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Aeschylus' Oresteia: Translation and Theatrical Commentary
by Michael EwansThis is a fully revised new edition of Michael Ewans’ 1995 English translation of the Oresteia, taking into account the extensive work published on the trilogy in recent years.Accompanying this lucid, accurate and actable translation is a substantial introduction, outlining the festival setting of the plays, the original performance conditions and performance style, the form and meaning of the trilogy, the issues surrounding the act of translation, and finally a survey of some major productions since 1980. The text itself is a thoroughly competitive translation into modern English verse, now significantly revised in the light of recent scholarship on the text. It is followed by a theatrical commentary on each scene and chorus, providing unique insights into how the plays might have been staged in ancient Athens and how they can be staged today. The book also includes notes on the translation, two glossaries of names and Greek terms, selected further reading, and a chronology of Aeschylus’ life and times.Aeschylus’ Oresteia: Translation and Theatrical Commentary is the most comprehensive English edition of Aeschylus’ masterpiece, and this new edition fully meets the needs of teachers, students and practitioners working on the trilogy as well as those interested in ancient Greek drama and literature more broadly.
Aeschylus's Suppliant Women
by Geoffrey W. BakewellThis book offers a provocative interpretation of a relatively neglected tragedy, Aeschylus's Suppliant Women. Although the play's subject is a venerable myth, it frames the flight of the daughters of Danaus from Egypt to Greece in starkly contemporary terms, emphasizing the encounter between newcomers and natives. Some scholars read Suppliant Women as modeling successful social integration, but Geoffrey W. Bakewell argues that the play demonstrates, above all, the difficulties and dangers noncitizens brought to the polis. Bakewell's approach is rigorously historical, situating Suppliant Women in the context of the unprecedented immigration that Athens experienced in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. The flow of foreigners to Attika increased under the Pisistratids but became a flood following liberation, Cleisthenes, and the Persian Wars. As Athenians of the classical era became increasingly aware of their own collective identity, they sought to define themselves and exclude others. They created a formal legal status to designate the free noncitizens living among them, calling them metics and calling their status metoikia. When Aeschylus dramatized the mythical flight of the Danaids from Egypt in his play Suppliant Women, he did so in light of his own time and place. Throughout the play, directly and indirectly, he casts the newcomers as metics and their stay in Greece as metoikia. Bakewell maps the manifold anxieties that metics created in classical Athens, showing that although citizens benefited from the many immigrants in their midst, they also feared the effects of immigration in political, sexual, and economic realms. Bakewell finds metoikia was a deeply flawed solution to the problem of large-scale immigration. Aeschylus's Argives accepted the Danaids as metics only under duress and as a temporary response to a crisis. Like the historical Athenians, they opted for metoikia because they lacked better alternatives.
Aesop's Fables
by AesopSardonic, wry and wise, Aesop’s Fables are some of the most enduring and well-loved literary creations in history. In a series of pithy, amusing vignettes, Aesop created a vivid cast of characters to demonstrate different aspects of human nature. Here we see a wily fox outwitted by a quick-thinking cicada, a tortoise triumphing over a self-confident hare and a fable-teller named Aesop silencing those who mock him. Each jewel-like fable provides a warning about the consequences of wrong-doing, as well as offering a glimpse into the everyday lives of Ancient Greeks.
Aesop's Mirror
by Maryalice Huggins"Everything I needed to know about Fox and Grapes mirror, I knew the moment I first saw it"What antiques restorer Maryalice Huggins knew when she stumbled across the mirror at a country auction in Rhode Island was this: She was besotted. Rococo and huge (more than eight feet tall), the mirror was one of the most unusual objects she had ever seen. Huggins had to have it.The frame's elaborate carvings were almost identical to a famous eighteenth-century design. Could this be eighteenth-century American? That would make it rare indeed. But in the rarefied world of American antiques, an object is not significant unless you can prove where it's from. Huggins set out to trace the origins of her magnificent mirror.Fueled with the delightfully obsessive spirit of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief, Aesop's Mirror follows Huggins on her quest as she goes up against the leading lights of the very male world of high-end antiques and dives into the historical archives. And oh, what she finds there! The mirror was likely passed down through generations of the illustrious Brown family of Providence, Rhode Island.Throughout history, mirrors have been seen as having mystical powers, enabling those who peer into them to connect the past and the future. In Aesop's Mirror, Maryalice Huggins does just that, creating a marvelous, one-of-kind book about a marvelous, one of-a-kind American treasure.
