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Orestes was produced in 1750, an experiment which intensely interested the literary world and the public. In his Dedicatory Letters to the Duchess of Maine, Voltaire has the following passage on the Greek drama: "We should not, I acknowledge, endeavor to imitate what is weak and defective in the ancients: it is most probable that their faults were well known to their contemporaries. I am satisfied, Madam, that the wits of Athens condemned, as well as you, some of those repetitions, and some declamations with which Sophocles has loaded his Electra: they must have observed that he had not dived deep enough into the human heart. I will moreover fairly confess, that there are beauties peculiar not only to the Greek language, but to the climate, to manners and times, which it would be ridiculous to transplant hither. Therefore I have not copied exactly the Electra of Sophocles-much more I knew would be necessary; but I have taken, as well as I could, all the spirit and substance of it."
Child of materialism and positivism, Courbet was without a doubt one of the most complex painters of the nineteenth century. Symbolising the rejection of traditions, Courbet did not hesitate to confront the public with the truth by liberating painting of conventional rules. He became from then on the leader of pictorial realism.
A commitment to modernity is the underlying theme of this volume. Through essays that are interpretive and theoretical, the author seeks to situate the modern in contemporary cultural practice. She sets up an ideological vantage point to view modernism along its multiple tracks in India and the third world.The essays divide into three sections. The first two sections, Artists and ArtWork and Film/Narratives, raise questions of authorship, genre, and contemporary features of national culture that materialize into an aesthetic in the Indian context. The last section, Frames of Reference, formalizes the polemical options developed across the book. The essays here propose resistance to the depoliticization of narratives, and affirm an open-ended engagement with the avant-garde. They explore the possibility of art practice finding its own signifying space that is still a space for radical transformation.Geeta Kapur is an independent art critic and curator living in New Delhi. Her extensive publications on modern Indian art include the book Contemporary Indian Artists (Delhi, 1978), exhibition catalogues and monographs on artists. She is currently writing a monograph on Tyeb Mehta. Her essays on cultural criticism have been widely presented in forums of art history and cultural studies. Her curatorial work includes the show Bombay/Mumbai 1992 2001 in the multi-part exhibition titled Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis , at Tate Modern, London, in 2001. Geeta Kapur is a founder-editor of the Journal of Arts & Ideas and advisory editor to Third Text. She has held research fellowships at Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, and Clare Hall, Cambridge University. For the past three decades, [Geeta Kapur s] has been the singular dominant presence in the field to a point that her writings alone seem to have constituted the whole field of modern Indian art theory and criticism. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Biblio (Delhi), May June 2001. Geeta Kapur is a magisterial presence in the sphere of modern Indian art. [The] insistence on the primacy of bearing witness to creative practice has been the leitmotif of Kapur s work. . . . Kapur s contribution . . . is best understood by reflection on the radical change that her activity has brought about in Indian art criticism. Ranjit Hoskote, Art India (Mumbai), Vol. VI, 1, 2001. When Was Modernism is a book of essays: imaginative, interpretive, argumentative, polemical, political and, in the combined sense of all these, historical. . . . [It] provides an instance of passionate engagement that, at its best moments, verges on the poetic. Chaitanya Sambrani, ART AsiaPacific (Australia), Issue 30, 2001.
Ethnographic study of cultural politics in the contemporary Egyptian art world, examining how art-making is a crucial aspect of the transformation from socialism to neoliberalism in postcolonial countries.
Mario Paz has, in the Romantic Agony, acutely analyzed the effect of the traditions of Byron and De Sade upon poets and painters from 1800 to 1900. It is the analysis of a mood in literature. The mood may ve been transient, but it was widespread, and it was expressed in dreams of "luxurious cruelties," "fatal women," corpse-passions, and the sinful agonies of delight. Professo Praz has described the whole Romantic literature under one of its most characteristic aspects, that of erotic sensibility.
It is a close study of four novels by Boris Vian. It aims to show how L'Ecume des jours, L'Automne a Pekin, L'Herbe rouge and L'Arrache-coeur form a unified and coherent tetralogy. By establishing close links between these four texts, it becomes possible to achieve a more comprehensive understanding, not only of the significance of the tetralogy in exposing a complex and multi-layered novelistic strategy at the heart of the vianesque, but of the individual novels as autonomous creations. An examination of the novels reveals that they are not merely joined to one another via a superficial network of textual similarities (that which I refer to as intratextuality), but that this intertwining is emblematic of a common method of narrative construction. Each Vian novel is dependent, for a thorough understanding of the text to be possible, upon the multiple lines of external influence running through it. The sources of this influence (which I refer to as intertextuality) are located in various major texts of twentieth century literature, anglophone as well as francophone. Thus, in each instance the narrative is driven by a complicated interaction of intratextuality and intertextuality."
"Modern Arab Art provides a historical and theoretical overview of the forces that have spawned artistic movements across the Middle East from the 1940s through today. Nada Shabout recognizes the important distinction between Arabic art and Islamic art, and views them as overlapping rather than synonymous subjects. Based on interviews with Arab artists, reviews of Arabic resources, and visits to sites and galleries in the Arab world, Shabout provides an introduction to a field that has been long neglected. With particular emphasis on production, reception, and the intersection between art and politics in Iraq and Palestine, she reveals the fallacy in Western fascination with Arab art as a timeless and exotic 'other'"--Jacket.
Fiction. Translated from the French by Paul Knobloch. Originally published in 1947. "In the Exopotamian desert, where hepatrols blossom and children collect little animals called sandpeepers, the sun shines in an unusual way: it produces eerie black zones whose mysteries remain unexplained. Above all, Vian's pecurilar way with language proves that, indeed, life in the desert is equal to none. Since unusual language is bound to produce unusual fiction, it follows that the story does not take place in the fall, nor is it set in China" - from the Foreword by Marc Lapprand. The fourth novel by Vian, who was a contemporary of Sartre and Beauvoir. His innovative style, cutting-edge during his lifetime, but only successful in the sixties, made him an icon of the May 1968 student movement.
In the thick of the Second World War, the Cairo-based Surrealist collective Art et Liberte were pioneering new art forms and mounting subversive exhibitions that sent shockwaves across local artistic circles. Born with the publication of their Manifesto Long Live Degenerate Art on December 22nd, 1938, the group rejected the convergence of art and nationalism, aligning themselves with a complex, international and evolving Surrealist movement spanning cities such as Paris, London, Mexico City, New York, Beirut and Tokyo. Art and Liberty created a distinct reworking of Surrealism, which provided a generation of disillusioned Egyptian and non-Egyptian artists and writers, men and women alike, with a platform for cultural reform and anti-Fascist protest. Surrealism in Egypt is the first comprehensive analysis of Art and Liberty's artworks, literature and critical writings on Surrealism. By addressing the group's long-lost and often misconstrued legacy, and drawing on a substantial body of previously unpublished primary documents and more than 200 field interviews, the author charts Art and Liberty's significant contribution towards a new definition of Surrealism.Moving beyond the polarizing dichotomies of Saidian Orientalism, this book rewrites the history of Surrealism itself - advocating for a new definition of the movement that reflects an inclusive vision of art history.
