Things Beyond Resemblance
Things Beyond Resemblance

Author: Robert Hullot-Kentor

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2006-09-05

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0231510039

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Theodor W. Adorno was a major twentieth-century philosopher and social critic whose writings on oppositional culture in art, music, and literature increasingly stand at the center of contemporary intellectual debate. In this excellent collection, Robert Hullot-Kentor, widely regarded as the most distinguished American translator and commentator on Adorno, gathers together sixteen essays he has written about the philosopher over the past twenty years. The opening essay, "Origin Is the Goal," pursues Adorno's thesis of the dialectic of enlightenment to better understand the urgent social and political situation of the United States. "Back to Adorno" examines Adorno's idea that sacrifice is the primordial form of human domination; "Second Salvage" reconstructs Adorno's unfinished study of the transformation of music in radio transmission; and "What Is Mechanical Reproduction" revisits Adorno's criticism of Walter Benjamin. Further essays cover a broad range of topics: Adorno's affinities with Wallace Stevens and Nabokov, his complex relationship with Kierkegaard and psychoanalysis, and his critical study of popular music. Many of these essays have been revised, with new material added that emphasizes the relevance of Adorno's thought to the United States today. Things Beyond Resemblance is a timely and richly analytical collection crucial to the study of critical theory, aesthetics, continental philosophy, and Adorno.

Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual, and Religion
Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual, and Religion

Author: Brian K. Smith

Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publishe

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9788120815322

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The classical Vedic texts that deal with large-scale sacrificial ritual and those writings that deal with domestic ritual have traditionally been treated as unrelated. The former are devoted to the explication of rituals that are dominated by wealthy male elites; the latter concern humble private ceremonies more open to famale participation. Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual and Religion argues that there is in fact, a fundamental connection between these two large and important bodies of Indic religious literature.

Wallace Stevens and the Seasons
Wallace Stevens and the Seasons

Author: George S. Lensing

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2004-04-01

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 9780807129722

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This fruitful pairing of literary and biographical interpretation follows Wallace Stevens’s poetry through the lens of its dominant metaphor—the seasons of nature—and illuminates the poet’s personal life experiences reflected there. From Stevens’s first collection, Harmonium (1923), to his last poems written shortly before his death in 1955, George S. Lensing offers clear and detailed examination of Stevens’s seasonal poetry, including extensive discussions of “Autumn Refrain,” “The Snow Man,” “The World as Meditation,” and “Credences of Summer.” Drawing upon a vast knowledge of the poet, Lensing argues that Stevens’s pastoral poetry of the seasons assuaged a profound and persistent personal loneliness. An important scholarly assessment of a major twentieth-century modernist, Wallace Stevens and the Seasons also serves as an appealing introduction to Stevens.

Philosophy of New Music
Philosophy of New Music

Author: Theodor W. Adorno

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2020-06-02

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1452965692

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An indispensable key to Adorno’s influential oeuvre—now in paperback In 1949, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music was published, coinciding with the prominent philosopher’s return to a devastated Europe after his exile in the United States. Intensely polemical from its first publication, every aspect of this work was met with extreme reactions, from stark dismissal to outrage. Even Arnold Schoenberg reviled it. Despite the controversy, Philosophy of New Music became highly regarded and widely read among musicians, scholars, and social philosophers. Marking a major turning point in his musicological philosophy, Adorno located a critique of musical reproduction as internal to composition, rather than a matter of musical performance. Consisting of two distinct essays, “Schoenberg and Progress” and “Stravinsky and Reaction,” Philosophy of New Music poses the musical extremes in which Adorno perceived the struggle for the cultural future of Europe: between human emancipation and barbarism, between the compositional techniques and achievements of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. In this translation, which is accompanied by an extensive introduction by distinguished translator Robert Hullot-Kentor, Philosophy of New Music emerges as an essential guide to the whole of Adorno's oeuvre.

Poetry and Power of Judgment
Poetry and Power of Judgment

Author: Song Ye

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-07-25

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 1040048013

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This book examines Chinese traditional poetry with an emphasis on the sources of pleasure in creating and appreciating classical Chinese poems and the basis for valid aesthetic judgments about poetry. The pleasure derived from art plays a crucial role in people’s evaluation of its worth. This book shows that Chinese classical poetics and Western aesthetics agree on the sources of aesthetic pleasure. Both hold, despite their obvious differences, that aesthetic taste essentially involves cognition. The book explores important ideas in traditional Chinese poetry, emphasizing that “Poetry is founded upon the power of judgement (shi).” This central idea guides other key concepts throughout the history of Chinese poetics, revealing the fundamental principles of creating and appreciating poetic art. The author presents new views of traditional Chinese poetry and poetics by unifying these long-dispersed basic propositions into a new coherent cognitivist framework that also gives due importance to emotion. Scholars and students studying Chinese literature, poetics, philosophy of art, and philosophy of mind will find this book interesting.

Other Things
Other Things

Author: Bill Brown

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-01-08

Total Pages: 435

ISBN-13: 022628316X

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From the pencil to the puppet to the drone—the humanities and the social sciences continue to ride a wave of interest in material culture and the world of things. How should we understand the force and figure of that wave as it shapes different disciplines? Other Things explores this question by considering a wide assortment of objects—from beach glass to cell phones, sneakers to skyscrapers—that have fascinated a range of writers and artists, including Virginia Woolf, Man Ray, Spike Lee, and Don DeLillo. The book ranges across the literary, visual, and plastic arts to depict the curious lives of things. Beginning with Achilles’s Shield, then tracking the object/thing distinction as it appears in the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan, Bill Brown ultimately focuses on the thingness disclosed by specific literary and artistic works. Combining history and literature, criticism and theory, Other Things provides a new way of understanding the inanimate object world and the place of the human within it, encouraging us to think anew about what we mean by materiality itself.

Adorno, Politics, and the Aesthetic Animal
Adorno, Politics, and the Aesthetic Animal

Author: Caleb J. Basnett

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1487541449

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Reconstructing the philosophy of T.W. Adorno, this book offers a critical theory of the human/animal distinction and its relation to politics.

Resemblance and Reality in Greek Thought
Resemblance and Reality in Greek Thought

Author: Arum Park

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-09-13

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1317355342

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Resemblance and Reality in Greek Thought follows the construction of reality from Homer into the Hellenistic era and beyond. Not only in didactic poetry or philosophical works but in practically all genres from the time of Homer onwards, Greek literature has shown an awareness of the relationship between verbal art and the social, historical, or cultural reality that produces it, an awareness that this relationship is an approximate one at best and a distorting one at worst. This central theme of resemblance and its relationship to reality draws together essays on a range of Greek authors, and shows how they are unified or allied in posing similar questions to classical literature.

Karl Kraus and the Discourse of Modernity
Karl Kraus and the Discourse of Modernity

Author: Ari Linden

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2020-05-15

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0810141647

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Ari Linden’s Karl Kraus and the Discourse of Modernity reconsiders the literary works of the Viennese satirist, journalist, and playwright Karl Kraus (1874–1936). Combining close readings with intellectual history, Linden shows how Kraus’s two major literary achievements (The Last Days of Mankind and The Third Walpurgis Night) and his adaptation of The Birds by Aristophanes (Cloudcuckooland) address the political catastrophes of the first third of Europe’s twentieth century—from World War I to the rise of fascism. Kraus’s central insight, Linden argues, is that the medial representations of such events have produced less an informed audience than one increasingly unmoved by mass violence. In the second part of the book, Linden explores this insight as he sees it inflected in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno. This hidden dialogue, Linden claims, offers us a richer understanding of the often-neglected relationship between satire and critical theory writ large.