Aesopic Conversations
by Leslie KurkeExamining the figure of Aesop and the traditions surrounding him, Aesopic Conversations offers a portrait of what Greek popular culture might have looked like in the ancient world. What has survived from the literary record of antiquity is almost entirely the product of an elite of birth, wealth, and education, limiting our access to a fuller range of voices from the ancient past. This book, however, explores the anonymous Life of Aesop and offers a different set of perspectives. Leslie Kurke argues that the traditions surrounding this strange text, when read with and against the works of Greek high culture, allow us to reconstruct an ongoing conversation of "great" and "little" traditions spanning centuries.Evidence going back to the fifth century BCE suggests that Aesop participated in the practices of nonphilosophical wisdom (sophia) while challenging it from below, and Kurke traces Aesop's double relation to this wisdom tradition. She also looks at the hidden influence of Aesop in early Greek mimetic or narrative prose writings, focusing particularly on the Socratic dialogues of Plato and the Histories of Herodotus. Challenging conventional accounts of the invention of Greek prose and recognizing the problematic sociopolitics of humble prose fable, Kurke provides a new approach to the beginnings of prose narrative and what would ultimately become the novel.Delving into Aesop, his adventures, and his crafting of fables, Aesopic Conversations shows how this low, noncanonical figure was--unexpectedly--central to the construction of ancient Greek literature.
Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism: Spectacle, Politics and History (Asia's Transformations)
by Hong KalWhile most studies on Korean nationalism centre on textual analysis, Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism offers a different approach. It looks at expositions, museums and the urban built environment at particular moments in both colonial and postcolonial eras and analyses their discursive relations in the construction of Korean nationalism. By linking concepts of visual spectacle, urban space and governmentality, this book explores how such notions made the nation imaginable to the public in both the past and the present; how they represented a new modality of seeing for the state and contributed to the shaping of collective identities in colonial and postcolonial Korea. The author further examines how their different modes were associated with the change in governmentality in Korea. In addressing these questions, the book interprets the politics behind the culture of displays and shows both the continuity and the transformation of spectacles as a governing technology in twentieth-century Korea. Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism is a significant contribution to a study of the politics of visual culture in colonial and postcolonial Korea. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of Korean Studies, Culture and Heritage Studies and Asian Studies.
Aesthetic Dilemmas: Encounters with Art in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Literary Modernism
by Marlo Alexandra BurksHugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) is frequently portrayed in cultural histories as an aloof writer with a precious style, out of step with modern sensibilities. In Aesthetic Dilemmas Marlo Burks reassesses Hofmannsthal’s oeuvre and its place in twentieth-century European modernist aesthetics.Through an examination of a diverse range of Hofmannsthal’s ekphrastic writings – including poetry, essays, opera libretti, fiction, and letters – Burks argues that Hofmannsthal’s work aims to engage the consciousness and sensibility of readers, listeners, and viewers by way of dynamic encounters with works of art. Aesthetic Dilemmas thereby corrects a long-standing, flawed characterization of Hofmannsthal’s work as escapist and demonstrates how his place in the Modernist movement has been misunderstood in most scholarship. The book is in dialogue with a broad range of critical voices and treats a variety of themes, from aestheticism to money, interpersonal relationships, suffering, poverty, labour, futurity, legacy, and hope. Translating numerous passages into English for the first time, Aesthetic Dilemmas gives English-speaking readers the chance to evaluate Hofmannsthal’s literary merit and his contributions to the enduring conversation about art’s relation to ethics.
