Aesthetics Alienation

Download or read book Aesthetics & Alienation written by Gary Tedman and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2012-06-29 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A complete and original theory of aesthetics based on Marx and Althusser in the modernist Marxist anti-humanist tradition (Brecht, Althusser, Benjamin, Adorno). The main concepts that arise from this work are: the aesthetic level of practice, aesthetic state apparatuses, aesthetic interpellation, and pseudo dialectics, all of which are used to understand the role of aesthetic experience and its place in everyday life. - In the space long thought as necessary to fill spanning the gap between Marx and Freud, the author proposes that aesthetics can be located and defined in a concrete way. We are therefore looking at a domain involving and implicating feelings, affections, dispositions, sensibilities and sensuality, as well as their social role in art, tradition, ritual, and taboo. With the classic Marxist concepts of base and superstructure divided into levels, economic, ideological, and political, the aesthetic level of practice is the area that has traditionally been mostly either missing or mislocated and, especially perhaps, misrepresented for political reasons. The importance of this level is that it fuels and supports the media, or as Althusser described it the 'traffic' (or mediation) between base and superstructure, although for Althusser this was ideological traffic. Here, this is also defined as aesthetic. From this vantage point, we begin to be able to see aesthetic state apparatuses, analyse how they function, both in the past, historically (for example firstly in art history), and today, in the contemporary political context, to grasp the role that art and feelings, along with affective alienation, plays in our culture as a complete and, in fact, cyclical reciprocating system. ,

Download or read book Aesthetics of Alienation written by Evgeny Dobrenko and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2005-05-16 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative work takes issue with the idea that Socialist Realism was mainly the creation of party leaders and was imposed from above on the literati who lived and worked under the Soviet regime. Evgeny Dobrenko, a leading expert on Soviet literature, argues instead--and offers persuasive evidence--that the aesthetic theories underpinning Socialist Realism arose among the writers themselves, born of their proponents' desire for power in the realm of literary policymaking. Accordingly, Dobrenko closely considers the evolution of these theories, deciphering the power relations and social conditions that helped to shape them. In chapters on Proletkult, RAPP, LEF, and Pereval, Dobrenko reexamines the theories generated by these major Marxist literary groupings of the early Soviet Union. He shows how each approached the problems of literature's response to the presumed social mandate of the young communist society, and how Socialist Realism emerged as a conglomerate of these earlier, revolutionary theories. With extensive and detailed reference to supporting testimony and documents, Dobrenko clearly demonstrates how Socialist Realism was created from within the revolutionary culture, and how this culture and its disciples fully participated in this creative process. His work represents a major breakthrough in our current understanding of the complex sources that contributed to early Soviet culture.

Download or read book Passions for Nature written by Rochelle Johnson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 660 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century Americans celebrated nature through many artistic forms, including natural-history writing, landscape painting, landscape design theory, and transcendental philosophy. Although we tend to associate these movements with the nation’s dawning environmental consciousness, Passions for Nature demonstrates that they instead alienated Americans from the physical environment even as they seemed to draw people to it. Rather than see these expressions of passion for nature as initiating environmental awareness, this study reveals how they contributed to a culture that remains startlingly ignorant of the details of the material world. Using as a touchstone the writings of nineteenth-century philanthropist Susan Fenimore Cooper (the daughter of famed author James Fenimore Cooper), Passions for Nature reveals that while a generalized passion for nature was intense and widespread in her era, cultural attention to the "real" physical world was quite limited. Popular artistic forms represented the natural world through specific metaphors for the American experience, cultivating a national tradition of valuing nature in terms of humanity. Johnson crosses disciplinary boundaries to demonstrate that anthropocentric understandings of the natural world result not only from the growing gulf between science and imagination that C. P. Snow located in the early twentieth century but also--and surprisingly--from cultural productions traditionally viewed as positive engagements with the environment. By uncovering the roots of a cultural alienation from nature, Passions for Nature explains how the United States came to be a nation that simultaneously reveres the natural world and yet remains dangerously distant from it.

Download or read book Art, Alienation, and the Humanities written by Charles Reitz and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2000-02-10 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illustrates how Marcuse's theory sheds new light on current debates in both education and society involving issues of multiculturalism, postmodernism, civic education, the "culture wars," critical thinking, and critical literacy.

Download or read book Aesthetics Equals Politics written by Mark Foster Gage and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How 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 Picard Matt Shaw, Managing Editor

Download or read book Alienation Effects written by Branislav Jakovljevic and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-06-13 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the interplay of artistic, political, and economic performance in the former Yugoslavia and reveals their inseparability

Download or read book Theological Aesthetics after von Balthasar written by Dr James Fodor and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays by distinguished authors explores the present-day field of theological aesthetics: from von Balthasar’s contribution and parallel developments to correctives and alternatives to his approach. A tribute to von Balthasar’s own project expands into a dialogue with ancient and medieval traditions in search of revelatory aesthetics. The contributors outline challenges to his approach (including Protestant perspectives) and introduce new ways of viewing the field of theological aesthetics, which ultimately opens up to the idea of concrete cultural contexts and practical human needs determining the use of the arts and aesthetic sensibilities in theology.