights For Martians Notes

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Book SynopsisIn this book, the founder of object-oriented ontology develops his view that aesthetics is the central discipline of philosophy. Whereas science must attempt to grasp an object in terms of its observable qualities, philosophy and art cannot proceed in this way because they don't have direct access to their objects. Hence philosophy shares the same fate as art in being compelled to communicate indirectly, allusively, or elliptically, rather than in the clear propositional terms that are often taken – wrongly – to be the sole stuff of genuine philosophy. Conceiving of philosophy and art in this way allows us to reread key debates in aesthetic theory and to view art history in a different way. The formalist criticism of Greenberg and Fried is rejected for its refusal to embrace the innate theatricality and deep multiplicity of every artwork. This has consequences for art criticism, making pictorial content more important than formalism thinks but less entwined with the social sphere than anti-formalism holds. It has consequences for art history too, as the surrealists, David, and Poussin, among others, gain in importance. The close link between aesthetics and ontology also invites a new periodization of modern philosophy as a whole, and the habitual turn away from Kant’s thing-in-itself towards an increase in philosophical "immanence" is shown to be a false dawn. This major work will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy, aesthetics, art history and cultural theory.Trade Review“An essential guide by the foremost philosopher of our age. This book will educate and delight both aficionados and those unfamiliar with the first major philosophical movement of the twenty-first century.”Timothy Morton, Rice University “Harman presents a clear overview of the development of Speculative Realism’s core debates. He not only reconstructs its genealogy but offers a remarkably concise introduction to his own ontology by putting it in its larger context.”Markus Gabriel, University of Bonn". . . Harman is a wonderful writer. He’s accessible and lively, a real joy to read."The University BookmanTable of ContentsAbbreviations for Frequently Cited Works Preliminary Note Introduction: Formalism and the Lessons of Dante 1. OOO and Art: A First Summary 2. Formalism and its Flaws 3. Theatrical, Not Literal 4. The Canvas is the Message 5. After High Modernism 6. Dada, Surrealism, and Literalism 7. Weird Formalism Notes Works Cited

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Book SynopsisFrom mobile phones to consoles, tablets and PCs, we are now a generation of gamers. The PlayStation Dreamworld is – to borrow a phrase from Slavoj Zizek – the pervert's guide to videogames. It argues that we can only understand the world of videogames via Lacanian dream analysis. It also argues that the Left needs to work inside this dreamspace – a powerful arena for constructing our desires – or else the dreamworld will fall entirely into the hands of dominant and reactionary forces. While cyberspace is increasingly dominated by corporate organization, gaming, at its most subversive, can nevertheless produce radical forms of enjoyment which threaten the capitalist norms that are created and endlessly repeated in our daily relationships with mobile phones, videogames, computers and other forms of technological entertainment. Far from being a book solely for dedicated gamers, this book dissects the structure of our relationships to all technological entertainment at a time when entertainment has become ubiquitous. We can no longer escape our fantasies but rather live inside their digital reality.Trade Review“The universe of video games and the action they involve us in render perfectly the illusions and antagonisms of our ideological predicament - the popularity of post-apocalyptic games tells it all. But perhaps even more important is the type of subjectivity a gamer has to adopt when immersed into a game: a mixture of extreme engagement and loss of reality, a universe of immortality where actions are indefinitely repeatable. So it is not that we can understand the impact of these games only through the analysis of our social reality - it's also the other way round: to understand how our societies work you have to know video games And Alfie Bown does this at such a high level that he produces an instant classic, a book that everyone who seeks to find a way in our confused social life will have to read. The Playstation Dreamworld is unputdownable, once you start reading it you will get addicted to it... as in a good video game!” Slavoj Žižek “If you ever asked yourself what Freud and Lacan would think if they had a chance to play video games, Alfie Bown gives you the answer. As a passionate gamer and a playful philosopher, he succeeds in showing not only why video-games matter but why they might carry subversive potential. This exciting psychoanalysis of video games shows why Pokémon GO and other games were only the beginning of a brave new world."Srećko Horvat From mobile phones to consoles to tablet, we are now a generation of gamers. This book dissects the structure of our relationships to all forms of technological entertainment at a time when digital enjoyment has become ubiquitous.Alfie Bown is Assistant Professor of Literature at HSMC, Hong Kong and co-editor of the Hong Kong Review of Books."A significant contribution to the debate around virtual reality" TLSTable of Contents Contents Acknowledgements Note on the Games Tutorial: The Pokémon Generation Level 1. From Farming Simulation to Dystopic Wasteland: Gaming and Capitalism Work and Play - Cultures of Distraction - Pastoral Dystopia, Apocalyptic Utopia – No Alternative Level 2. Dreamwork: Cyborgs on the Analyst’s Couch Japanese Dreams, American Texts – The Dreamworld - Repetitions and the Dromena – Immersion and Westworld Level 3. Retro Gaming: The Politics of Former and Future Pleasures 90s Rational Gaming – Virtual/Reality - Subject, Object, Enjoyment - Jouissance in the Arcades Bonus Features: How to be a Subversive Gamer Game Index Endnotes

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Book SynopsisThroughout modernity there has been a clear divide between art and commerce. Objects could either be consumed as commerce or contemplated as art. Today, as museums are facing increasing financial pressure and as stores have become inventive locations for new modes of display, this clear divide has begun to dissolve. There is one place that represents a key stage in this evolution: 10 Corso Como. It was founded in Milan, at that very address, by fashion editor Carla Sozzani and has since expanded to Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, and New York. The name “concept store”, which has now spread across our globalized world, was originally coined to describe this new form. This book is the first philosophical inquiry into this new form of store and it sheds new light on how categories that have governed our modern lives, such as commerce, art, fashion, and museum, are being redefined today.Trade Review“Coccia and Grau's insightful account of 10 Corso Como presents a model where multiple disciplines do not just sit side by side but blend together holistically under one roof. This is a compelling case study of a transitional and ever-shifting space that is wholly in tune with the rhythm and pace of our time.”Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London “Is some of the future of the art museum to be found in the intimate experience that comes in 10 Corso Como, the ultimate, curated ‘concept store’? Coccia and Grau have found food for museum thought in a retail temple of fashion and living.”Michael Govan, CEO and Director, Los Angeles County Museum of ArtTable of Contents Foreword. In Action Chapter 1. Absolute Commerce Chapter 2. The Eternal and the Ephemeral Chapter 3: The Confines of Fashion Postface. At Calm Notes

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Book SynopsisThe time of the landscape is not the time when people started describing gardens, mountains and lakes in poems or representing them in works of art: it is the time when the landscape imposed itself as a specific object of thought. It is the time when both the harmony of arranged gardens and the disharmony of wild nature led to a revolution in the criteria of the beautiful and in the meaning of the word “art.” It coincided with the birth of aesthetics, understood as a regime for shaping how art is seen and thought, and also with the French Revolution, understood as a revolution in the very idea of what binds together a human community. The time of the landscape is the time when the conjunction of these two upheavals brought into focus, however hazily, a common horizon: that of a revolution that no longer concerns only the laws of the state or the norms of art, but the very forms of sensible experience. This brilliant and wide-ranging book will be of interest to students and scholars in philosophy, literature, the visual arts, and the humanities generally, and to anyone interested in critical theory and philosophy.Trade Review“This short, polemical intervention in the history of landscape aesthetics is sure to energize a fresh debate about the relations of painting, architecture, and visual experience in the nineteenth century.”W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago“A decisive treatment of the perception and management of nature, The Time of the Landscape contends that the design and management of gardens in the post-revolutionary regime signal a sea-change in the ways we perceive, experience, and shape the world around us.”Tom Conley, Harvard UniversityTable of ContentsAbbreviations of frequently cited works List of Illustrations Foreword I. A Newcomer to the Fine Arts II. Scenes of Nature III. The Landscape as Painting IV. Beyond the Visible V. Politics of the Landscape Epilogue Notes

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Book SynopsisIn recent years, bioaesthetics has used the latest discoveries in evolutionary studies and neuroscience to provide new ways of looking at art and aesthetics. Carsten Strathausen’s remarkable exploration of this emerging field is the first comprehensive account of its ideas, as well as a timely critique of its limitations. Strathausen familiarizes readers with the basics of bioaesthetics, grounding them in its philosophical underpinnings while articulating its key components. Importantly, he delves into the longstanding problem of the “two cultures” that separate the arts and the sciences. Seeking to make bioaesthetics a more robust way of thinking, Strathausen then critiques it for failing to account for science’s historical and cultural assumptions. At its worst, he says, biologism reduces artworks to mere automatons that rubber-stamp pre-established scientific truths. Written with a sensitive understanding of science’s strengths, and willing to refute its best arguments, Bioaesthetics helps readers separate the sensible from the specious. At a time when humanities departments are shrinking—and when STEM education is on the rise—Bioaesthetics makes vital points about the limitations of science, while lodging a robust defense of the importance of the humanities.Trade Review"If you’ve ever wondered how we’ve gotten to the point where virtually every cultural theory field now boasts a ‘bio-’ or ‘neuro-’ subfield, Carsten Strathausen’s Bioaesthetics is an excellent guide. Setting the stage with scrupulous readings of historical controversies, Strathausen then incisively critiques the reductionist ‘biologism’ he finds in ‘literary Darwinism,’ ‘biopoetics,’ ‘neuroaestethics,’ and so on, before judiciously tackling Deleuze and affect theory. A powerful and insightful study, Bioaesthetics rewards the reader with clarifying and careful mappings of important contemporary concepts."—John Protevi, author of Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the SciencesTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionThe Biological Nature of What?Against Consilience What Is Bioaesthetics?Structure and Chapters1. Human Nature after KantKant and BiologyPreformation and Epigenesis before 1800Emergent Life (Autopoiesis and Cognition)Sensus Communis Aestheticus2. Marxism and BiologyMarx and DarwinChance and Necessity, or, Kant RevisitedScience and PoliticsA Biologistic Theory of HistoryOn Norm-Circularity and Aleatory Materialism3. Cultural EvolutionSociobiologyEvolutionary Psychology (EP)Social Learning and SociogenesisOf Memes and Culturgens Technogenesis4. Evolutionary AestheticsArt and NatureA Survey of the FieldLiterary Darwinism RevisitedCognitive Studies5. NeuroaestheticsHow to “Read” a Brain ScanThe Cerebral SubjectConsciousnessNeuronal Aesthetics: The Historical ViewNeuroaesthetics: The Scientific View“The Pre-existing Idea within Us”: Zeki’s PlatonismCodaDeleuze and AffectA Posthuman Aesthetics?NotesIndex

