Radical Decadence

Radical Decadence PDF Author: Julia Skelly
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472569423
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
This pioneering book explores the notion of 'radical decadence' as concept, aesthetic and lived experience, and as an analytical framework for the study of contemporary feminist textile art. Gendered discourses of decadence that perpetuate anxieties about women's power, consumption and pleasure are deconstructed through images of drug use, female sexuality and 'excessive' living, in artworks by several contemporary textile artists including Orly Cogan, Tracey Emin, Allyson Mitchell, and Rozanne Hawksley. Perceptions of decadence are invariably bound to the negative connotations of decay and degradation, particularly with regard to the transgression of social norms related to femininity and the female body. Excessive consumption by women has historically been represented as grotesque, and until now, women's pleasure in relation to drug and alcohol use has largely gone unexamined in feminist art history and craft studies. Here, representations of female consumption, from cupcakes to alcohol and cocaine, are opened up for critical discussion. Drawing on feminist and queer theories, Julia Skelly considers portrayals of 'bad girls' in artworks that explore female sexuality - performative pieces designed to subvert and exceed feminine roles. In this provocative book, decadence is understood not as a destructive force but as a liberating aesthetic.

Radical Decadence

Radical Decadence PDF Author: Julia Skelly
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472569423
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
This pioneering book explores the notion of 'radical decadence' as concept, aesthetic and lived experience, and as an analytical framework for the study of contemporary feminist textile art. Gendered discourses of decadence that perpetuate anxieties about women's power, consumption and pleasure are deconstructed through images of drug use, female sexuality and 'excessive' living, in artworks by several contemporary textile artists including Orly Cogan, Tracey Emin, Allyson Mitchell, and Rozanne Hawksley. Perceptions of decadence are invariably bound to the negative connotations of decay and degradation, particularly with regard to the transgression of social norms related to femininity and the female body. Excessive consumption by women has historically been represented as grotesque, and until now, women's pleasure in relation to drug and alcohol use has largely gone unexamined in feminist art history and craft studies. Here, representations of female consumption, from cupcakes to alcohol and cocaine, are opened up for critical discussion. Drawing on feminist and queer theories, Julia Skelly considers portrayals of 'bad girls' in artworks that explore female sexuality - performative pieces designed to subvert and exceed feminine roles. In this provocative book, decadence is understood not as a destructive force but as a liberating aesthetic.

Decadence

Decadence PDF Author: Jim Hougan
Publisher: William Morrow
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description


Sexual Restraint and Aesthetic Experience in Victorian Literary Decadence

Sexual Restraint and Aesthetic Experience in Victorian Literary Decadence PDF Author: Sarah Green
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108831516
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Sarah Green shows how late Victorian Decadent literature paradoxically treats sexual restraint as healthy and aesthetically productive.

The Oxford Handbook of Decadence

The Oxford Handbook of Decadence PDF Author: Jane Desmarais
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190066954
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 745

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Book Description
Edited by Jane Desmarais and David Weir.

Staging Decadence

Staging Decadence PDF Author: Adam Alston
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135023706X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
How is decadence being staged today – as a practice, issue, pejorative, and as a site of pleasure? Where might we find it, why might we look for it, and who is decadence for? This book is the first monographic study of decadence in theatre and performance. Adam Alston makes a passionate case for the contemporary relevance of decadence in the thick of a resurgent culture war by focusing on its antithetical relationship to capitalist-led growth, progress, and intensified productivity. He argues that the qualities used to disparage the study and practice of theatre and performance are the very things we should embrace in celebrating their value – namely, their spectacular uselessness, wastefulness, outmodedness, and abundant potential for producing forms of creativity that flow away from the ends and excesses of capitalism. Alston covers an eclectic range of examples by Julia Bardsley (UK), Hasard Le Sin (Finland), jaamil olawale kosoko (USA), Toco Nikaido (Japan), Martin O'Brien (UK), Toshiki Okada (Japan), Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca (Spain), Normandy Sherwood (USA), The Uhuruverse (USA), Nia O. Witherspoon (USA), and Wunderbaum (Netherlands). Expect ruminations on monstrous scenographies, catatonic choreographies, turbo-charged freneticism, visions of the apocalypse – and what might lie in its wake.

