Author: Laurie Ruth Johnson
Publisher: Brill Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042031135
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
Aesthetic Anxiety analyzes uncanny repetition in psychology, literature, philosophy, and film, and produces a new narrative about the centrality of aesthetics in modern subjectivity. The often horrible, but sometimes also enjoyable, experience of anxiety can be an aesthetic mode as well as a psychological state. Johnson's elucidation of that state in texts by authors from Kant to Rilke demonstrates how estrangement can produce attachment, and repositions Romanticism as an engine of modernity.
Author: Ruth Ronen
Publisher: Suny Press
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
Places anxiety at the heart of the aesthetic experience.
Author: Nicholas A. Germana
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1640140026
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279
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Book Description
A history of Kantian and post-Kantian thought and of a foundational stage of German orientalism. German orientalism has been understood, variously, as a form of latent colonialism, as a quest for academic hegemony in Europe, and as an effort to diagnose and treat the ills of modern Western culture. Nicholas Germana identifiesa different impetus for orientalism in German thought, seeing it as an effort to come to grips with the Other within German society at the turn of the nineteenth century and within the dynamics of subjectivity itself. Drawing largely on work by feminist scholars, the book uncovers an anxiety at the core of Kantian and post-Kantian thought, thus shedding light on its derogation (or elevation) of Oriental cultures. Kant's philosophy of freedom is a construction of modern, Western masculinity. Reason, which alone can make freedom possible, subverts and orders chaotic nature and protects the rational subject from the enervating influences of the senses and the imagination. The feminized, sexually charged Orient is a threat to the historical achievement of Western male rationality. Germana's book emphasizes aesthetics in the German orientalist discourse, a subject that has received little attention todate. In this tradition of German thought, aesthetics became a form of spiritual anthropology, ordering and classifying societies, races, and genders in terms of their ability to master the senses and the imagination, forces thatundermine rational autonomy, the very source of human (i.e., masculine) dignity. Nicholas A. Germana is Professor of History at Keene State College, New Hampshire.
Author: Sianne Ngai
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674041526
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
Envy, irritation, paranoia—in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity. Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called “animatedness,” and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called “stuplimity.” She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-twentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening. Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of ugly feelings to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature—with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race—but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.
Author: Margo Natalie Crawford
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
After the "Black is Beautiful" movement of the 1960s, black body politics have been overdetermined by both the familiar fetishism of light skin as well as the counter-fetishism of dark skin. Moving beyond the longstanding focus on the tragic mulatta and making room for the study of the fetishism of both light-skinned and dark-skinned blackness, Margo Natalie Crawford analyzes depictions of colorism in the work of Gertrude Stein, Wallace Thurman, William Faulkner, Black Arts poets, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and John Edgar Wideman. In Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus, Crawford adds images of skin color dilution as a type of castration to the field of race and psychoanalysis. An undercurrent of light-skinned blackness as a type of castration emerges within an ongoing story about the feminizing of light skin and the masculinizing of dark skin. Crawford confronts the web of beautified and eroticized brands and scars, created by colorism, crisscrossing race, gender, and sexuality. The depiction of the horror of these aestheticized brands and scars begins in the white-authored and black-authored modernist literature examined in the first chapters. A call for the end of the ongoing branding emerges with sheer force in the post-Black movement novels examined in the final chapters.
Author: Rhett Smith
Publisher: Moody Publishers
ISBN: 080247909X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 170
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Book Description
Is anxiety “un-Christian”? Many Christians believe the answer to this question is yes! Understandably, then, many Christians feel shame when they are anxious. They especially feel this shame when well-intentioned fellow believers dismiss or devalue anxiety with Christian platitudes and Bible verses. Rhett Smith, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, helps us understand anxiety in a new way. Rhett argues that, rather than being destructive or shameful, anxiety can be a catalyst for our spiritual growth. Using Biblical thinking and personal examples, Rhett explains how anxiety allows us to face our resistance and fears, understand where those fears come from, and then make intentional decisions about issues such as career, marriage, money, and our spiritual lives. Allow this book to challenge your view of anxiety, and allow God to use your anxiety for good.