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Book SynopsisIn recent years, bioaesthetics has used the latest discoveries in evolutionary studies and neuroscience to provide new ways of looking at art and aesthetics. Carsten Strathausen’s remarkable exploration of this emerging field is the first comprehensive account of its ideas, as well as a timely critique of its limitations. Strathausen familiarizes readers with the basics of bioaesthetics, grounding them in its philosophical underpinnings while articulating its key components. Importantly, he delves into the longstanding problem of the “two cultures” that separate the arts and the sciences. Seeking to make bioaesthetics a more robust way of thinking, Strathausen then critiques it for failing to account for science’s historical and cultural assumptions. At its worst, he says, biologism reduces artworks to mere automatons that rubber-stamp pre-established scientific truths. Written with a sensitive understanding of science’s strengths, and willing to refute its best arguments, Bioaesthetics helps readers separate the sensible from the specious. At a time when humanities departments are shrinking—and when STEM education is on the rise—Bioaesthetics makes vital points about the limitations of science, while lodging a robust defense of the importance of the humanities.Trade Review"If you’ve ever wondered how we’ve gotten to the point where virtually every cultural theory field now boasts a ‘bio-’ or ‘neuro-’ subfield, Carsten Strathausen’s Bioaesthetics is an excellent guide. Setting the stage with scrupulous readings of historical controversies, Strathausen then incisively critiques the reductionist ‘biologism’ he finds in ‘literary Darwinism,’ ‘biopoetics,’ ‘neuroaestethics,’ and so on, before judiciously tackling Deleuze and affect theory. A powerful and insightful study, Bioaesthetics rewards the reader with clarifying and careful mappings of important contemporary concepts."—John Protevi, author of Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the SciencesTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionThe Biological Nature of What?Against Consilience What Is Bioaesthetics?Structure and Chapters1. Human Nature after KantKant and BiologyPreformation and Epigenesis before 1800Emergent Life (Autopoiesis and Cognition)Sensus Communis Aestheticus2. Marxism and BiologyMarx and DarwinChance and Necessity, or, Kant RevisitedScience and PoliticsA Biologistic Theory of HistoryOn Norm-Circularity and Aleatory Materialism3. Cultural EvolutionSociobiologyEvolutionary Psychology (EP)Social Learning and SociogenesisOf Memes and Culturgens Technogenesis4. Evolutionary AestheticsArt and NatureA Survey of the FieldLiterary Darwinism RevisitedCognitive Studies5. NeuroaestheticsHow to “Read” a Brain ScanThe Cerebral SubjectConsciousnessNeuronal Aesthetics: The Historical ViewNeuroaesthetics: The Scientific View“The Pre-existing Idea within Us”: Zeki’s PlatonismCodaDeleuze and AffectA Posthuman Aesthetics?NotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA philosophical and cultural distillation of the bleak joys in today’s ambivalent ecologies and patterns of lifeBleak Joys develops an understanding of complex entities and processes—from plant roots to forests to ecological damage and its calculation—as aesthetic. It is also a book about “bad” things, such as anguish and devastation, which relate to the ecological and technical but are also constitutive of politics, the ethical, and the formation of subjects.Avidly interdisciplinary, Bleak Joys draws on scientific work in plant sciences, computing, and cybernetics, as well as mathematics, literature, and art in ways that are not merely illustrative of but foundational to our understanding of ecological aesthetics and the condition in which the posthumanities are being forged. It places the sensory world of plants next to the generalized and nonlinear infrastructure of irresolvability—the economics of indifference up against the question of how to make a home on Planet Earth in a condition of damaged ecologies. Crosscutting chapters on devastation, anguish, irresolvability, luck, plant, and home create a vivid and multifaceted approach that is as remarkable for its humor as for its scholarly complexity.Engaging with Deleuze, Guattari, and Bakhtin, among others, Bleak Joys captures the modes of crises that constitute our present ecological and political condition, and reckons with the means by which they are not simply aesthetically known but aesthetically manifest.Trade Review"Bleak Joys is a tour de force—a survey of some of the most important ideas and environmental issues of our times."—Eben Kirksey, author of Emergent Ecologies and editor of The Multispecies Salon"With Bleak Joys, Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova take us on an extraordinary exploration of aesthetic transformations in the era of the new climate regime. Not only does the book offer a unique perspective on a new framework of thought, but it also questions the perceptual, emotional, and ethico-aesthetic transformations imposed on us by the ecological crisis that constitutes our present."—Didier Debaise, author of Nature as Event: The Lure of the Possible

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Book SynopsisA new speculative ontology of aesthetics In Aesthesis and Perceptronium, Alexander Wilson presents a theory of materialist and posthumanist aesthetics founded on an original speculative ontology that addresses the interconnections of experience, cognition, organism, and matter. Entering the active fields of contemporary thought known as the new materialisms and realisms, Wilson argues for a rigorous redefining of the criteria that allow us to discriminate between those materials and objects where aesthesis (perception, cognition) takes place and those where it doesn’t. Aesthesis and Perceptronium negotiates between indiscriminately pluralist views that attribute mentation to all things and eliminative views that deny the existence of mentation even in humans. By recasting aesthetic questions within the framework of “epistemaesthetics,” which considers cognition and aesthetics as belonging to a single category that can neither be fully disentangled nor fully reduced to either of its terms, Wilson forges a theory of nonhuman experience that avoids this untenable dilemma. Through a novel consideration of the evolutionary origins of cognition and its extension in technological developments, the investigation culminates in a rigorous reevaluation of the status of matter, information, computation, causality, and time in terms of their logical and causal engagement with the activities of human and nonhuman agents. Trade Review"Aesthesis and Perceptronium offers a nuanced engagement with science, technology, and art that is otherwise largely missing from contemporary debates, exploring the significance of aesthetics in the aftermath of neomaterialist and nonrepresentational theories of perception, cognition, and intelligence."—Luciana Parisi, Goldsmiths, University of London

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Book SynopsisA new speculative ontology of aesthetics In Aesthesis and Perceptronium, Alexander Wilson presents a theory of materialist and posthumanist aesthetics founded on an original speculative ontology that addresses the interconnections of experience, cognition, organism, and matter. Entering the active fields of contemporary thought known as the new materialisms and realisms, Wilson argues for a rigorous redefining of the criteria that allow us to discriminate between those materials and objects where aesthesis (perception, cognition) takes place and those where it doesn’t. Aesthesis and Perceptronium negotiates between indiscriminately pluralist views that attribute mentation to all things and eliminative views that deny the existence of mentation even in humans. By recasting aesthetic questions within the framework of “epistemaesthetics,” which considers cognition and aesthetics as belonging to a single category that can neither be fully disentangled nor fully reduced to either of its terms, Wilson forges a theory of nonhuman experience that avoids this untenable dilemma. Through a novel consideration of the evolutionary origins of cognition and its extension in technological developments, the investigation culminates in a rigorous reevaluation of the status of matter, information, computation, causality, and time in terms of their logical and causal engagement with the activities of human and nonhuman agents. Trade Review"Aesthesis and Perceptronium offers a nuanced engagement with science, technology, and art that is otherwise largely missing from contemporary debates, exploring the significance of aesthetics in the aftermath of neomaterialist and nonrepresentational theories of perception, cognition, and intelligence."—Luciana Parisi, Goldsmiths, University of London

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Book SynopsisReconsiders exceptionalism between aesthetics and politics Here, Arne De Boever proposes the notion of aesthetic exceptionalism to describe the widespread belief that art and artists are exceptional. Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism challenges that belief by focusing on the sovereign artist as genius, as well as the original artwork as the foundation of the art market. Engaging with sculpture, conceptual artwork, and painting by emerging and established artists, De Boever proposes a worldly, democratic notion of unexceptional art as an antidote to the problems of aesthetic exceptionalism.Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the leadTrade Review"De Boever’s work offers an ongoing intellectual and critical project."—Collateral

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Book SynopsisHow can architecture develop better aesthetic directions for the twenty-first-century built environment? Our world, increasingly defined by efficient but unconsidered architecture and cities, seems to be getting uglier. In On the Appearance of the World, Mark Foster Gage asks why. He imagines a future scenario where architectural design and ideas from aesthetic philosophy align toward the production of a built world that is more humane, habitable, beautiful, and just.