Aesthetic Hybridity in Mughal Painting, 1526-1658 (Transculturalisms, 1400-1700)
by Valerie GonzalezThe first specialized critical-aesthetic study to be published on the concept of hybridity in early Mughal painting, this book investigates the workings of the diverse creative forces that led to the formation of a unique Mughal pictorial language. Mughal pictoriality distinguishes itself from the Persianate models through the rationalization of the picture’s conceptual structure and other visual modes of expression involving the aesthetic concept of mimesis. If the stylistic and iconographic results of this transformational process have been well identified and evidenced, their hermeneutic interpretation greatly suffers from the neglect of a methodologically updated investigation of the images’ conceptual underpinning. Valerie Gonzalez addresses this lacuna by exploring the operations of cross-fertilization at the level of imagistic conceptualization resulting from the multifaceted encounter between the local legacy of Indo-Persianate book art, the freshly imported Persian models to Mughal India after 1555 and the influx of European art at the Mughal court in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The author's close examination of the visuality, metaphysical order and aesthetic language of Mughal imagery and portraiture sheds new light on this particular aspect of its aesthetic hybridity, which is usually approached monolithically as a historical phenomenon of cross-cultural interaction. That approach fails to consider specific parameters and features inherent to the artistic practice, such as the differences between doxis and praxis, conceptualization and realization, intentionality and what lies beyond it. By studying the distinct phases and principles of hybridization between the variegated pictorial sources at work in the Mughal creative process at the successive levels of the project/intention, the practice/realization and the result/product, the author deciphers the modalities of appropriation and manipulation of the heterogeneous elements. Her unique
Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style
by Rose CaseyAcross Africa, Asia, and the Americas, colonial Britain’s property laws are in the process of being transformed. Aesthetic Impropriety analyzes vanguard legal actions and literary innovations to reveal contemporary reforms to property law that are undoing law’s colonial legacies. Casey traces precise legal histories across distinct jurisdictions throughout the anglophone world, revealing the connection between land law and petroleum extraction in the Niger Delta, inheritance and divorce laws and gender inequality in India, intellectual property law and Indigenous dispossession in South Africa, and admiralty law and racialized non-personhood in the English Atlantic. In response to these manifold forms of dispossession, significant reforms are underway, including through common law suits, statutory reform, and proposed changes to legal doctrine. Casey develops the concept of aesthetic impropriety to identify shared structures of thought across legal and literary venues. She shows that writers of poetry and prose are also transforming harmful property laws: in Nigeria, Ben Okri and Chigozie Obioma have articulated symbiotic ecological relationships that are also evidenced in recent actions against petroleum companies; in India, Arundhati Roy’s challenge to divorce laws has preempted similar attempts at reform in Parliament; in South Africa, Zoë Wicomb theorized protections for Indigenous modes of creative production nineteen years before they were signed into law; and in the Americas, M. NourbeSe Philip has proposed a novel method of achieving justice for the one hundred fifty enslaved people who were killed in the 1781 Zong massacre. Aesthetic Impropriety makes a convincing case for literature’s generative capacities and registers the enduring significance of the postcolonial as a necessary framework for understanding globalized inequality in the twenty-first century. By analyzing shared legal and aesthetic transformations, Aesthetic Impropriety argues that law and literature play vital roles in creating anticolonial world orders.
Aesthetic Origins: Peter Viereck and the Imaginative Sources of Politics
by Claes G. Ryn Jay Patrick StarliperWhile it is gaining in academic prominence, discussion of the imagination is too often neglected. Society is dangerously unaware of the intimate relationship between culture and politics, ethics and aesthetics. Challenging this, Jay Patrick Starliper examines the imagination through the lens of the work of Peter Viereck and other likeminded thinkers. The result is a philosophical deconstruction that demonstrates why books are bullets.In 1941, before Nazi barbarism was public knowledge, a young Peter Viereck published Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler. In it, Viereck attacked the diabolical spiritual foundations of National Socialism. He made the ostensibly absurd claim that a certain shade of romanticism was the ethical foundation of a German revolt against decency. According to Viereck, Nazism was the culmination of over a century and a half of bad culture, the result of an idyllic imagination. Starliper warns that the same diseased imagination that culminated in gas chambers and guillotines is subtly affecting the way millions of people view the world today and that, without the inspiration of an elevated aesthetic, civilization will not survive.In the spirit of Edmund Burke and Irving Babbitt, Viereck's insight into the ethical and political force of aesthetics provides a much needed critique of contemporary civilization.
