Arts of Impoverishment

Arts of Impoverishment PDF Author: Leo Bersani
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Why taunt and flout us, as Beckett's writing does? Why discourage us from seeing, as Mark Rothko's paintings often can? Why immobilize and daze us, as Alain Resnais' films sometimes will? Why, Leo Bersnai and Ulysse Dutoit ask, would three acknowledged masters of their media make work deliberately opaque and inhospitable to an audience? This book shows how such crippling moves may signal a profoundly original - and profoundly anti-modernist - renunciation of art's authority.

Arts of Impoverishment

Arts of Impoverishment PDF Author: Leo Bersani
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Why taunt and flout us, as Beckett's writing does? Why discourage us from seeing, as Mark Rothko's paintings often can? Why immobilize and daze us, as Alain Resnais' films sometimes will? Why, Leo Bersnai and Ulysse Dutoit ask, would three acknowledged masters of their media make work deliberately opaque and inhospitable to an audience? This book shows how such crippling moves may signal a profoundly original - and profoundly anti-modernist - renunciation of art's authority.

Untimely Beggar

Untimely Beggar PDF Author: Patrick Greaney
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145291351X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
This highly original book takes as its starting point a central question for nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and philosophy: how to represent the poor? Covering the period from the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857 to the composition of Benjamin’s final texts in the 1930s, Untimely Beggar investigates the coincidence of two modern literary and philosophical interests: representing the poor and representing potential. To take account of literature’s relation to the poor, Patrick Greaney proposes the concept of impoverished writing, which withdraws from representing objects and registers the existence of power. By reducing itself to the indication of its own potential, by impoverishing itself, literary language attempts to engage and participate in the power of the poor. This focus on impoverished language offers new perspectives on major French and German authors, including Marx, Nietzsche, Mallarm, Rilke, and Brecht; and makes significant contributions to recent debates about power and potential in thinkers such as Agamben, Deleuze, Foucault, Hardt, and Negri. In doing so, Greaney offers significant insights into modernity’s intense philosophical and literary interest in socioeconomic poverty. Patrick Greaney is assistant professor of German studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

World Spectators

World Spectators PDF Author: Kaja Silverman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804738323
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Combining phenomenology and psychoanalysis in highly innovative ways, this book seeks to undo the binary opposition between appearance and Being that has been in place since Plato’s parable of the cave. It is, essentially, an essay on what could be called “world love,” the possibility and necessity for psychic survival of a profound and vital erotic investment by a human being in the cosmic surround. Here, the author takes her cue from Freud’s assertion that the “loss of reality” associated with psychosis is a function of a disturbance not in the capacity to reason or perceive, but rather in the capacity for world love, the libidinal and semiotic circuity by means of which such love actualizes itself. In an implicit challenge to poststructuralist thought, the author claims that this love is always in response to a call issued by the world—that the world has, as it were, a vocation: its beauty ought to be seen. We must think of our own being-in-the world as a response to a primordial calling out to respond to this beauty. We are, the author suggests, at the very core of our being, summoned to what she terms world spectatorship. Drawing on Heidegger’s phenomenological elaboration of care as the being distinctive of human being and the primarily Lacanian conceptualization of the language of desire specific to each human subject, this metapsychology of love attempts to integrate issues in the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, visual culture, art history, and literary and film studies.

Conversation Pieces

Conversation Pieces PDF Author: Grant H. Kester
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520275942
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Grant Kester discusses the disparate network of artists & collectives united by a desire to create new forms of understanding through creative dialogue that crosses boundaries of race, religion, & culture.

Contingent Figure

Contingent Figure PDF Author: Michael D. Snediker
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452965293
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
A masterful synthesis of literary readings and poetic reflections, making profound contributions to our understanding of chronic pain At the intersection of queer theory and disability studies, acclaimed theorist Michael D. Snediker locates something unexpected: chronic pain. Starting from this paradigm-shifting insight, Snediker elaborates a bracing examination of the phenomenological peculiarity of disability, articulating a complex idiom of figuration as the lived substance of pain’s quotidian. This lexicon helps us differently inhabit both the theoretical and phenomenal dimensions of chronic pain and suffering by illuminating where these modes are least distinguishable. Suffused with fastidious close readings, and girded by a remarkably complex understanding of phenomenal experience, Contingent Figure resides in the overlap between literary theory and lyric experiment. Snediker grounds his exploration of disability and chronic pain in dazzling close readings of Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and many others. Its juxtaposition of these readings with candid autobiographical accounts makes Contingent Figure an exemplary instance of literary theory as a practice of lyric attention. Thoroughly rigorous and anything but predictable, this stirring inquiry leaves the reader with a rich critical vocabulary indebted to the likes of Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, D. O. Winnicott, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A master class in close reading’s inseparability from the urgency of lived experience, this book is essential for students and scholars of disability studies, queer theory, formalism, aesthetics, and the radical challenge of Emersonian poetics across the long American nineteenth century.