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Book SynopsisGrammatology of Images radically alters how we approach images. Instead of asking for the history, power, or essence of images, Sigrid Weigel addresses imaging as such. The book considers how something a-visible gets transformed into an image. Weigel scrutinizes the moment of mis-en-apparition, of making an appearance, and the process of concealment that accompanies any imaging. Weigel reinterprets Derrida’s and Freud’s concept of the trace as that which must be thought before something exists. In doing so, she illuminates the threshold between traces and iconic images, between something immaterial and its pictorial representation. Chapters alternate between general accounts of the line, the index, the effigy, and the cult-image, and case studies from the history of science, art, politics, and religion, involving faces as indicators of emotion, caricatures as effigies of defamation, and angels as embodiments of transcendental ideas. Weigel’s approach to images illuminates fascinating, unexpected correspondences between premodern and contemporary image-practices, between the history of religion and the modern sciences, and between things that are and are not understood as art.Table of ContentsNote to the English-Language Edition | vii List of Figures | ix Introduction: Toward a Grammatology of Images | 1 1 The Trace and the Current Revaluation of Lines | 15 2 Faces: Between Trace and Image, Encoding and Measurement | 43 3 Indexical Images: Trace, Resemblance, and Code | 84 4 Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and the Supplementary Economy of the Likeness (Ebenbild) | 101 5 Defamatory Images: Disfiguration in Physiognomy and Caricature’s Two Bodies | 118 6 Cult Images: Iconoclastic Controversy, the Desire for Images, and the Dialectic of Secularization | 170 7 Angels: Images of Making-Appearance between Religion, Art, and Science | 202 8 Perspectives of the Grammatology of Images beyond Visual Culture | 264 Notes | 275 Bibliography | 319 Index | 347

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Book SynopsisGrammatology of Images radically alters how we approach images. Instead of asking for the history, power, or essence of images, Sigrid Weigel addresses imaging as such. The book considers how something a-visible gets transformed into an image. Weigel scrutinizes the moment of mis-en-apparition, of making an appearance, and the process of concealment that accompanies any imaging. Weigel reinterprets Derrida’s and Freud’s concept of the trace as that which must be thought before something exists. In doing so, she illuminates the threshold between traces and iconic images, between something immaterial and its pictorial representation. Chapters alternate between general accounts of the line, the index, the effigy, and the cult-image, and case studies from the history of science, art, politics, and religion, involving faces as indicators of emotion, caricatures as effigies of defamation, and angels as embodiments of transcendental ideas. Weigel’s approach to images illuminates fascinating, unexpected correspondences between premodern and contemporary image-practices, between the history of religion and the modern sciences, and between things that are and are not understood as art.Table of ContentsNote to the English-Language Edition | vii List of Figures | ix Introduction: Toward a Grammatology of Images | 1 1 The Trace and the Current Revaluation of Lines | 15 2 Faces: Between Trace and Image, Encoding and Measurement | 43 3 Indexical Images: Trace, Resemblance, and Code | 84 4 Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and the Supplementary Economy of the Likeness (Ebenbild) | 101 5 Defamatory Images: Disfiguration in Physiognomy and Caricature’s Two Bodies | 118 6 Cult Images: Iconoclastic Controversy, the Desire for Images, and the Dialectic of Secularization | 170 7 Angels: Images of Making-Appearance between Religion, Art, and Science | 202 8 Perspectives of the Grammatology of Images beyond Visual Culture | 264 Notes | 275 Bibliography | 319 Index | 347

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Book SynopsisBeing of Two Minds examines the place that early modern literature held in Modernist literary criticism. For T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and William Empson, the early modern period helps model a literary future. At stake in their engagements across time were ontological questions about literature and its ability to mediate between the one and the many, the particular and the general, life and death, the past and the present. If reading and writing literature enables the mind to be in two places at once, creative experience serves as a way to participate in an expanded field of consciousness alongside mortality. Goldberg reads the readings that these modernists performed on texts that Eliot claimed for the canon like the metaphysical poets and Jacobean dramatists, but also Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, and Margaret Cavendish. Ontological concerns are reflected in Eliot’s engagement with Aristotle’s theory of the soul and Empson’s Buddhism. These arguments about being affect minds and bodies and call into question sexual normativity: Eliot glances at a sodomitical male-male mode of literary transmission; Woolf produces a Judith Shakespeare to model androgynous being; Empson refuses to distinguish activity from passivity to rewrite gender difference. The work of one of our leading literary and cultural critics, Being of Two Minds spans centuries to show how the most compelling and surprising ideas about mind, experience, and existence not only move between early modernity, high modernism, and our own moment, but are also constituted through that very movement between times and minds.Table of ContentsIntroduction | 1 1. Impersonal Eliot | 25 2. Anonymous Woolf | 67 3. Ambiguous Empson | 107 Acknowledgments | 153 Notes | 155 Index | 175

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Book SynopsisBeing of Two Minds examines the place that early modern literature held in Modernist literary criticism. For T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and William Empson, the early modern period helps model a literary future. At stake in their engagements across time were ontological questions about literature and its ability to mediate between the one and the many, the particular and the general, life and death, the past and the present. If reading and writing literature enables the mind to be in two places at once, creative experience serves as a way to participate in an expanded field of consciousness alongside mortality. Goldberg reads the readings that these modernists performed on texts that Eliot claimed for the canon like the metaphysical poets and Jacobean dramatists, but also Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, and Margaret Cavendish. Ontological concerns are reflected in Eliot’s engagement with Aristotle’s theory of the soul and Empson’s Buddhism. These arguments about being affect minds and bodies and call into question sexual normativity: Eliot glances at a sodomitical male-male mode of literary transmission; Woolf produces a Judith Shakespeare to model androgynous being; Empson refuses to distinguish activity from passivity to rewrite gender difference. The work of one of our leading literary and cultural critics, Being of Two Minds spans centuries to show how the most compelling and surprising ideas about mind, experience, and existence not only move between early modernity, high modernism, and our own moment, but are also constituted through that very movement between times and minds.Table of ContentsIntroduction | 1 1. Impersonal Eliot | 25 2. Anonymous Woolf | 67 3. Ambiguous Empson | 107 Acknowledgments | 153 Notes | 155 Index | 175

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Book SynopsisUse your imagination! The demand is as important as it is confusing. What is the imagination? What is its value? Where does it come from? And where is it going in a time when even the obscene seems overdone and passé? This book takes up these questions and argues for the centrality of imagination in human cognition. It traces the development of the imagination in Kant’s critical philosophy (particularly the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment) and claims that the insights of Kantian aesthetic theory, especially concerning the nature of creativity, common sense, and genius, influenced the development of nineteenth-century American philosophy. The book identifies the central role of the imagination in the philosophy of Peirce, a role often overlooked in analytic treatments of his thought. The final chapters pursue the observation made by Kant and Peirce that imaginative genius is a type of natural gift (ingenium) and must in some way be continuous with the creative force of nature. It makes this final turn by way of contemporary studies of metaphor, embodied cognition, and cognitive neuroscience.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments | ix 1 The Cultivation of the Imagination | 1 2 Enlightening Thought: Kant and the Imagination | 25 3 C. S. Peirce and the Growth of the Imagination | 57 4 Abduction: Inference and Instinct | 75 5 Imagining Nature | 93 6 Ontology and Imagination: Peirce on Necessity and Agency | 120 7 The Evolution of the Imagination | 139 8 Emergence, Complexity, and Creativity | 165 9 Be Imaginative! Suggestion and Imperative | 192 Notes | 211 Bibliography | 235 Index | 249

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Book SynopsisSecret Sharers traces a genealogy of secret sharing between literary modernism and psychoanalysis, focusing on the productive entanglements and intense competitive rivalries that helped shape Anglo-American modernism as a field. As Jennifer Spitzer reveals, such rivalries played out in explicit criticism, inventive misreadings, and revisions of Freudian forms—from D. H. Lawrence’s re-descriptions of the unconscious to Vladimir Nabokov’s parodies of the psychoanalytic case study. While some modernists engaged directly with Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis with unmistakable rivalry and critique, others wrestled in more complex ways with Freud’s legacy. The key protagonists of this study—D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, and Vladimir Nabokov—are noteworthy for the way they engaged with, popularized, and revised the terms of Freudian psychoanalysis, while also struggling with it as an encroaching discourse. Modernists read psychoanalysis, misread psychoanalysis, and sometimes refused to read it altogether, while expressing anxiety about being read by psychoanalysis—subjecting themselves and their art to psychoanalytic interpretations. As analysts, such as Freud, Ernest Jones, and Alfred Kuttner, turned to literature and art to illustrate psychoanalytic theories, modernists sought to counter such reductive narratives by envisioning competing formulations of the relationship between literature and psychic life. Modernists often expressed ambivalence about the probing, symptomatic style of psychoanalytic interpretation and responded with a re-doubling of arguments for aesthetic autonomy, formal self-consciousness, and amateurism. Secret Sharers reveals how modernists transformed the hermeneutic and diagnostic priorities of psychoanalysis into novel aesthetic strategies and distinctive modes of epistemological and critical engagement. In reassessing the historical and intellectual legacies of modernism, this book suggests that modernist responses to psychoanalytic criticism anticipate more recent critical debates about the value of “symptomatic” reading and the “hermeneutics of suspicion.”Table of ContentsIntroduction: Intimate Others | 1 1 On Not Reading Freud: Amateurism, Expertise, and the “Pristine Unconscious” in D. H. Lawrence | 31 2 The Soul under Psychoanalysis: Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy | 59 3 The Heterodox Psychology and Queer Poetics of Auden in the 1930s | 88 4 Nabokov and the Lure of Freudian Forms | 115 Conclusion: Modernist Afterlives and the Legacies of Suspicion | 143 Acknowledgments | 155 Notes | 159 Index | 191