The Routledge Companion to Art and Disability

The Routledge Companion to Art and Disability PDF Author: Keri Watson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000553450
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 574

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Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Art and Disability explores disability in visual culture to uncover the ways in which bodily and cognitive differences are articulated physically and theoretically, and to demonstrate the ways in which disability is culturally constructed. This companion is organized thematically and includes artists from across historical periods and cultures in order to demonstrate the ways in which disability is historically and culturally contingent. The book engages with questions such as: How are people with disabilities represented in art? How are notions of disability articulated in relation to ideas of normality, hybridity, and anomaly? How do artists use visual culture to affirm or subvert notions of the normative body? Contributors consider the changing role of disability in visual culture, the place of representations in society, and the ways in which disability studies engages with and critiques intersectional notions of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. This book will be particularly useful for scholars in art history, disability studies, visual culture, and museum studies.

Disciplinary Decadence

Disciplinary Decadence PDF Author: Lewis R. Gordon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317261208
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
In this book, philosopher and social critic Lewis Gordon explores the ossification of disciplines, which he calls disciplinary decadence. In response, he offers a theory of what he calls a teleological suspension of disciplinarity, in which he encourages scholars and lay intellectuals to pay attention to the openness of ideas and purposes on which their disciplines were born. Gordon builds his case through discussions of philosophy of education, problems of secularization in religious thought, obligations across generations, notions of invention in the study of ideas, decadence in development, colonial epistemologies, and the quest for a genuine postcolonial language. These topics are examined with the underlying diagnosis of the present political and academic environment as one in which it is indecent to think.

Fashion Theory and the Visual Semiotics of the Body

Fashion Theory and the Visual Semiotics of the Body PDF Author: Žarko Paić
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527585832
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
Instead of the logic of representation of fashion in the light of modern society and postmodern culture, this book argues that contemporary fashion should be regarded as a performative-conceptual turn in the very core of body iconograms. The text presents a theoretical perspective of the phenomenon of fashion within fashion theory as establishing a new approach from visual semiotics. Through this lens, fashion, therefore, emerges as a visual code of contemporary societies and cultures in the networked matrices of hyperreality and visions of that coming time that will determine the combination of cybernetics, fetishism and transgression.

The Decadent Society

The Decadent Society PDF Author: Ross Douthat
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1476785252
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
From the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bad Religion, a “clever and stimulating” (The New York Times Book Review) portrait of how our turbulent age is defined by dark forces seemingly beyond our control. The era of the coronavirus has tested America, and our leaders and institutions have conspicuously failed. That failure shouldn’t be surprising: Beneath social-media frenzy and reality-television politics, our era’s deep truths are elite incompetence, cultural exhaustion, and the flight from reality into fantasy. Casting a cold eye on these trends, The Decadent Society explains what happens when a powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemate, and demographic decline creates a unique civilizational crisis. Ranging from the futility of our ideological debates to the repetitions of our pop culture, from the decline of sex and childbearing to the escapism of drug use, Ross Douthat argues that our age is defined by disappointment—by the feeling that all the frontiers are closed, that the paths forward lead only to the grave. Correcting both optimism and despair, Douthat provides an enlightening explanation of how we got here, how long our frustrations might last, and how, in renaissance or catastrophe, our decadence might ultimately end.

Decadent Conservatism

Decadent Conservatism PDF Author: Alex Murray
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192858203
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
British Decadent literature was a radical attack on conventional morality and middle-class taste, its insistence on the autonomy of the art and its exploration of sexuality, dissipation, and depravity at odds with the literary and social establishment. Yet this counter-cultural narrative has obscured the often reactionary and elitist tendencies of Decadent writers and artists of the fin de siècle. Decadent Conservatism offers the first in-depth examination of the intersection of Decadence and conservatism, arguing that underpinning both was the desire to find alternatives to liberal modernity. Both Decadents and conservatism turned to the past to uncover values and models of social organisation that could offer stability in a chaotic world. From well-known figures such as Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, through to the forgotten editors of short-lived periodicals, important female aesthetes such as Michael Field, and politicians such as Arthur Balfour, Decadent Conservatism challenges conventional understandings of the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and the past in late-Victorian Britain. Through a series of thematic chapters exploring the alternative communities created by little magazines, the politics of Individualism, investments in monarchy and religion, Folk Decadence, and jingoistic and nationalist responses to the Second Anglo-Boer war, this study offers a new, and much messier, picture of fin-de-siècle literary politics. It will be of interest to those working on Victorian literature and modernism, as well as social, political, and cultural history of the period 1880-1920.