Aesthetic Poetry
by Walter PaterTHE "aesthetic" poetry is neither a mere reproduction of Greek or medieval poetry, nor only an idealisation of modern life and sentiment. <P> <P> The atmosphere on which its effect depends belongs to no simple form of poetry, no actual form of life. Greek poetry, medieval or modern poetry, projects, above the realities of its time, a world in which the forms of things are transfigured. Of that transfigured world this new poetry takes possession, and sublimates beyond it another still fainter and more spectral, which is literally an artificial or "earthly paradise."
Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements
by Aleš ErjavecThis collection examines key aesthetic avant-garde art movements of the twentieth century and their relationships with revolutionary politics. The contributors distinguish aesthetic avant-gardes --whose artists aim to transform society and the ways of sensing the world through political means--from the artistic avant-gardes, which focus on transforming representation. Following the work of philosophers such as Friedrich Schiller and Jacques Rancière, the contributors argue that the aesthetic is inherently political and that aesthetic avant-garde art is essential for political revolution. In addition to analyzing Russian constructivsm, surrealism, and Situationist International, the contributors examine Italian futurism's model of integrating art with politics and life, the murals of revolutionary Mexico and Nicaragua, 1960s American art, and the Slovenian art collective NSK's construction of a fictional political state in the 1990s. Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements traces the common foundations and goals shared by these disparate arts communities and shows how their art worked towards effecting political and social change. Contributors. John E. Bowlt, Sascha Bru, David Craven, Aleš Erjavec, Tyrus Miller, Raymond Spiteri, Miško Šuvakovic
Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650-1720
by Alexander Wragge-MorleyThe scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the symbolic and moral goals of Renaissance natural history in favor of plainly representing the world as it really was. In Aesthetic Science, Alexander Wragge-Morley challenges this interpretation by arguing that key figures such as John Ray, Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, Robert Hooke, and Thomas Willis saw the study of nature as an aesthetic project. To show how early modern naturalists conceived of the interplay between sensory experience and the production of knowledge, Aesthetic Science explores natural-historical and anatomical works of the Royal Society through the lens of the aesthetic. By underscoring the importance of subjective experience to the communication of knowledge about nature, Wragge-Morley offers a groundbreaking reconsideration of scientific representation in the early modern period and brings to light the hitherto overlooked role of aesthetic experience in the history of the empirical sciences.
Aesthetic Theology in the Franciscan Tradition: The Senses and the Experience of God in Art (Routledge Research in Art and Religion)
by Xavier Seubert Oleg BychkovThe book investigates the aesthetic theology embedded in the Franciscan artistic tradition. The novelty of the approach is in applying concepts gleaned from Franciscan textual sources to create a deeper understanding of how art in all its sensual forms was foundational to the Franciscan milieu. Chapters range from studies of statements about aesthetics and the arts in theological textual sources to examples of visual, auditory, and tactile arts communicating theological ideas found in texts. The essays cover not only European art and textual sources, but also Franciscan influences in the Americas found in both texts and artifacts.
Aesthetic Theory: Essential Texts
by Mark Foster GageA collection of pivotal ideas about beauty from throughout history, with an introduction and critical headnotes. This collection of writings on beauty includes selections from twenty key philosophers and theoreticians spanning two millennia: Plato • Aristotle • Vitruvius • Alberti • Kant • Burke • Fiedler • Nietzsche • Wilde • Bergson • Bell • Scott • Benjamin • Bataille • Sontag • Jameson • Scarry • Nehamas • Zangwill • Freedberg and Gallese With an introduction and critical headnotes explaining the importance of each text, Mark Foster Gage offers a framework for a provocative history of ideas about beauty as they relate to contemporary thinking on architecture and design. In a world increasingly defined by sumptuous visuality, the concepts of beauty and visual sensation are not mere intellectual exercises but standards that define the very nature of design practice across disciplines and that are essential to the emerging worlds of design and architecture in the twenty-first century.