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Book SynopsisSecret Sharers traces a genealogy of secret sharing between literary modernism and psychoanalysis, focusing on the productive entanglements and intense competitive rivalries that helped shape Anglo-American modernism as a field. As Jennifer Spitzer reveals, such rivalries played out in explicit criticism, inventive misreadings, and revisions of Freudian forms—from D. H. Lawrence’s re-descriptions of the unconscious to Vladimir Nabokov’s parodies of the psychoanalytic case study. While some modernists engaged directly with Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis with unmistakable rivalry and critique, others wrestled in more complex ways with Freud’s legacy. The key protagonists of this study—D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, and Vladimir Nabokov—are noteworthy for the way they engaged with, popularized, and revised the terms of Freudian psychoanalysis, while also struggling with it as an encroaching discourse. Modernists read psychoanalysis, misread psychoanalysis, and sometimes refused to read it altogether, while expressing anxiety about being read by psychoanalysis—subjecting themselves and their art to psychoanalytic interpretations. As analysts, such as Freud, Ernest Jones, and Alfred Kuttner, turned to literature and art to illustrate psychoanalytic theories, modernists sought to counter such reductive narratives by envisioning competing formulations of the relationship between literature and psychic life. Modernists often expressed ambivalence about the probing, symptomatic style of psychoanalytic interpretation and responded with a re-doubling of arguments for aesthetic autonomy, formal self-consciousness, and amateurism. Secret Sharers reveals how modernists transformed the hermeneutic and diagnostic priorities of psychoanalysis into novel aesthetic strategies and distinctive modes of epistemological and critical engagement. In reassessing the historical and intellectual legacies of modernism, this book suggests that modernist responses to psychoanalytic criticism anticipate more recent critical debates about the value of “symptomatic” reading and the “hermeneutics of suspicion.”Table of ContentsIntroduction: Intimate Others | 1 1 On Not Reading Freud: Amateurism, Expertise, and the “Pristine Unconscious” in D. H. Lawrence | 31 2 The Soul under Psychoanalysis: Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy | 59 3 The Heterodox Psychology and Queer Poetics of Auden in the 1930s | 88 4 Nabokov and the Lure of Freudian Forms | 115 Conclusion: Modernist Afterlives and the Legacies of Suspicion | 143 Acknowledgments | 155 Notes | 159 Index | 191

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Book SynopsisA foundational book by one of the most distinguished German humanists of the last half century, Tempus joins cultural linguistics and literary interpretation at the hip. Developing two controversial theses—that sentences are not truly meaningful in isolation from their contexts and that verb tenses are primarily indicators not of time but of the attitude of the speaker or writer—Tempus surveys a dazzling array of ancient and modern texts from famous authors as well as casual speakers of German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, and English, with a final chapter extending the observations to Greek, Russian, and world languages. A classic in German and long available in many other languages, Tempus launched a new discipline, text linguistics, and established a unique career that was marked by precise observation, sensitive cultural outreach, and practical engagement with the situation of migrants. Weinrich’s robust and lucid close readings of famous and little-known authors from all the major languages of western Europe expand our literary horizons and challenge our linguistic understanding.Table of ContentsTranslators’ Note | ix Introduction | 1 Jane K. Brown and Marshall Brown 1 Tense in Texts | 9 Tense and Time, 9 • Text Linguistics, 11 • A Preliminary Reflection: Obstinate Signs, 14 • Tense Distribution, 17 • Two Tense Groups: Discussing and Narrating, 22 • On the Freedom of the Narrator, 25 2 Discussing–Narrating | 32 Syntax and Communication, 32 • Register, 36 • Tense in Different Genres, 42 • The World of Discussion, 45 • The World of Narrating, 50 • Tense in the Language of Children, 55 3 Perspective | 60 Time in Texts, 60 • The Future (using French as an example), 64 • The Perfekt in German, 69 • The Perfect in English, 75 • Thornton Wilder: The Ides of March, 78 • The Passé composé in French, 83 • The Passato prossimo in Italian, 87 • The Perfecto compuesto in Spanish, 91 • Narration, Past, Truth, 96 4 Highlighting | 101 Narrative Highlighting, 101 • Narrative Tempo in the Novel, 106 • Baudelaire: “Le vieux saltimbanque” (The Old Mountebank), 111 • Of the Tense of Death, 117 5 Tense in Novellas and Short Stories: Highlighting vs. Aspect | 121 Maupassant, 121 • Pirandello, 126 • Unamuno, Darío, Echegaray, 129 • Hemingway, 135 • Frame Narrative (Boccaccio), 142 • Narration in the Middle Ages, 147 • Frame and Highlighting in Modern Stories, 150 6 Tense Transitions 153 Tense in Dialogue, 153 • Descartes, Rousseau, and the Sequence of Tenses, 164 7 Tense Metaphors | 171 Tense Metaphors in Texts, 171 • Condition and Consequence, Reality and Unreality, 180 8 Tense Combinations | 186 Tense and Person, 186 • Tense and Adverbs, 190 • Combined Transitions, 197 • Semi-finite Verbs, 205 9 A Crisis in Narration? | 211 Tense in Old French, 211 • Evidence of Language Consciousness in French Classicism, 217 • The Time of Newspapers, 224 • Albert Camus: L’étranger, 227 • Oral Narration in French, 236 • A Parallel: Tense in South-German Dialects, 244 10 Other Languages—Other Tenses? | 252 Tense in Ancient Greek, 252 • Tense in Latin, 256 • Whorf, Spengler, and the Hopi Indians, 264 • Toward a New Method of Description, 270 Index | 275

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Book SynopsisNew Critical Nostalgia weighs the future of literary study by reassessing its past. It tracks today's impassioned debates about method back to the discipline’s early professional era, when an unprecedented makeover of American higher education with far-reaching social consequences resulted in what we might call our first crisis of academic life. Rovee probes literary study’s nostalgic attachments to this past, by recasting an essential episode in the historiography of English—the vigorous rejection of romanticism by American New Critics—in the new light of the American university’s tectonic growth. In the process, he demonstrates literary study’s profound investment in romanticism and reveals the romantic lyric’s special affect, nostalgia, as having been part of English’s professional identity all along. New Critical Nostalgia meticulously shows what is lost in reducing mid-century American criticism and the intense, quirky, and unpredictable writings of central figures, such as Cleanth Brooks, Josephine Miles, and W. K. Wimsatt, to a glib monolith of New Critical anti-romanticism. In Rovee’s historically rich account, grounded in analysis of critical texts and enlivened by archival study, readers discover John Crowe Ransom’s and William Wordsworth’s shared existential nostalgia, witness the demolition of the “immature” Percy Shelley in the revolutionary textbook Understanding Poetry, explore the classroom give-and-take prompted by the close reading of John Keats, consider the strange ambivalence toward Lord Byron on the part of formalist critics and romantic scholars alike, and encounter the strikingly contemporary quantitative studies by one of the mid-century’s preeminent poetry scholars, Josephine Miles. These complex and enthralling engagements with the romantic lyric introduce the reader to a dynamic intellectual milieu, in which professionals with varying methodological commitments (from New Critics to computationalists), working in radically different academic locales (from Nashville and New Haven to Baton Rouge and Berkeley), wrangled over what it means to read, with nothing less than the future of the discipline at stake.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Our Elegiac Professionalism | 1 1 Ransom’s Melancholy (Reading Wordsworth in Gambier, Ohio) | 23 2 Shelley’s Immaturity | 52 3 Brooks and the Collegiate Public, Reading Keats Together | 85 4 The Case of Byron | 110 5 The Emergence of Josephine Miles (Reading Wordsworth in Berkeley, California) | 135 Epilogue: The Fields of Learning | 177 Acknowledgments | 193 Notes | 197 Index | 253

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Book SynopsisNew Critical Nostalgia weighs the future of literary study by reassessing its past. It tracks today's impassioned debates about method back to the discipline’s early professional era, when an unprecedented makeover of American higher education with far-reaching social consequences resulted in what we might call our first crisis of academic life. Rovee probes literary study’s nostalgic attachments to this past, by recasting an essential episode in the historiography of English—the vigorous rejection of romanticism by American New Critics—in the new light of the American university’s tectonic growth. In the process, he demonstrates literary study’s profound investment in romanticism and reveals the romantic lyric’s special affect, nostalgia, as having been part of English’s professional identity all along. New Critical Nostalgia meticulously shows what is lost in reducing mid-century American criticism and the intense, quirky, and unpredictable writings of central figures, such as Cleanth Brooks, Josephine Miles, and W. K. Wimsatt, to a glib monolith of New Critical anti-romanticism. In Rovee’s historically rich account, grounded in analysis of critical texts and enlivened by archival study, readers discover John Crowe Ransom’s and William Wordsworth’s shared existential nostalgia, witness the demolition of the “immature” Percy Shelley in the revolutionary textbook Understanding Poetry, explore the classroom give-and-take prompted by the close reading of John Keats, consider the strange ambivalence toward Lord Byron on the part of formalist critics and romantic scholars alike, and encounter the strikingly contemporary quantitative studies by one of the mid-century’s preeminent poetry scholars, Josephine Miles. These complex and enthralling engagements with the romantic lyric introduce the reader to a dynamic intellectual milieu, in which professionals with varying methodological commitments (from New Critics to computationalists), working in radically different academic locales (from Nashville and New Haven to Baton Rouge and Berkeley), wrangled over what it means to read, with nothing less than the future of the discipline at stake.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Our Elegiac Professionalism | 1 1 Ransom’s Melancholy (Reading Wordsworth in Gambier, Ohio) | 23 2 Shelley’s Immaturity | 52 3 Brooks and the Collegiate Public, Reading Keats Together | 85 4 The Case of Byron | 110 5 The Emergence of Josephine Miles (Reading Wordsworth in Berkeley, California) | 135 Epilogue: The Fields of Learning | 177 Acknowledgments | 193 Notes | 197 Index | 253

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Book SynopsisThis volume is a fascinating introduction to the core themes and basic methods of aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Providing an analytic and historical treatment of the issues, and including many illustrative examples to both motivate and reinforce theoretical discussion, An Introduction to Aesthetics is the ideal course book for the philosophical novice. It includes an Appendix (containing the texts referred to in the book), a comprehensive Glossary and further reading suggestions to help the student reader develop a deeper comprehension of the field.Trade Review"This is a dependable, well-informed and accessible guide to the complexities of contemporary philosophical aesthetics. In taking a problem-oriented, rather than historically-based, approach the book directly engages with core issues in the subject. What emerges is not just an introductory survey of problems but a testament to the vitality and richness of the subject itself. I recommend the book to beginners and more advanced readers alike." Professor Peter Lamarque, British Journal of Aesthetics "A highly reader-friendly guide. It is a clearly and attractively written work which will provide a very reliable text for many university courses on the subject. At the end of each chapter there are excellent, and bang-up-to-date, suggestions for further reading and there is a useful glossary of terms used in the text at the end."Table of ContentsList of Acknowledgements. Introduction. 1. Language About Art and Aesthetics. Getting Started. Aesthetic Predicates. Criticism and Value Terms. The Problem of Definition. 2. Aesthetic Analysis and Its Objects. Formal Analysis. Aesthetic Objects. 3. The Artist and the Work of Art. The Artist's Intentions. Inspiration. Creativity and Originality. Breaking the Connection Between Artist and Art. 4. The Audience and the Work of Art. Attitudes of the Audience. Critics and Criticism. Institutions and the Role of the Audience. 5. The Artist and the Audience. The Aesthetics of Reception. Mythpoesis: Myth and Ritual. Institutional and Post-Institutional Aesthetics. Appendix. Glossary. Index.