Author: Peter Sloterdijk
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074569988X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
In this wide-ranging book, renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk examines art in all its rich and varied forms: from music to architecture, light to movement, and design to typography. Moving between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, his analyses span the centuries, from ancient civilizations to contemporary Hollywood. With great verve and insight he considers the key issues that have faced thinkers from Aristotle to Adorno, looking at art in its relation to ethics, metaphysics, society, politics, anthropology and the subject. Sloterdijk explores a variety of topics, from the Greco-Roman invention of postcards to the rise of the capitalist art market, from the black boxes and white cubes of modernism to the growth of museums and memorial culture. In doing so, he extends his characteristic method of defamiliarization to transform the way we look at works of art and artistic movements. His bold and original approach leads us away from the well-trodden paths of conventional art history to develop a theory of aesthetics which rejects strict categorization, emphasizing instead the crucial importance of individual subjectivity as a counter to the latent dangers of collective culture. This sustained reflection, at once playful, serious and provocative, goes to the very heart of Sloterdijk’s enduring philosophical preoccupation with the aesthetic. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and aesthetics and will appeal to anyone interested in culture and the arts more generally.
Author: Joseph Carroll
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030461904
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 416
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Book Description
This pioneering volume offers an expansive introduction to the relatively new field of evolutionary studies in imaginative culture. Contributors from psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and the humanities probe the evolved human imagination and its artefacts. The book forcefully demonstrates that imagination is part of human nature. Contributors explore imaginative culture in seven main areas: Imagination: Evolution, Mechanisms and Functions Myth and Religion Aesthetic Theory Music Visual and Plastic Arts Video Games and Films Oral Narratives and Literature Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture widens the scope of evolutionary cultural theory to include much of what “culture” means in common usage. The contributors aim to convince scholars in both the humanities and the evolutionary human sciences that biology and imaginative culture are intimately intertwined. The contributors illuminate this broad theoretical argument with comprehensive insights into religion, ideology, personal identity, and many particular works of art, music, literature, film, and digital media. The chapters “Imagination, the Brain’s Default Mode Network, and Imaginative Verbal Artifacts” and “The Role of Aesthetic Style in Alleviating Anxiety About the Future” are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195112214
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
The book remains a central work of criticism for all students of literature.
Author: Dr Katharine Phillips
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190254157
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 601
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Book Description
This landmark book is the first comprehensive edited volume on body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), a common and severe disorder. People with BDD are preoccupied with distressing or impairing preoccupations with non-existent or slight defects in their physical appearance. People with BDD think that they look ugly -- even monstrous -- although they look normal to others. BDD often derails sufferers' lives and can lead to suicide. BDD has been described around the world since the 1800s but was virtually unknown and unstudied until only several decades ago. Since then, research on BDD has dramatically increased understanding of this often-debilitating condition. Only recently, BDD was considered untreatable, but today, most sufferers can be successfully treated. This is the only book that provides comprehensive, in-depth, up-to-date information on BDD's clinical features, history, classification, epidemiology, morbidity, features in special populations, diagnosis and assessment, etiology and pathophysiology, treatment, and relationship to other disorders. Numerous chapters focus on cosmetic treatment, because it is frequently received but usually ineffective for BDD, which can lead to legal action and even violence toward treating clinicians. The book includes numerous clinical cases, which illustrate BDD's clinical features, its often-profound consequences, and recommended treatment approaches. This volume's contributors are the leading researchers and clinicians in this rapidly expanding field. Editor Katharine A. Phillips, head of the DSM-V committee on BDD, has done pioneering research on many aspects of this disorder, including its treatment. This book will be of interest to all clinicians who provide mental health treatment and to researchers in BDD, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and other obsessive-compulsive and related disorders. It will be indispensable to surgeons, dermatologists, and other clinicians who provide cosmetic treatment. Students and trainees with an interest in psychology and mental health will also be interested in this book. This book fills a major gap in the literature by providing clinicians and researchers with cutting-edge, indispensable information on all aspects of BDD and its treatment.