Aestheticism (The Critical Idiom Reissued #3)
by R. V. JohnsonFirst published in 1969, this work explores aestheticism and its relationship with literature. After defining the term and examining the unique qualities of ‘the Aesthetes’, the book provides an overview of the literary movement from its emergence to its apotheosis in the 1890s. This book will be of particular interest to those studying 19th Century literature.
Aesthetics Equals Politics: New Discourses across Art, Architecture, and Philosophy (The\mit Press Ser.)
by Mark Foster Gage Matt ShawHow aesthetics—understood as a more encompassing framework for human activity—might become the primary discourse for political and social engagement.These essays make the case for a reignited understanding of aesthetics—one that casts aesthetics not as illusory, subjective, or superficial, but as a more encompassing framework for human activity. Such an aesthetics, the contributors suggest, could become the primary discourse for political and social engagement. Departing from the “critical” stance of twentieth-century artists and theorists who embraced a counter-aesthetic framework for political engagement, this book documents how a broader understanding of aesthetics can offer insights into our relationships not only with objects, spaces, environments, and ecologies, but also with each other and the political structures in which we are all enmeshed. The contributors—philosophers, media theorists, artists, curators, writers and architects including such notable figures as Jacques Rancière, Graham Harman, and Elaine Scarry—build a compelling framework for a new aesthetic discourse. The book opens with a conversation in which Rancière tells the volume's editor, Mark Foster Gage, that the aesthetic is “about the experience of a common world.” The essays following discuss such topics as the perception of reality; abstraction in ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics as the “first philosophy”; Afrofuturism; Xenofeminism; philosophical realism; the productive force of alienation; and the unbearable lightness of current creative discourse.Contributors Mark Foster Gage, Jacques Rancière, Elaine Scarry, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Ferda Kolatan, Adam Fure, Michael Young, Nettrice R. Gaskins, Roger Rothman, Diann Bauer, Matt Shaw, Albena Yaneva, Brett Mommersteeg, Lydia Kallipoliti, Ariane Lourie Harrison, Rhett Russo, Peggy Deamer, Caroline PicardMatt Shaw, Managing Editor
Aesthetics and Marxism: Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and Their Western Contemporaries
by Liu KangAlthough Chinese Marxism--primarily represented by Maoism--is generally seen by Western intellectuals as monolithic, Liu Kang argues that its practices and projects are as diverse as those in Western Marxism, particularly in the area of aesthetics. In this comparative study of European and Chinese Marxist traditions, Liu reveals the extent to which Chinese Marxists incorporate ideas about aesthetics and culture in their theories and practices. In doing so, he constructs a wholly new understanding of Chinese Marxism. Far from being secondary considerations in Chinese Marxism, aesthetics and culture are in fact principal concerns. In this respect, such Marxists are similar to their Western counterparts, although Europeans have had little understanding of the Chinese experience. Liu traces the genealogy of aesthetic discourse in both modern China and the West since the era of classical German thought, showing where conceptual modifications and divergences have occurred in the two traditions. He examines the work of Mao Zedong, Lu Xun, Li Zehou, Qu Qiubai, and others in China, and from the West he discusses Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Marxist theorists including Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse. While stressing the diversity of Marxist positions within China as well as in the West, Liu explains how ideas of culture and aesthetics have offered a constructive vision for a postrevolutionary society and have affected a wide field of issues involving the problems of modernity. Forcefully argued and theoretically sophisticated, this book will appeal to students and scholars of contemporary Marxism, cultural studies, aesthetics, and modern Chinese culture, politics, and ideology.