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Book SynopsisThe first book to examine Goethe's writings on the daemonic in relation to both Classical philosophy and German Idealism. For Plato, the daemonic is a sensibility that brings individuals into contact with divine knowledge; Socrates was also inspired by a "divine voice" known as his "daimonion." Goethe was introduced to this ancient concept by Hamannand Herder, who associated it with the aesthetic category of genius. This book shows how the young Goethe depicted the idea of daemonic genius in works of the Storm and Stress period, before exploring the daemonic in a series of later poetic and autobiographical works. Reading Goethe's works on the daemonic through theorists such as Lukács, Benjamin, Gadamer, Adorno, and Blumenberg, Nicholls contends that they contain arguments concerning reason, nature, and subjectivity that are central to both European Romanticism and the Enlightenment. Angus Nicholls is Claussen-Simon Foundation Research Lecturer in German and Comparative Literature at the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations in the Department of German, Queen Mary, University of London.Trade ReviewNicholls's excellent monograph must surely be the most comprehensive and the most analytic discussion of the daemonic to date....Nicholls has provided a study that is...truly inspiring. * JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES *Nicholls outlines with unusual erudition and broad knowledge of the subject matter the tension between the subjective and objective in Goethe's concept of the demonic. * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *[A] well-thought out and well-written book. Nicholls is able to summarize the vast corpus of Goethe scholarship, while at the same time offering new interpretations of several well-known works. * NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY *Nicholls argues that the daemonic is not simply of bibliographical significance but was a philosophical concern for Goethe which he brought to bear on a range of contemporary debates.... [T]he concept of the daemonic deserves attention in our time when rationality is in crisis. * FORUM FOR MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES *In this solidly researched book, which represents a significant contribution to our understanding of `Goethe's concept of the daemonic,' Nicholls offers the reader many stimulating insights and viewpoints. * GOETHE JAHRBUCH *The story of Goethe's turn from the Geniezeit to classicism has been told many times before, but seldom in such philosophical detail or with such a range of references to European intellectual history. * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *...Nicholls's intelligent and deeply researched book opens new windows onto Goethe's philosophical return to the daemonic throughout his works. It is a major contribution to scholarship, and will doubtless inspire new readings of individual works as well as of the dynamic links in Goethe between philosophy, science, literature, and aesthetics. * GERMAN QUARTERLY *Nicholls's intelligent and deeply researched book opens new windows onto Goethe's philosophical return to the daemonic throughout his works. It is a major contribution to scholarship, and will doubtless inspire new readings of individual works.. * GERMAN QUARTERLY *Table of ContentsIntroduction The Ancients and Their Daemons The Daemonic in the Philosophy of the Sturm und Drang: Hamann and Herder Romanticism and Unlimited Subjectivity: "Mahomets Gesang" Werther: The Pathology of an Aesthetic Idea Kantian Science and the Limits of Subjectivity Schelling, Naturphilosophie, and "Mächtiges Überraschen" After the Ancients: Dichtung und Wahrheit and "Urworte. Orphisch" Eckermann, or the Daemonic and the Political Epilogue: Socrates and the Cicadas

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Book SynopsisNew essays on diverse topics from the Age of Goethe, with a special section on Goethe scholarship's role in the establishment of Germanistik. The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, encouraging North American Goethe scholarship by publishing original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. Volume 19 of the Goethe Yearbook continues to investigate the connection between Goethe's scientific theories and his aesthetics, with essays on his optics and his plant morphology. A special section examines the central role that Goethe philology has had in establishing practices that shaped the history of Germanistik as a whole. The yearbookalso includes essays on legal history and the novella, Goethe Lieder, esoteric mysticism in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, and Werther's sexual pathology. The volume also includes three essays re-examining Goethe's aesthetics in the context of the history of deconstruction, as well as the customary book review section. Contributors: Beate Allert, Frauke Berndt, Sean Franzel, Stefan Hajduk, Bernd Hamacher, Jeffrey L. High, Francien Markx, Lavinia Meier-Ewert, Ansgar Mohnkern, Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth, Edward T. Potter, Chenxi Tang, Robert Walter. Daniel Purdy is Associate Professor of German at Pennsylvania State University. Book review editor Catriona MacLeod is Associate Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania.Table of ContentsTowards a German Romantic Concept of the Ballad:Goethe's "Johanna Sebus" and Its Musical Interpretations by Zelter and Reichardt "Trübe" as the Source of New Color Formation in Goethe's Late Works Entoptische Farben (1817-20)and Chromatik (1822) The Myth of Otherness: Goethe on Presence The Transformation of the Law of Nations and the Reinvention of the Novella: Legal History and LiteraryInnovation from Boccaccio's Decameron to Goethe's Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten "Hear him! hört ihn!": Scholarly Lecturing in Berlinand the Popular Style of Karl Philipp Moritz Hypochondria, Onanism, and Reading in Goethe's Werther Judex! Blasphemy! and Posthumous Conversion: Schiller and (No) Religion Esoterik der "Macht, die über uns waltet und alleszum Besten lenkt": Das Wissen vom Anderen in Goethes Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre Goethes Fortgepflanztes: Zur Unbegrifflichkeitder Morphologie Introduction Goethe und Goethe-Philologie als Muster derneugermanistischen Editionswissenschaft: Eine Skizzemit Blick auf literaturwissenschaftsgeschichtliche Kontexte "Aus dieser fingierten Welt in eine ähnliche wirklicheversetzt"?: Die Theorie der Autobiografie und ein postmoderner Goethe "Man sucht einen Mittelpunkt und das ist schwerund nicht einmal gut": Figurationen der Verdopplungin Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren Book Reviews

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Book SynopsisThis book presents a theory of aesthetic judgment and appreciation in the spirit of modern empiricism. There are three parts: the first deals with questions of philosophical logic, the second with questions in the philosophy of mind, and the third with questions in the philosophy of art. Thus the argument advances from a theory of aesthetic judgment (and in particularly of “aesthetic description”) to a theory of aesthetic appreciation, and thence to an account of the nature and value of art. Scruton examines and rejects various attempts made by recent philosophers to demarcate the realm of aesthetic judgment. He argues that the logic of aesthetic judgment does not suffice to distinguish what is “aesthetic” from what is not, for aesthetic judgments must be explained in terms of the conditions for their acceptance rather than the conditions for their truth. These “acceptance conditions” can be understood only if we first know what is meant by aesthetic experience. This theory attempts to show how aesthetic experience can be regarded as autonomous, even though it is intimately connected with ordinary experience, and is indeed dependent on ordinary experience for its full description.

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Book SynopsisDuring the last months of the war, Josef Pieper saw the realization of a long-cherished plan to escape from the “lethal chaos” that was the Germany of that time, “plucked,” he writes, “as was Habakkuk, by the hair of his head . . . to be planted into a realm of the most peaceful seclusion, whose borders and exists were, of course, controlled by armed sentries.” There he made contact with a friend close-by, who possessed an amazing library, and Pieper hit upon the idea of reading the letters of Goethe from that library. Soon, however, he decided to read the entire Weimar edition of fifty volumes, which were brought to him in sequence, two or three at a time.The richness of this life revealing itself over a period of more than sixty years appeared before my gaze in its truly overpowering magnificence, which almost shattered my powers of comprehension – confined, as they had been, to the most immediate and pressing concerns. What a passionate focus on reality in all its forms, what an undying quest to chase down all that is in the world, what strength to affirm life, what ability to take part in it, what vehemence in the way he showed his dedication to it! Of course, too, what ability to limit himself to what was appropriate; what firm control in inhibiting what was purely aimless; what religious respect for the truth of being! I could not overcome my astonishment; and the prisoner entered a world without borders, a world in which the fact of being in prison was of absolutely no significance. But no matter how many astonishing things I saw in these unforgettable weeks of undisturbed inner focus, nothing was more surprising or unexpected than this: to realize how much of what was peculiar to this life occurred in carefully preserved seclusion; how much the seemingly communicative man who carried on a world-wide correspondence still never wanted to expose in words the core of his existence. It was precisely in the seclusion, the limitation, the silence of Goethe that made the strongest impact on Pieper. Here was modern Germany’s quintessential conversationalist intellectual, but the strength of his words came from the restraint behind them, even to the point of purposeful forgetting:The culmination is when the eighty-year-old sees forgetting not as a convulsive refusal to think of things, but as what could almost be termed a physiological process of simple forgetting as a function of life. He praises as “a great gift of the gods” . . . “the ethereal stream of forgetfulness” which he “was always able to value, to use, and to heighten.” However manifold the forms of this silence and of their unconscious roots and conscious motives may have been, is it not always the possibility of hearing, the possibility of a purer perception of reality that is aimed at? And so, is not Goethe’s type of silence above all the silence of one who listens? . . . This listening silence is much deeper than the mere refraining from words and speech in human intercourse. It means a stillness, which, like a breath, has penetrated into the inmost chamber of one’s own soul. It is meant, in the Goethean “maxim,” to “deny myself as much as possible and to take up the object into myself as purely as it is possible to do.” . . . The meaning of being silent is hearing – a hearing in which the simplicity of the receptive gaze at things is like the naturalness, simplicity, and purity of one receiving a confidence, the reality of which is creatura, God’s creation. And insofar as Goethe’s silence is in this sense a hearing silence, to that extent it has the status of the model and paradigm – however much, in individual instances, reservations and criticism are justified. One could remain circumspectly silent about this exemplariness after the heroic nihilism of our age has proclaimed the attitude of the knower to be by no means that of a silent listener but rather as that of self-affirmation over against being: insight and knowledge are naked defiance, the severest endangering of existence in the midst of the superior strength of concrete being. The resistance of knowledge opposes the oppressive superior power. However, that the knower is not a defiant rebel against concrete being, but above all else a listener who stays silent and, on the basis of his silence, a hearer – it is here that Goethe represents what, since Pythagoras, may be considered the silence tradition of the West.Pieper concludes his remarkable find with this summation:When such talk, which one encounters absolutely everywhere in workshops and in the marketplace – and as a constant temptation – , when such deafening talk, literally out to thwart listening, is linked to hopelessness, we have to ask is there not in silence – listening silence – necessarily a shred of hope? For who could listen in silence to the language of things if he did not expect something to come of such awareness of the truth? And, in a newly founded discipline of silence, is there not a chance not merely to overcome the sterility of everyday talk but also to overcome its brother, hopelessness – possibly if only to the extent that we know the true face of this relationship? I know that here quite different forces come into play which are beyond human control, and perhaps the circulus has to be broken through in a different place. However, one may ask: could not the “quick, strict resolution” to remain silent at the same time serve as a kind of training in hope?