Thoughts and Things

Thoughts and Things PDF Author: Leo Bersani
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022620605X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
Leo Bersani s career spans more than 50 years, and extends across a wide spectrum of fieldsfrom French studies, modernism, realist fiction, and psychoanalytic criticism, to film theory and queer theory (a field Bersani could be said to have invented). In Thoughts and Things Bersani emerges as a thinker of ontology, aesthetics, and ethics, i.e., he emerges as a philosopher of the first order. In this elegant series of essays, he posits what would appear to be an irreducible gap between our thoughts (the human subject) and things (the world). His exemplary texts range from Jean Genet (Our Lady of the Flowers) to Claire Denis (the French filmmaker whose masterpiece is Beau Travail). But he then asks whether a fissure of being between the subject and the world might simply be masking a more fundamental oneness, arguably a oneness intrinsic to our being in and with the world. He addresses the problem of formulating ways to consider the undivided mind, drawing on various sources from Dsecartes to cosmology, Sufi mysticism, and neo-Platonism. Cosmos and individual, past and present merge in the idea that our bodies contain atoms from stars that exploded millions of years ago: res cogitans and res extensa, for Bersani, are united in the oneness of cosmic being. This little book, in its sensitive treatment of films and literary texts, succeeds brilliantly in diagramming new forms as well as radical failures of connectedness. It is a new departure for Bersani, and will be devoured by his growing body of devoted readers."

The Habit of Lying

The Habit of Lying PDF Author: John Vignaux Smyth
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822383748
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Lying appears to be ubiquitous, what Franz Kafka called "a universal principle”; yet, despite a number of recent books on the subject, it has been given comparatively little genuinely systematic attention by philosophers, social scientists, or even literary theorists. In The Habit of Lying John Vignaux Smyth examines three forms of falsification—lying, concealment, and fiction—and makes a strong critique of traditional approaches to each of them, and, above all, to the relations among them. With recourse to Rene Girard, Paul de Man, Theodor Adorno, Leo Strauss, and other theoreticians not usually considered together, Smyth arrives at some surprising conclusions about the connections between lying, mimesis, sacrifice, sadomasochism, and the sacred, among other central subjects. Arguing that the relation between lying and truthtelling has been characterized in the West by sharply sacrificial features, he begins with a critique of the philosophies of lying espoused by Kant and Sissela Bok, then concludes that the problem of truth and lies leads to the further problem of the relation between law and arbitrariness as well as to the relation between rationality and unanimity. Constructively criticizing the work of such philosophers as Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty, and Nelson Goodman, Smyth shows how these problems occur comparably in fiction theory and how Paul de Man’s definition of fiction as arbitrariness finds confirmation in analytic philosophy. Through the novels of Defoe, Stendhal, and Beckett—with topics ranging from Defoe’s treatment of lies, fiction, and obscenity to Beckett’s treatment of the anus and the sacred—Smyth demonstrates how these texts generalize the issues of mendacity, concealment, and sacrificial arbitrariness in Girard’s sense to almost every aspect of experience, fiction theory, and cultural life. The final section of the book, taking its cue from Shakespeare, elaborates a sacrificial view of the history of fashion and dress concealment.

The Experimental Group

The Experimental Group PDF Author: Matthew Jesse Jackson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226389413
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
"Matthew Jesse Jackson's writing and quality of mind put him in the forefront of the next wave in modern art studies." Thomas E. Crow, Institute of Fine Arts --

Time and Trace: Multidisciplinary Investigations of Temporality

Time and Trace: Multidisciplinary Investigations of Temporality PDF Author: Sabine Gross
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004315721
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Time holds an enduring fascination for humans. Time and Trace investigates the human experience and awareness of time and time’s impact on a wide range of cultural, psychological, and artistic phenomena, from reproductive politics and temporal logic to music and theater, from law to sustainability, from memory to the Vikings. The volume presents selected essays from the 15th triennial conference of the International Society for the Study of Time from the arts (literature, music, theater), history, law, philosophy, science (psychology, biology), and mathematics. Taken together, they pursue the trace of time into the past and future, tracing temporal processes and exploring the traces left by time in individual experience as well as culture and society. Contributors are: Michael Crawford, Orit Hilewicz, Rosemary Huisman, John S. Kafka, Erica W. Magnus, Arkadiusz Misztal, Carlos Montemayor, Stephanie Nelson, Peter Øhrstrøm, Jo Alyson Parker, Thomas Ploug, Helen Sills, Lasse C. A. Sonne, Raji C. Steineck, and Frederick Turner.

Seeing Things

Seeing Things PDF Author: Alan Ackerman
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442696532
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
A technological revolution has changed the way we see things. The storytelling media employed by Pixar Animation Studios, Samuel Beckett, and William Shakespeare differ greatly, yet these creators share a collective fascination with the nebulous boundary between material objects and our imaginative selves. How do the acts of seeing and believing remain linked? Alan Ackerman charts the dynamic history of interactions between showing and knowing in Seeing Things, a richly interdisciplinary study which illuminates changing modes of perception and modern representational media. Seeing Things demonstrates that the airy nothings of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Ghost in Hamlet, and soulless bodies in Beckett's media experiments, alongside Toy Story's digitally animated toys, all serve to illustrate the modern problem of visualizing, as Hamlet put it, 'that within which passes show.' Ackerman carefully analyses such ghostly appearances and disappearances across cultural forms and contexts from the early modern period to the present, investigating the tension between our distrust of shadows and our abiding desire to believe in invisible realities. Seeing Things provides a fresh and surprising cultural history through theatrical, verbal, pictorial, and cinematic representations.