Aesthetics and Morals in the Philosophy of David Hume (Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy)
by Timothy M CostelloeThe book has two aims. First, to examine the extent and significance of the connection between Hume's aesthetics and his moral philosophy; and, second, to consider how, in light of the connection, his moral philosophy answers central questions in ethics. The first aim is realized in chapters 1-4. Chapter 1 examines Hume's essay "Of the Standard of Taste" to understand his search for a "standard" and how this affects the scope of his aesthetics. Chapter 2 establishes that he treats beauty in nature and art and moral beauty as similar in kind, and applies the conclusions about his aesthetics to his moral thought. Chapter 3 solves a puzzle to which this gives rise, namely, how individuals both accept general standards that they also contravene in the course of aesthetic and moral activity. Chapter 4 takes up the normative aspect of Hume's approach by understanding moral character through his view of moral beauty. The second aim of the book is realized in chapters 5-7 by entertaining three objections against Hume's moral philosophy. First, if morality is an immediate reaction to the beauty of vice and the deformity of virtue, why is perfect virtue not the general condition of every human individual? Second, if morality consists of sentiments that arise in the subject, how can moral judgments be objective and claim universal validity? And third, if one can talk of "general standards" governing conduct, how does one account for the diversity of moral systems and their change over time? The first is answered by showing that like good taste in aesthetics, 'right taste' in morals requires that the sentiments are educated; the second, by arguing against the view that Hume is a subjectivist and a relativist, and the third (chapter 6), by showing that his approach contains a view of progress left untouched by any personal prejudices Hume himself might harbor. The book concludes in chapter 7 by showing how Hume's view of philosophy affects the scope of any normative ethics.
Aesthetics and Politics (Radical Thinkers)
by Walter Benjamin Theodor Adorno Georg Lukacs Bertolt Brecht Ernst BlochNo other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.
Aesthetics and Technology in Building: The Twenty-First-Century Edition
by Thomas Leslie Pier Nervi Cristiana Chiorino Elisabetta NerviThe UNESCO headquarters in Paris. The Pirelli skyscraper in Milan. The Palazetto dello Sport in Rome. The "soaring beauty" of Pier Luigi Nervi's visionary designs and buildings changed cityscapes in the twentieth century. His uncanny ingenuity with reinforced concrete, combined with a gift for practical problem solving, revolutionized the use of open internal space in structures like arenas and concert halls. Aesthetics and Technology in Building: The Twenty-First-Century Edition introduces Nervi's ideas about architecture and engineering to a new generation of students and admirers. More than 200 photographs, details, drawings, and plans show how Nervi put his ideas into practice. Expanding on the seminal 1961 Norton Lectures at Harvard, Nervi analyzes various functional and construction problems. He also explains how precast and cast-in-place concrete can answer demands for economy, technical and functional soundness, and aesthetic perfection. Throughout, he uses his major projects to show how these now-iconic buildings emerged from structural truths and far-sighted construction processes. This new edition features dozens of added images, a new introduction, and essays by Joseph Abram, Robert Einaudi, Alberto Bologna, and Gabriele Neri on Nervi's life, work, and legacy.
Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: Comparative Perspectives
by Prabha Shankar DwivediThis volume brings together the finest research on aesthetics and the philosophy of art by stalwart critics and leading scholars in the field. It discusses various themes, such as the idea of aesthetic perception, the nature of aesthetic experience, attitude theory, the relation of art to morality, representation in art, and the association of aesthetics with language studies in the Indian tradition. It deliberates over the theories and views of Aristotle, Freud, Plato, Immanuel Kant, T. S. Eliot, George Dickie, Leo Tolstoy, R. G. Collingwood, Michael H. Mitias, Monroe C. Beardsley, and Abhinavagupta, among others. The book offers a comparative perspective on Indian and Western approaches to the study of art and aesthetics and enables readers to appreciate the similarities and differences between the conceptions of aesthetics and philosophy of art on a comparative scale detailing various aspects of both. The first of its kind, this key text will be useful for scholars and researchers of arts and aesthetics, philosophy of art, cultural studies, comparative literature, and philosophy in general. It will also appeal to general readers interested in the philosophy of art.