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Book SynopsisRepresentations of violence are often said to generate cathartic effects, but what does “catharsis” mean? And what theory of the unconscious made this concept so popular that it reaches from classical antiquity to the digital age? In Violence and the Oedipal Unconscious, Nidesh Lawtoo reframes current debates on (new) media violence by tracing the philosophical, aesthetic, and historical vicissitudes of the “catharsis hypothesis” from antiquity to modernity and into the present. Drawing on theorists of mimesis from Aristotle to Nietzsche, Bernays to Breuer, Freud to Girard to Morin, Lawtoo offers a genealogy of the relationship between violence and the unconscious with at least two aims: First, this study gives an account of the birth of the Oedipal unconscious—out of a “cathartic method.” Second, it provides new theoretical foundations to solve a riddle of (new) media violence that may no longer rest on Oedipal solutions. In the process, Lawtoo outlines a new theory of violence, mimesis, and the unconscious that does not have desire as a via regia, but rather, the untimely realization that all affects spread contagiously and thus mimetically.

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Book SynopsisRepresentations of violence have subliminal contagious effects, but what kind of unconscious captures this imperceptible affective dynamic in the digital age? In volume two of a Janus-faced diagnostic of the cathartic and contagious effects of (new) media violence, Nidesh Lawtoo traces a genealogy of a long-neglected, embodied, relational, and highly mimetic unconscious that, well before the discovery of mirror neurons, posited mirroring reactions as a via regia to a phantom ego. Rather than being the product of a solipsistic discovery, the unconscious turns out to have haunted philosophers, psychologists, and artists for a long time. This book proposes a genealogy of untimely philosophical physicians that goes from Plato to Nietzsche, Bernheim to FÉrÉ, Freud to Bataille, Arendt to Girard, affect theory to the neurosciences. In their company, Lawtoo promotes the transdisciplinary field of mimetic studies by reevaluating the unconscious actions and reactions of homo mimeticus. As a new theory of mimesis emerges, Violence and the Mimetic Unconscious offers a searching diagnosis as to why the pathos of (new) media violence—from film to video games, police murders to the storming of the U.S Capitol—continues to cast a material shadow on the present and future.Trade ReviewIn this impressive sequel on violence and the unconscious, Nidesh Lawtoo accounts for the horrorism at play in new forms of contemporary media violence that generate contagious pathologies in the digital age. Sensitive to the pathos of vulnerable subjects in terms of age, gender, race, and education, this remarkable study reloads Plato’s ancient question on the influence of art for mimetic studies from Nietzsche to Arendt, affect theory to the neurosciences, Greek tragedy to video games to the storming of the U.S. Capitol." - Adriana Cavarero, honorary professor of political philosophy, University of Verona, and author of Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence"To grasp the speed, complexity, and contagiousness of violence today, as it crosses daily experience, the new media, neofascist movements, and circles back again, Lawtoo finds it imperative to supplant the Freudian unconscious with a mimetic unconscious that is at once collective, differentiated, porous, and suggestible. The result is an innovative, courageous, and powerful study that is indispensable today." - William E. Connolly, author of Resounding Events: Adventures of an Academic from the Working Class"In this latest installment of his long-standing inquiry into the “will to mime” that drives humans at an unconscious level, Lawtoo moves mimetic theory into the present, in order to confront what he calls the “hypermimetic crises” associated with contemporary media. Moving from the ancients and Nietzsche to pop culture and the most up-to-date scientific work on the operation of mirror neurons in the human brain, this fascinating book suggests that maybe Plato was right, after all, and representations of violence—fictional or real—pose a threat of "mimetic contamination," of an irrationally compelled imitation of the represented acts." - Henry Staten, professor in the humanities at University of Washington, and the author of Techne Theory: A New Language for Art

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Book SynopsisLiterary recognition is a technical term for a climactic plot device. Odysseys of Recognition claims that interpersonal recognition is constituted by performance, and brings performance theory into dialogue with poetics, politics, and philosophy. By observing Odysseus figures from Homer to Kleist, Ellwood Wiggins offers an alternative to conventional intellectual histories that situate the invention of the interior self in modernity. Through strategic readings of Aristotle, this elegantly written, innovative study recovers an understanding of interpersonal recognition that has become strange and counterintuitive. Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey offers a model for agency in ethical knowledge that has a lot to teach us today. Early modern and eighteenth-century characters, meanwhile, discover themselves not deep within an impenetrable self, but in the interpersonal space between people in the world. Recognition, Wiggins contends, is the moment in which epistemology and ethics coincide: in which what we know becomes manifest in what we do. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.Trade Review"This is an intelligent, serious, patient, and innovative work. It is also beautifully written: nimble, unaffected, crystal-clear, and often entertaining." -- Nicholas Rennie * Rutgers University *"Poised between literary studies, philosophy, and political theory, the elegant Odysseys of Recognition will be of interest to a broad range of scholars. Scholars of the Goethezeit will find much to contemplate, as will classicists and philosophers." * Goethe Yearbook *"To take Wiggins at his word, the varied recognitions that result from his painstaking analyses are both decisively conclusive and tantalizingly openended. The point is to learn to be amenable to change in all its potentiality— that is, without settling for a substantial conclusion that would preclude further modification. In this way Wiggins’s assiduous brand of literary criticism acquires ethical urgency. As he beautifully formulates it, given the temporal nature of intersubjective, performative relations, any conclusion “is never fully commensurate with or explanatory of the living complexity of another human." * Modern Language Quarterly *"Wiggins’s monograph solicits and breaks ground for further readings in and beyond the texts he addresses. For whether it is a question of the most often cited texts of antiquity, their reinventions in the renaissance, or their adaptations in Weimar Classicism, and romanticism, Wiggins’s interventions will have altered what it means to come to know them." * The German Quarterly *"Ellwood Wiggins has produced a learned and thoughtful study of Aristotelian anagnorisis and its applicability to literary texts from Homer to Kleist." * German Studies Review *"This is an intelligent, serious, patient, and innovative work. It is also beautifully written: nimble, unaffected, crystal-clear, and often entertaining." -- Nicholas Rennie * Rutgers University *"Poised between literary studies, philosophy, and political theory, the elegant Odysseys of Recognition will be of interest to a broad range of scholars. Scholars of the Goethezeit will find much to contemplate, as will classicists and philosophers." * Goethe Yearbook *"To take Wiggins at his word, the varied recognitions that result from his painstaking analyses are both decisively conclusive and tantalizingly openended. The point is to learn to be amenable to change in all its potentiality— that is, without settling for a substantial conclusion that would preclude further modification. In this way Wiggins’s assiduous brand of literary criticism acquires ethical urgency. As he beautifully formulates it, given the temporal nature of intersubjective, performative relations, any conclusion “is never fully commensurate with or explanatory of the living complexity of another human." * Modern Language Quarterly *"Wiggins’s monograph solicits and breaks ground for further readings in and beyond the texts he addresses. For whether it is a question of the most often cited texts of antiquity, their reinventions in the renaissance, or their adaptations in Weimar Classicism, and romanticism, Wiggins’s interventions will have altered what it means to come to know them." * The German Quarterly *"Ellwood Wiggins has produced a learned and thoughtful study of Aristotelian anagnorisis and its applicability to literary texts from Homer to Kleist." * German Studies Review *Table of Contents Overview of Contents ... viiIllustrations ... viiiAbbreviations ... ixA Note on Translations and Orthography ... xi Introduction: Performing Recognition ... 1 Interiority Illusion Instantaneousness Illusion Recognition as Performance Aims and Scope of Readings Part I. Marking the Limits of Recognition: Between Aristotle and the Odyssey ... 31 1 “Just as the name itself signifies”: Under the Sign of Recognition ... 37 Nostalgia and Recognition Recognitions in Mycenae and Sparta Nostalgic Recognition and Epic Afterness Self-signification and the Nostalgia of Semiotics 2 “Recognition is a change”: Performance in Motion ... 84 Rhapsodic Mimesis and Narration Change in Aristotle’s Physics and Poetics Crying for Show in the Odyssey Recognition in Performance Theory and Moral Philosophy 3 “From ignorance to knowledge”: Penelope’s Poetological Epistemology ... 131 Penelopean Epistemology (Reading Penelope) Penelopean Poetics (Penelope Reading) 4 “Into friendship or enmity”: An Ethics of Authentic Deception ... 164 5 “For those bound for good or bad fortune”: Casualties of Recognition ... 193 Part II. Outing Interiority: Modern Recognitions ... 211 6 Self-Knowledge Between Plato and Shakespeare: Alcibiades and Troilus and Cressida ... 218 Philosophy or Theater? Mirrored Dramatic Structures Mirrored Selves 7 Metamorphoses of Recognition: Goethe’s “Fortunate Event” ... 248 “Glückliches Ereignis” as Anagnorisis Scene Recognizing Action: Visualizing Stories Recognizing Things: Experiencing Ideas Recognizing People: Moving Tableaux 8 Epistemologies of Recognition: Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris and the Spectacle of Catharsis ... 292 Spirals of Intertextual Performance Intertextual Intersubjectivity Intertextual Spectacle The Effects of Tragedy 9 Politics of Recognition: Friends, Enemies, and Goethe’s Iphigenie ... 324 Between Recognition and Acknowledgement The Exception of Friendship The Promise of Politics 10 The Fate of Recognition: Kleist’s Penthesilea ... 361 The Mirrored Gaze Plays within Plays Concluding Reflections: Signifying Silence in Blumenberg and Kafka ... 403Acknowledgements ... 417Bibliography ... 421Index ... 448About the Author ... 449

