Aesthetic Realism
Aesthetic Realism

Author: Inês Morais

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-05-13

Total Pages: 149

ISBN-13: 3030201279

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This compelling book defends realism concerning the aesthetic—in particular, concerning the aesthetic properties of works of art (including works of literature). Morais lucidly argues that art criticism, when referring to aesthetic properties, is referring not ultimately to the critic’s subjective reactions, but to genuine properties of the works. With a focus on contemporary discussion conducted in the analytic tradition, as well as on arguments by Hume and Kant, this book characterizes the debate in aesthetics and the philosophy of art concerning aesthetic realism, examining attacks on the objectivity of values, the ‘autonomy thesis’, and Hume’s sentimentalism. Considering and defusing scepticism concerning the significance of the ontological debate about aesthetic realism, Morais discusses two powerful attacks on aesthetic realism before defending the doctrine against them and providing a positive realist account of aesthetic properties.

The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic
The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic

Author: Lauren M. E. Goodlad

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2015-01-22

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0191044008

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How did realist fiction alter in the effort to craft forms and genres receptive to the dynamism of an expanding empire and globalizing world? Do these nineteenth-century variations on the "geopolitical aesthetic" continue to resonate today? Crossing literary criticism, political theory, and longue durée history, The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic explores these questions from the standpoint of nineteenth-century novelists such as Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and Anthony Trollope, as well as successors including E. M. Forster and the creators of recent television serials. By looking at the category of "sovereignty" at multiple scales and in diverse contexts, Lauren M. E. Goodlad shows that the ideological crucible for "high" realism was not a hegemonic liberalism. It was, rather, a clash of modern liberal ideals struggling to distintricate themselves from a powerful conservative vision of empire while striving to negotiate the inequalities of power which a supposedly universalistic liberalism had helped to generate. The material occasion for the Victorian era's rich realist experiments was the long transition from an informal empire of trade that could be celebrated as liberal to a neo-feudal imperialism that only Tories could warmly embrace. The book places realism's geopolitical aesthetic at the heart of recurring modern experiences of breached sovereignty, forgotten history, and subjective exile. The Coda, titled "The Way We Historicize Now", concludes the study with connections to recent debates about "surface reading", "distant reading", and the hermeneutics of suspicion.

Climate Realism
Climate Realism

Author: Lynn Badia

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-28

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0429766521

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book sets forth a new research agenda for climate theory and aesthetics for the age of the Anthropocene. It explores the challenge of representing and conceptualizing climate in the era of climate change. In the Anthropocene when geologic conditions and processes are primarily shaped by human activity, climate indicates not only atmospheric forces but the gamut of human activity that shape these forces. It includes the fuels we use, the lifestyles we cultivate, the industrial infrastructures and supply chains we build, and together these point to the possible futures we may encounter. This book demonstrates how every weather event constitutes the climatic forces that are as much social, cultural, and economic as they are environmental, natural, and physical. By foregrounding this fundamental insight, it intervenes in the well-established political and scientific discourses of climate change by identifying and exploring emergent aesthetic practices and the conceptual project of mediating the various forces embedded in climate. This book is the first to sustain a theoretical and analytical engagement with the category of realism in the context of anthropogenic climate change, to capture climate’s capacity to express embedded histories, and to map the formal strategies of representation that have turned climate into cultural content.

The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics
The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics

Author: Jerrold Levinson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2005-01-27

Total Pages: 844

ISBN-13: 9780199279456

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

'The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics' has assembled 48 brand-new essays, making this a comprehensive guide available to the theory, application, history, and future of the field.

The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, 1890-1934
The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, 1890-1934

Author: Irina Gutkin

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9780810115453

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The past fifteen years have seen an important shift in the way scholars look at socialist realism. Where it was seen as a straitjacket imposed by the Stalinist regime, it is now understood to be an aesthetic movement in its own right, one whose internal logic had to be understood if it was to be criticized. International specialists remain divided, however, over the provenance of Soviet aesthetic ideology, particularly over the role of the avant-garde in its emergence. In The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, Irina Gutkin brings together the best work written on the subject to argue that socialist realism encompassed a philosophical worldview that marked thinking in the USSR on all levels: political, social, and linguistic. Using a wealth of diverse cultural material, Gutkin traces the emergence of the central tenants of socialist realist theory from Symbolism and Futurism through the 1920s and 1930s.

Abstractionist Aesthetics
Abstractionist Aesthetics

Author: Phillip Brian Harper

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2015-12-25

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1479865435

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An artistic discussion on the critical potential of African American expressive culture In a major reassessment of African American culture, Phillip Brian Harper intervenes in the ongoing debate about the “proper” depiction of black people. He advocates for African American aesthetic abstractionism—a representational mode whereby an artwork, rather than striving for realist verisimilitude, vigorously asserts its essentially artificial character. Maintaining that realist representation reaffirms the very social facts that it might have been understood to challenge, Harper contends that abstractionism shows up the actual constructedness of those facts, thereby subjecting them to critical scrutiny and making them amenable to transformation. Arguing against the need for “positive” representations, Abstractionist Aesthetics displaces realism as the primary mode of African American representational aesthetics, re-centers literature as a principal site of African American cultural politics, and elevates experimental prose within the domain of African American literature. Drawing on examples across a variety of artistic production, including the visual work of Fred Wilson and Kara Walker, the music of Billie Holiday and Cecil Taylor, and the prose and verse writings of Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and John Keene, this book poses urgent questions about how racial blackness is made to assume certain social meanings. In the process, African American aesthetics are upended, rendering abstractionism as the most powerful modality for Black representation.