Aesthetics from Ancient China: Aspects of Fenggu (Key Concepts in Chinese Thought and Culture)
by Yonghao WangThis book presents the concept of Fenggu, one of the most important aesthetic categories of ancient China. As an inspiring aesthetic principle, it once encapsulated the particularities of various types of artistic creation and played an important role in traditional artistic creation and theoretic critique. The present volume aims to systematically elaborate on its etymological origin, connotations and generation, its great role in overcoming the tendency of creative stereotypes, its logical positioning in the ancient aesthetic system and its profound connection with traditional culture, via comprehensive analysis of a rich repository of original materials, in combination with calligraphy, painting, and poetry criticism. The theoretical character of traditional aesthetics has been derived from agglomeration of Fenggu with other several important categories of paradigm significance. Therefore, its investigation can offer insights into the organic rhythm of the development of ancient aesthetic thought and consequently lay a solid foundation for the construction of ancient art history and aesthetic history.
Aesthetics of Negativity: Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)
by William S. AllenMaurice Blanchot and Theodor W. Adorno are among the most difficult but also the most profound thinkers in twentieth-century aesthetics. While their methods and perspectives differ widely, they share a concern with the negativity of the artwork conceived in terms of either its experience and possibility or its critical expression. Such negativity is neither nihilistic nor pessimistic but concerns the status of the artwork and its autonomy in relation to its context or its experience. For both Blanchot and Adorno negativity is the key to understanding the status of the artwork in post-Kantian aesthetics and, although it indicates how art expresses critical possibilities, albeit negatively, it also shows that art bears an irreducible ambiguity such that its meaning can always negate itself. This ambiguity takes on an added material significance when considered in relation to language as the negativity of the work becomes aesthetic in the further sense of being both sensible and experimental, and in doing so the language of the literary work becomes a form of thinking that enables materiality to be thought in its ambiguity.In a series of rich and compelling readings, William S. Allen shows how an original and rigorous mode of thinking arises within Blanchot’s early writings and how Adorno’s aesthetics depends on a relation between language and materiality that has been widely overlooked. Furthermore, by reconsidering the problem of the autonomous work of art in terms of literature, a central issue in modernist aesthetics is given a greater critical and material relevance as a mode of thinking that is abstract and concrete, rigorous and ambiguous. While examples of this kind of writing can be found in the works of Blanchot and Beckett, the demands that such texts place on readers only confirm the challenges and the possibilities that literary autonomy poses to thought.
Aesthetics of Sorrow: The Wailing Culture of Yemenite Jewish Women
by Tova GamlielThe term "wailing culture" includes an array of women's behaviors and beliefs following the death of a member of their ethnic group and is typical of Jewish life in Yemeni culture. Central to the practice is wailing itself--a special artistic genre that combines speech with sobbing into moving lyrical poetry that explores the meaning of death and loss. In Aesthetics of Sorrow: The Wailing Culture of Yemenite Jewish Women, Tova Gamliel decodes the cultural and psychological meanings of this practice in an ethnography based on her anthropological research among Yemenite Jewish communities in Israel in 2001-2003. Based on participant-observervation in homes of the bereaved and on twenty-four in-depth interviews with wailing women and men, Gamliel illuminates wailing culture level by level: by the circles in which the activity takes place; the special areas of endeavor that belong to women; and the broad social, historical, and religious context that surrounds these inner circles. She discusses the main themes that define the wailing culture (including the historical origins of women's wailing generally and of Yemenite Jewish wailing in particular), the traits of wailing as an artistic genre, and the wailer as a symbolic type. She also explores the role of wailing in death rituals, as a therapeutic expertise endowed with unique affective mechanisms, as an erotic performance, as a livelihood, and as an indicator of the Jewish exile. In the end, she considers wailing at the intersection of tradition and modernity and examines the study of wailing as a genuine methodological challenge. Gamliel brings a sensitive eye to the vanishing practice of wailing, which has been largely unexamined by scholars and may be unfamiliar to many outside of the Middle East. Her interdisciplinary perspective and her focus on a uniquely female immigrant cultural practice will make this study fascinating reading for scholars of anthropology, gender, folklore, psychology, performance, philosophy, and sociology.