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Book SynopsisAround 1800, print culture became a particularly rich source for metaphors about thinking as well as writing, nowhere more so than in the German tradition of Dichter und Denker. Goethe, Jean Paul, and Hegel (among many others) used the preface in order to reflect on the problems of writing itself, and its interpretation. If Sterne teaches us that a material book enables mind games as much as it gives expression to them, the Germans made these games more theoretical still. Weaving in authors from Antiquity to Agamben, Williams shows how European–and, above all, German–Romanticism was a watershed in the history of the preface. The playful, paradoxical strategies that Romantic writers invented are later played out in continental philosophy, and in post-Structuralist literature. The preface is a prompt for playful thinking with texts, as much as it is conventionally the prosaic product of such an exercise. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.Trade Review"a study of tremendous academic rigor with original insights. it shows deep knowledge of both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature and philosophy and the many conversations in contemporary literary studies pertaining to them.it is an achievement in scholarship pertaining to the age of Goethe, romanticism, and literary studies at large."— The German Quarterly "Recommended."— Choice "Pretexts for Writing discusses the history of the literary and philosophical self-authored preface in the German speaking world around 1800 with an intensity and analytical depth previously unachieved in scholarship."— Till Dembeck, University of Luxembourg "This debut book, in short, contains much that is scintillant and surely announces the arrival of an important new scholarly voice in Germanistik."— Modern Language Review "Pretexts for Writing is an insightful, original, and persuasive work—compelling pretexts for reading." — Goethe Yearbook "This book is perceptive, timely, and ambitious: perceptive in that it zeroes in on serious gaps in research, the exploration of which may alter our views of eighteenth-century German literature."— Lessing Yearbook/Jahrbuch XLVIIITable of Contents Abbreviations ... v A Note on Translations... vi Introduction: What Prefaces Are Not: Pedantic Notes ... 1 Historical Context and Precedent Paratextual Theory and Textual Autonomy Rhetorical Caesura: Comprehending Romanticism Writing to Write 1 Goethe: A Playful and Resistive Set of Preface Strategies ... 66 Zero Prefaces Ambiguous Prefaces Poetic Prefaces Embedded Prefaces Belated Prefaces A Hypertrophic Preface 2 Jean Paul: Autoprefacing ... 144 Baroque Beginnings: The Preface as Brow, Morsel, and Porch Reviewers and Readers Writers and Preface-Writers Prefatory Procrastination and Textual Foreplay The Logic of Length; Or, Digressive Fragmentation Countering Captatio Benevolentiae? Beyond Eloquence Conclusion: Preface to Prefatorial Philosophy (and Theory) 3 Hegel: Prefatorial Polemic Becomes Philosophy ... 237 Starting with Sterne? Literature and Philosophy around 1800 Descriptive Induction versus Performative Prefacing A New Style of Preface Sublation of Conventional Prefatory Content A Superior Preface Philosophical and Rhetorical Preface Paradigms Post-Structuralist Postscript Conclusion... 311 Acknowledgements ... 328 Bibliography ... 330 Index ... 371 About the Author ... 372

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Book SynopsisAround the turn of the nineteenth century, no task seemed more urgent to German Romantics than the creation of a new mythology. It would unite modern poets and grant them common ground, and bring philosophers and the Volk closer together. But what would a new mythology look like? Only one model sufficed, according to Friedrich Schlegel: Dante’s Divine Comedy. Through reading and juxtaposing canonical and obscure texts, Dante in Deutschland shows how Dante’s work shaped the development of German Romanticism; it argues, all the while, that the weight of Dante’s influence induced a Romantic preoccupation with authority: Who was authorized to create a mythology? This question—traced across texts by Schelling, Novalis, and Goethe—begets a Neo-Romantic fixation with Dantean authority in the mythic ventures of Gerhart Hauptmann, Rudolf Borchardt, and Stefan George. Only in Thomas Mann’s novels, DiMassa asserts, is the Romantics’ Dantean project ultimately demythologized.Trade Review“Daniel DiMassa’s masterful book traces the fate of Dante in Germany, but in doing so tells a story of Romanticism and its many afterlives in Germany. From the Brothers Schlegel to the circle around Stefan George, DiMassa traces nothing less than the persistence of myth in German letters.”— Adrian Daub, author of What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley “DiMassa has brought together the long and complex history of Dante’s fascination for German writers in a lucid and stylish study. It is exhaustive in the documentation of every phase—Romanticism, the age of Goethe, on down to the political uncertainties and initiatives that followed World War I. Dante is shown to have been central to the quest for literary authority, the search for a new mythology, the potential of allegory, the need for a model of autobiographical self-presentation. It emerges convincingly that there is more Dante in the deep history of German culture than might have been expected. The large conceptions are supported by a fine grasp of the labyrinthine thinking of the Romantics and by close reading of key texts—Novalis’s ‘Hymnen an die Nacht’, Goethe’s ‘Ilmenau’, Schelling’s rarely analyzed poetry. Complexity nowhere generates obscurity. DiMassa’s text remains unpretentious and readable. He has drawn to good effect on his intimacy with two cultures.” — T.J. Reed, author of Genesis: The Making of Literary Works from Homer to Christa Wolf “An illuminating lens through which to reread the multi-faceted, discursive formation known as ‘German Romanticism.’ DiMassa shows how Dante, unlike Shakespeare and Cervantes, was not only rediscovered by the Early Romantics but crucially informed their understanding of modern literary authorship as a visionary task of myth-making. In a range of cases starting with Schelling, Novalis, and Goethe, DiMassa traces the spirit of Dante to the birth of the modern (German) literary author.” — Kirk Wetters, author of Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present “DiMassa’s erudite, intelligent, and elegantly written book offers an excellent overview of Dante’s reception in Germany in the context of Romanticism around 1800 and Neo-Romanticism in the early 20th century. He is not only very familiar with both German poetry and German literary criticism of the time; he also knows Dante’s text well.”— Vittorio Hösle, author of Dante’s "Commedia" und Goethe’s "Faust": Ein Vergleich der beiden wichtigsten philosophisc “It is still widely assumed that The Divine Comedy, given Goethe’s distaste for Dante, played little part in forming German modernity, and in shaping myths of a German return to medieval national and imperial glory. By leading us from a 1799 Jena reading circle to Stefan George and Thomas Mann, DiMassa fills in missing tranches of literary history to revise this potent, and ultimately tragic, narrative. Warmly recommended.”— David Wallace, editor of Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 “The German Romantics made Dante the ideal of modern poets. He became a mythical authority, with an absolute claim to the roles of truth-teller and guide. Dante in Deutschland traces this dream from its creative power to its megalomaniac tendency—a unique case of one name becoming the measure of all things.” — Stefan Matuschek, author of Der gedichtete Himmel. Eine Geschichte der RomantikTable of ContentsList of Figures List of Abbreviations A Note on Translation Introduction: Orienting Romanticism Part I: Romanticism 1. Discovering Dante and Theorizing Myth: The Schlegel Brothers and the Origins of the Romantic Project 2. Schelling, Novalis, and the Legitimation of a Dantean Mythology 3. Goethe’s Dantean Mythologies of the Self and of the World Part II: Neo-Romanticism 4. Trespassing the Sign: The Mad Flight of Gerhart Hauptmann 5. Abolishing History: New Dantean Germanies in Rudolf Borchardt and Stefan George 6. Thomas Mann and the Demythologization of Dante Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe Aesthetics of Kinship intervenes critically into rigidified discourses about the emergence of the nuclear family and the corresponding interior subject in the eighteenth century. By focusing on kinship constellations instead of “family plots” in seminal literary works of the period, this book presents an alternative view of the eighteenth-century literary social world and its concomitant ideologies. Whereas Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy and political theory posit the nuclear family as a microcosm for the ideal modern nation-state, literature of the period offers a far more heterogeneous image of kinship structures, one that includes members of various classes and is not defined by blood. Through a radical re-reading of the multifarious kinship structures represented in literature of the long eighteenth century, The Aesthetics of Kinship questions the inevitability of the dialectic of the Enlightenment and invokes alternative futures for conceptions of social and political life.Trade Review“Schlipphacke’s smart style brings the eighteenth-century tableau into vivid life. This wonderfully learned study expands our understanding of the eighteenth-century tableau beyond its immediate theatrical and painterly associations to show how it reframed models of family and kinship. Challenging the long standing presumption that the Bildungsroman coalesced around the nuclear family, Schlipphacke illuminates the tableau’s elastic depiction of porous social relations across an array of genres and media. Her queer, allegorical sensibility draws our attention away from the hermeneutic depths of the Romantic nuclear family onto the tableau’s surface alignments. The Aesthetics of Kinship brilliantly condenses eighteenth-century theories of spectatorship, theater, and the novel.”— Daniel Purdy, author of On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought “Schlipphacke demonstrates an active curiosity and adept intellect as she analyzes literary forms (such as unconventional endings and halted narrative progression) as challenges to the inward-focused, nuclear family as it begins to unfold into the nineteenth century. Rare is the scholar who links the study of social relations to aesthetics.”— Alice Kuzniar, author of The Birth of Homeopathy out of the Spirit of Romanticism “The Aesthetics of Kinship provides a thoroughly new understanding of how German authors, including major ones like Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe, used tableaux, props, and letters to highlight multiple types of family kinships that depict heterogeneous social groupings that highlight diversity, and that defy any narrow definition of ‘family.’”— Susan Gustafson, author of Goethe’s Families of the Heart “Historically significant and extremely timely! Schlipphacke’s fascinating turn to the period tableaux compellingly illustrates aesthetic experiments with diverse forms of relations, fruitfully challenging accounts of the rise of the nuclear family.”— Stefani Engelstein, author of Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of ModernityTable of ContentsList of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Introduction 1 Middle Class/Bourgeois/Bürger: The Idiosyncrasies of German Dramatic Realism 2 Tableau/Tableau Vivant: German-French Dramatic Encounters 3 The German Dramatic Tableau beyond Lessing 4 Against Interiority: Letters and Portraits as Dramatic Props 5 Material Kinship: The Economy of Props in G.E. Lessing’s Nathan der Weise 6 The Tableau of Relations: Novels in Stillness and Motion 7 Kinship and Aesthetic Depth: The Tableau Vivant in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften [Elective Affinities] Concluding Reflections Acknowledgments Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe five physical senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching have been held to underpin the complexity of human experience ever since Aristotle first theorised about how they worked. Classical and scholastic philosophy up to the time of the European Enlightenment relegated their operations to its margins, viewing them as at best a distraction from higher thinking, and at worst a positive deception. Paradoxically, what one could not objectively know, the products of the mind, were accorded precedence over the concrete. From the Romantic era onwards, the senses moved to the centre of speculative thought, and the various dialectical currents of philosophy after Hegel made them interdependent with the intellectual function, which was held to derive most or all of its authority from them. This tendency has continued down to the sensualist, hedonist and anti-intellectual currents of our own day. In this theoretical consideration of what has been done to the senses in modern experience, Stuart Walton subjects the life of the senses to a further materialist turn, one that refuses a spiritualisation of the material realm, to which contemporary discourses of the body have often fallen prey, while at the same time preserving sensuality from being delivered once again to a sterile idealism.

