The Aesthetics Of Power

Download or read book The Aesthetics of Power written by Claire Keyes and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When still a senior at Radcliffe, Adrienne Rich was selected as a Yale Younger Poet. The judge, W.H. Auden, wrote the introduction to her first book of poems. Thus Rich's career was launched by one of the most distinguished poets of the twentieth century, someone Rich herself admired and emulated. Adrienne Rich's early mentors were men, and her early poetry consequently adopted a strong male persona. In her development as artist, woman, and activist, however, Rich emerged as a leading voice of modern feminism--a voice which rejects a male-dominated world, forcing new definitions of power, new possibilities for women, and profound repercussions for society. In The Aesthetics of Power, Claire Keyes examines the shape and scope of Rich's poetry as it applies to Rich's female aesthetic. Keyes uncovers the process by which Rich embraces, then rejects, accepted uses of power, achieving a vision of beneficent female power. In her early poems, Adrienne Rich accepts certain traditions associated with the divisions of power according to sex. Later, Rich continually defines and redefines power until she can reject power-as-force (patriarchal power) for the power-to-transform, which, for her, is the truly significant and essential power. Surveying Rich's poetry and prose from 1951 to the present, this book traces the development of Adrienne Rich's new understanding of the power of the poet and the power of woman. Sharing Rich's feminist sensibilities, yet at times critical of her more radical positions, Claire Keyes draws a portrait of an artist who was molded by the complex political and social climate of post-World War II America. It is a portrait that reveals the creative growth of an artist, and the personal growth of a powerful and controversial woman.

Download or read book Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power written by Lutz Peter Koepnick and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power explores Walter Benjamin?s seminal writings on the relationship between mass culture and fascism. The book offers a nuanced reading of Benjamin?s widely influential critique of aesthetic politics, while it contributes to current debates about the cultural projects of Nazi Germany, the changing role of popular culture in the twentieth century, and the way in which Nazi aesthetics have persisted into the present. Lutz Koepnick first explores the development of the aestheticization thesis in Benjamin?s work from the early 1920s to his death in 1940. Pushing Benjamin?s fragmentary remarks to a logical conclusion, Koepnick sheds light on the ways in which the Nazis employed industrial mass culture to redress the political as a self-referential space of authenticity and self-assertion. Koepnick then examines to what extent Benjamin?s analysis of fascism holds up to recent historical analyses of the National Socialist period and whether Benjamin?s aestheticization thesis can help conceptualize cultural politics today. Although Koepnick insists on crucial differences between the stage-managing of political action in modern and postmodern societies, he argues throughout that it is in Benjamin?s emphatic insistence on experience that we may find the relevance of his reflections today. Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power is both an important contribution to Benjamin studies and a revealing addition to our understanding of the Third Reich and of contemporary culture?s uneasy relationship to Nazi culture.

Download or read book Fascist Spectacle written by Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This richly textured cultural history of Italian fascism traces the narrative path that accompanied the making of the regime and the construction of Mussolini's power. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi reads fascist myths, rituals, images, and speeches as texts that tell the story of fascism. Linking Mussolini's elaboration of a new ruling style to the shaping of the regime's identity, she finds that in searching for symbolic means and forms that would represent its political novelty, fascism in fact brought itself into being, creating its own power and history. Falasca-Zamponi argues that an aesthetically founded notion of politics guided fascist power's historical unfolding and determined the fascist regime's violent understanding of social relations, its desensitized and dehumanized claims to creation, its privileging of form over ethical norms, and ultimately its truly totalitarian nature.

Download or read book Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics written by Frederic Spotts and published by Harry N. Abrams. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Available again, the classic, unprecedented look at how the strategies and ideals of the Third Reich were informed by Adolf Hitler's artistic aspirations. "Grimly fascinating . . . A book that will rightly find its place among the central studies of Nazism. . . . Invaluable." --The New York Times

Download or read book The Aesthetics of Power written by Carol Duncan and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Aesthetics of Power gathers together the key articles and essays by Carol Duncan, one of the pioneers of a new socio-political approach to art history and criticism, and one of the strongest feminist voices to emerge in the 1970s and '80s. These essays, many of which have become classics, explore a wide variety of subjects: images of mothers, fathers, and children in eighteenth century art and culture; the image of the female nude in the context of the modern museum; and the role of modern art criticism in today's art market. Other essays examine the contexts in which art is seen, taught, and made. Whatever her theme, Duncan treats art as a working part of a larger social reality and a pathway to understanding its deepest tensions, fears, and desires. A final section of this book is devoted to the life and collected critical writings of Cheryl Bernstein, a fictitious critic created by Duncan as parody, but who was taken as a real and eventually influential, critic.

Download or read book The Art of Power written by Diego A. Von Vacano and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Art of Power is a challenge to traditional political theory. Diego A. von Vacano examines the work of Machiavelli, arguing that he establishes a new, aesthetic perspective on political life. He then proceeds to carry out the most extensive analysis to date of an important relationship in political theory: that between the thought of Machiavelli and Friedrich Nietzsche. Arguing that these two theorists have similar aims and perspectives, this work uncovers the implications of their common way of looking at the human condition and political practice to elucidate the phenomenon of the persistence of aesthetic, sensory cognition as fundamental to the human experience, particularly to the political life. By exploring this relationship, The Art of Power makes a significant contribution to the growing interest in the intersection of aesthetic theory and political philosophy as well as in interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives on political theory.

Download or read book A Rhetoric of Aesthetic Power written by Christian Kock and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: