Objects, Audiences, and Literatures

Objects, Audiences, and Literatures PDF Author: Carma Gorman
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443809462
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
In Objects, Audiences, and Literatures: Alternative Narratives in the History of Design, five art historians tap a variety of unexpected literary sources to reveal the dynamic relationship between intention and reception in architecture, interior design, costume, and the decorative arts. The essays consider both handcrafted and serially produced objects from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, including a japanned high chest from colonial Boston, German and Austrian Artistic Dress, Tiffany lamps, the architecture of the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels in Paris, and the “dream homes” portrayed in two popular postwar American films. The five chapters demonstrate that a complex and even contradictory mixture of stakeholders determines the meanings of designed objects. Each author examines popular forms of literature in order to reveal the preconceptions that viewers brought with them to the experience of looking at and using objects. The authors’ attentiveness to viewers’ class and gender provides a methodological model for approaching the study of reception within the field of design history. "Objects, Audiences, and Literatures introduces a new generation of historians of design and decorative arts with five superb case studies. Looking beyond the laconic historical data that has formed the backbone of scholarship in this field these authors plumb popular culture—films, advertisements, and especially novels—to understand contemporaneous meanings of objects. Using these polyglot sources with an eye particularly on narrative and gender they suss out heretofore unnoticed dissonances between the prescriptive pronouncements of avant-garde “insiders” and the reception that design innovation found in broader publics. These wide-ranging essays are marked by imagination, exuberance, and acuity; I look forward to using it in my teaching." —Margaretta M. Lovell, University of California, Berkeley "This is a welcome addition to the literature that addresses the growing scholarly and popular interest in design and design history. Drawing on an impressive array of examples, the authors explore how class, gender, and cultural context shaped the reception of architecture, interior design, costume, and the decorative arts at various moments in the modern era. The collection is noteworthy for the way each of the contributors draws upon literary sources for insights into design and material culture that transcend the specific examples under review. Models of methodological rigor, these essays should appeal to scholars in multiple disciplines." —Dennis P. Doordan, University of Notre Dame

Objects, Audiences, and Literatures

Objects, Audiences, and Literatures PDF Author: Carma Gorman
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443809462
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Objects, Audiences, and Literatures: Alternative Narratives in the History of Design, five art historians tap a variety of unexpected literary sources to reveal the dynamic relationship between intention and reception in architecture, interior design, costume, and the decorative arts. The essays consider both handcrafted and serially produced objects from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, including a japanned high chest from colonial Boston, German and Austrian Artistic Dress, Tiffany lamps, the architecture of the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels in Paris, and the “dream homes” portrayed in two popular postwar American films. The five chapters demonstrate that a complex and even contradictory mixture of stakeholders determines the meanings of designed objects. Each author examines popular forms of literature in order to reveal the preconceptions that viewers brought with them to the experience of looking at and using objects. The authors’ attentiveness to viewers’ class and gender provides a methodological model for approaching the study of reception within the field of design history. "Objects, Audiences, and Literatures introduces a new generation of historians of design and decorative arts with five superb case studies. Looking beyond the laconic historical data that has formed the backbone of scholarship in this field these authors plumb popular culture—films, advertisements, and especially novels—to understand contemporaneous meanings of objects. Using these polyglot sources with an eye particularly on narrative and gender they suss out heretofore unnoticed dissonances between the prescriptive pronouncements of avant-garde “insiders” and the reception that design innovation found in broader publics. These wide-ranging essays are marked by imagination, exuberance, and acuity; I look forward to using it in my teaching." —Margaretta M. Lovell, University of California, Berkeley "This is a welcome addition to the literature that addresses the growing scholarly and popular interest in design and design history. Drawing on an impressive array of examples, the authors explore how class, gender, and cultural context shaped the reception of architecture, interior design, costume, and the decorative arts at various moments in the modern era. The collection is noteworthy for the way each of the contributors draws upon literary sources for insights into design and material culture that transcend the specific examples under review. Models of methodological rigor, these essays should appeal to scholars in multiple disciplines." —Dennis P. Doordan, University of Notre Dame

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain PDF Author: Leah Price
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691159548
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Good Talk

Good Talk PDF Author: Mira Jacob
Publisher: One World
ISBN: 0399589058
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “beautiful and eye-opening” (Jacqueline Woodson), “hilarious and heart-rending” (Celeste Ng) graphic memoir about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us, from the acclaimed author of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing. ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Chicago Tribune, The New York Public Library, Publishers Weekly • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, BuzzFeed, Esquire, Literary Journal, Kirkus Reviews “How brown is too brown?” “Can Indians be racist?” “What does real love between really different people look like?” Like many six-year-olds, Mira Jacob’s half-Jewish, half-Indian son, Z, has questions about everything. At first they are innocuous enough, but as tensions from the 2016 election spread from the media into his own family, they become much, much more complicated. Trying to answer him honestly, Mira has to think back to where she’s gotten her own answers: her most formative conversations about race, color, sexuality, and, of course, love. Written with humor and vulnerability, this deeply relatable graphic memoir is a love letter to the art of conversation—and to the hope that hovers in our most difficult questions. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/OPEN BOOK AWARD “Jacob’s earnest recollections are often heartbreaking, but also infused with levity and humor. What stands out most is the fierce compassion with which she parses the complexities of family and love.”—Time “Good Talk uses a masterful mix of pictures and words to speak on life’s most uncomfortable conversations.”—io9 “Mira Jacob just made me toss everything I thought was possible in a book-as-art-object into the garbage. Her new book changes everything.”—Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy

Friends of Interpretable Objects

Friends of Interpretable Objects PDF Author: Miguel TAMEN
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674044215
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Tamen's concern is to show how inanimate objects take on life through their interpretation--notably, in our own culture, as they are collected and housed in museums. It is his claim that an object becomes interpretable only in the context of a "society of friends." Thus, he suggests, our inveterate tendency as human beings to interpret the phenomenal world gives objects not only a life but also a society.