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Book SynopsisDrawing on plays by Shakespeare, Sarah Kane, Sophocles, Samuel Beckett, and others, this book examines the ways in which these dramatists manipulated the actor’s body to demand laughter and/or sympathy. Ian Burrows shows how these strategies can be thought about beyond the stage-space: in the classroom, in the media, and in relation to the social construction of ‘snowflake culture’ as a 21st century phenomenon.

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Book SynopsisEssays by Adorno on art and cinema, available in English for the first time. In Without Model, Theodor W. Adorno strikingly demonstrates the intellectual range for which he is known. Taking the premise of the title as his guiding principle, that artistic and philosophical thought must eschew preconceptions and instead adapt itself to its time, circumstances, and object, Adorno presents a series of essays reflecting on culture at different levels, from the details of individual products to the social conditions of their production. He shows his more nostalgic side in the childhood reminiscences of ‘Amorbach’, but also his acute sociocultural analysis on the central topic of the culture industry. He criticizes attempts to maintain tradition in music and visual art, arguing against a restorative approach by stressing the modernity and individuality of historical works in the context of their time. In all of these essays, available for the first time in English, Adorno displays the remarkable thinking of one both steeped in tradition and dedicated to seeing beyond it. Table of Contents1. Without Model2. Amorbach3. On Tradition4. Scribbled at the Jeu de Paue5. From Sils Maria6. Non-Conciliatory Proposal7. The Culture Industry: A Résumé8. Obituary for an Organizer9. Transparencies on Film10. Chaplin Times Two11. Theses on The Sociology of Art12. Functionalism Today13. Luccan Memorial14. The Misused Baroque15. Vienna, After Easter 196716. Art and the Arts

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Book SynopsisExamines how Nietzschean ideas influenced the composition of Mahler's first four, so-called Wunderhorn, symphonies. Gustav Mahler and Friedrich Nietzsche both exercised a tremendous influence over the twentieth century. All the more fascinating, then, is Mahler's intellectual engagement with the writings of Nietzsche. Given the limited and frequently cryptic nature of the composer's own comments on Nietzsche, Mahler's specific understanding of the elusive thinker is achieved through the examination of Nietzsche's reception amongst the people who introduced composer to philosopher: members of the Pernerstorfer Circle at the University of Vienna. Mahler's Nietzsche draws on a variety of primary sources to answer two key questions. The first is hermeneutic: what do Mahler's allusions to Nietzsche mean? The second is creative: how can Mahler's own characterization of Nietzsche as an "epoch-making influence" be identified in his compositional techniques? By answering these two questions, the book paints a more accurate picture of the intersections of the arts, philosophy and politics in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Mahler's Nietzsche will be required reading for scholars and students of nineteenth and early twentieth century German music and philosophy.Table of ContentsIntroduction: An Epoch-Making Influence 1 The Case of Wagner 2 The Crown of Laughter 3 The Gay Science 4 The Übermensch 5 Ecce Homo Epilogue Appendix I: Original Symphony Programs Appendix II: Song Texts Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisWhat is the nature of aesthetic experience? Ha Poong Kim suggests that a genuine aesthetic experience is a perceptual state of consciousness, free of thought. He characterises it as subjectless, objectless, timeless, revelatory, and joyous. It is a state of mind thus markedly different from our everyday experience where thought processes impinge randomly on our consciousness. The seven essays are divided to three parts. Part I tackles the nature of aesthetic experience, as opposed to everyday perception, and attempts to illuminate the experience of the beautiful by discussing Plato's famous allegory of the charioteer in Phaedrus and an episode in Proust's In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, the second section of In Search of Lost Time. Part II takes a critical look at Kant's treatment of the judgement of taste in his Critique of Judgement and Eduard Hanslick's conception of the imagination. Part III details Kim's thoughts on several topics of the current debate in aesthetics -- among them, on the difference between aesthetic and intellectual pleasure, and the nature of expressiveness of music. In the first of the two essays in Part III the author discusses critically Christopher Butler's interpretation of artworks as narrative, and in the second, Peter Kivy's theory of expressive properties. Two appendices are provided: one on the alienation of aesthetic experience in the common love of artworks as values; and the other on performance art as an art form, especially in view of the recent retrospective of Marina Abramovic (MoMA, New York). In this appendix, the author presents a critique of today's prevailing conception of art.

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Book SynopsisThis, the sequel to the same author's much-acclaimed 'Xanthippic Dialogues,' is a multi-faceted commentary on the post-modern condition, which takes the form of part-Hellenistic, part-Arabian fairy tale. Archeanassa of Colophon, subject of a poem attributed by Diogenes Laertius to Plato, has returned to her birthplace in search of the lost manuscripts of another ex-lover, the poet Antimachus. There, she encounters Perictione, Plato's niece, who loves alone in the ruined and brutalized city amid memories and dreams. Perictione tells the strange story of Merope of Sardis, the Nietzshean philosopher who both made and destroyed her life. Little by little Archeanassa comes to recognize that Perictiones story is also her own story, and that the mystery of Colophon is the mystery of modernity itself. Through dialogues, stories and fantasies, the narrative explores the aesthetic way of life, and the possibilities of meaning in an age of inverted commas.

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Book SynopsisThat Ernst Gombrich was one of the most important art historians of the 20th century would seem to go without saying. And so one might expect him to feature prominently in the numerous surveys, guides and introductions to the history and methods of art history produced during the past two decades. Precisely the opposite, however, is the case. One reason for this certainly was that Gombrich was an avowed enemy of 'big ideas', interested not in generalizations but in the specifics of individual cases. Avoiding jargon or rhetoric, standing for 'common sense', he always argued from clear premises, and his thought was also very wide-ranging. He never 'owned' a subject, remarking "It cannot be too often repeated that the best tribute one can pay a scholar is to take him seriously and constantly to reappraise his lines of argument."The importance of Gombrich's work on the history of taste has yet to be fully recognised, and when it comes to the application of developments in psychology to the visual arts he has remained largely, among art historians, on his own. These essays assess the nature of his empiricism, the degree to which his ideas have been adopted, overturned or developed, and his contribution to the dialogue of art and perception.

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Book Synopsis1 Introduction.- 2 The Informational Turn in Philosophy.- 3 Towards an Information-theoretic Philosophy of Art.- 4 Towards a Computationalist Approach to Art-making.- 5 The Computationalist Theory of Problem-solving.- 6 Theorizing about Art.- 7 The Goals of Art.- 8 The Central Artistic Task.- 9 The Analogy between Logic and Art.- 10 The Creative Aspect of Art-making.- 11 The Ontological Status of Works of Art.- 12 Symbol Systems.- 13 Machine Art.- 14 Conclusion.

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Book SynopsisTheodor Adorno’s famous aesthetic theory was not merely a theory of the aesthetic; it also made a wider claim about the aesthetic implications of all theory. At the same time we have to deal with aesthetic objects and events in which an aesthetic theory is inherent, which show themselves as art. From both sides—theory and aesthetics—a link can be made to the etymological meaning of theōria, which understands the theoretical as a seeing or perspective. Featuring lucid essays by major thinkers, the book examines this link, focusing equally on the aesthetic implications of theory and the theoretical implications of aesthetic events.

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