Objects of Culture

Objects of Culture PDF Author: H. Glenn Penny
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807862193
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
In the late nineteenth century, Germans spearheaded a worldwide effort to preserve the material traces of humanity, designing major ethnographic museums and building extensive networks of communication and exchange across the globe. In this groundbreaking study, Glenn Penny explores the appeal of ethnology in Imperial Germany and analyzes the motivations of the scientists who created the ethnographic museums. Penny shows that German ethnologists were not driven by imperialist desires or an interest in legitimating putative biological or racial hierarchies. Overwhelmingly antiracist, they aspired to generate theories about the essential nature of human beings through their museums' collections. They gained support in their efforts from boosters who were enticed by participating in this international science and who used it to promote the cosmopolitan character of their cities and themselves. But these cosmopolitan ideals were eventually overshadowed by the scientists' more modern, professional, and materialist concerns, which dramatically altered the science and its goals. By clarifying German ethnologists' aspirations and focusing on the market and conflicting interest groups, Penny makes important contributions to German history, the history of science, and museum studies.

The Lost Thing

The Lost Thing PDF Author: Shaun Tan
Publisher: Franklin Watts
ISBN: 9780734410887
Category : Fantasy
Languages : en
Pages : 28

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Book Description
A boy discovers a bizarre-looking creature while out collecting bottle-tops at a beach. Having guessed that it is lost, he tries to find out who owns it or where it belongs, but the problem is met with indifference by everyone else, who barely notices its presence. Each is unhelpful in their own way; strangers, friends, parents are all unwilling to entertain this uninvited interruption to day-to-day life. In spite of his better judgement, the boy feels sorry for this hapless creature, and attempts to find out where it belongs.

Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Literature

Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Literature PDF Author: David Davies
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1551111772
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 459

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Book Description
What, if anything, distinguishes works of fiction such as Hamlet and Madame Bovary from biographies, news reports, or office bulletins? Is there a “right” way to interpret fiction? Should we link interpretation to the author’s intention? Ought our moral unease with works that betray sadistic, sexist, or racist elements lower our judgments of their aesthetic worth? And what, when it comes down to it, is literature? The readings in this collection bring together some of the most important recent work in the philosophy of literature by philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum, John Searle, and David Lewis. The readings explore philosophical issues such as the nature of fiction, the status of the author, the act of interpretation, the role of the emotions in the act of reading, the aesthetic and moral value of literary works, and other topics central to the philosophy of literature.

Living Books

Living Books PDF Author: Janneke Adema
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262046024
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Reimagining the scholarly book as living and collaborative--not as commodified and essentialized, but in all its dynamic materiality. In this book, Janneke Adema proposes that we reimagine the scholarly book as a living and collaborative project--not as linear, bound, and fixed, but as fluid, remixed, and liquid, a space for experimentation. She presents a series of cutting-edge experiments in arts and humanities book publishing, showcasing the radical new forms that book-based scholarly work might take in the digital age. Adema's proposed alternative futures for the scholarly book go beyond such print-based assumptions as fixity, stability, the single author, originality, and copyright, reaching instead for a dynamic and emergent materiality. Adema suggests ways to unbind the book, describing experiments in scholarly book publishing with new forms of anonymous collaborative authorship, radical open access publishing, and processual, living, and remixed publications, among other practices. She doesn't cast digital as the solution and print as the problem; the problem in scholarly publishing, she argues, is not print itself, but the way print has been commodified and essentialized. Adema explores alternative, more ethical models of authorship; constructs an alternative genealogy of openness; and examines opportunities for intervention in current cultures of knowledge production. Finally, asking why it is that we cut and bind our research together at all, she examines two book publishing projects that experiment with remix and reuse and try to rethink and reperform the book-apparatus by taking responsibility for the cuts they make.

Other Things

Other Things PDF Author: Bill Brown
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022628316X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
From the pencil to the puppet to the drone—the humanities and the social sciences continue to ride a wave of interest in material culture and the world of things. How should we understand the force and figure of that wave as it shapes different disciplines? Other Things explores this question by considering a wide assortment of objects—from beach glass to cell phones, sneakers to skyscrapers—that have fascinated a range of writers and artists, including Virginia Woolf, Man Ray, Spike Lee, and Don DeLillo. The book ranges across the literary, visual, and plastic arts to depict the curious lives of things. Beginning with Achilles’s Shield, then tracking the object/thing distinction as it appears in the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan, Bill Brown ultimately focuses on the thingness disclosed by specific literary and artistic works. Combining history and literature, criticism and theory, Other Things provides a new way of understanding the inanimate object world and the place of the human within it, encouraging us to think anew about what we mean by materiality itself.

Art Objects

Art Objects PDF Author: Jeanette Winterson
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307363635
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
In ten interlocking essays, the acclaimed author of Written on the Body and Art & Lies reveals art as an active force in the world--neither elitist nor remote, available to those who want it and affecting those who don't. Original, personal, and provocative, these essays are not so much a point of view as they are a way of life, revealing "a brilliant and deeply feeling artist at work" (San Francisco Chronicle).