Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory

Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory PDF Author: G. Ray
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403979448
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
The eleven interconnected essays of this book penetrate the dense historical knots binding terror, power and the aesthetic sublime and bring the results to bear on the trauma of September 11 and the subsequent War on Terror. Through rigorous critical studies of major works of post-1945 and contemporary culture, the book traces transformations in art and critical theory in the aftermath of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Critically engaging with the work of continental philosophers, Theodor W. Adorno, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Francois Lyotard and of contemporary artists Joseph Beuys, Damien Hirst, and Boaz Arad, the book confronts the shared cultural conditions that made Auschwitz and Hiroshima possible and offers searching meditations on the structure and meaning of the traumatic historical 'event'. Ray argues that globalization cannot be separated from the collective tasks of working through historical genocide. He provocatively concludes that the current US-led War on Terror must be grasped as a globalized inability to mourn.

Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory

Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory PDF Author: G. Ray
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403979448
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Get Book Here

Book Description
The eleven interconnected essays of this book penetrate the dense historical knots binding terror, power and the aesthetic sublime and bring the results to bear on the trauma of September 11 and the subsequent War on Terror. Through rigorous critical studies of major works of post-1945 and contemporary culture, the book traces transformations in art and critical theory in the aftermath of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Critically engaging with the work of continental philosophers, Theodor W. Adorno, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Francois Lyotard and of contemporary artists Joseph Beuys, Damien Hirst, and Boaz Arad, the book confronts the shared cultural conditions that made Auschwitz and Hiroshima possible and offers searching meditations on the structure and meaning of the traumatic historical 'event'. Ray argues that globalization cannot be separated from the collective tasks of working through historical genocide. He provocatively concludes that the current US-led War on Terror must be grasped as a globalized inability to mourn.

Art and the Sublime

Art and the Sublime PDF Author: Christine Riding
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781854379481
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 19

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Book Description
Scholars have debated the term 'sublime' in the field of aesthetics for centuries. Many more artists, writers, poets and musicians have sought to evoke or respond to it. But what is the sublime? Is it a thing, a feeling, an event or a state of mind? The word, of Latin origin, means something that is 'set or raised aloft, high up'. The sublime is further defined as having the quality of such greatness, magnitude or intensity, whether physical, metaphysical, moral, aesthetic or spiritual, that our ability to perceive or comprehend it is temporarily overwhelmed. The best-known theory published in Britain is Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Burke's definition of the sublime focuses on such terms as darkness, obscurity, privation, vastness, magnificence, loudness and suddenness, and that our reaction is defined by a kind of pleasurable terror. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the sublime was associated in particular with the immensity or turbulence of Nature and human responses to it. Consequently, in Western art, 'sublime' landscapes and seascapes, especially those from the Romantic period, often represent towering mountain ranges, deep chasms, violent storms and seas, volcanic eruptions or avalanches which, if actually experienced, would be life threatening. Other themes relate to the epic and the supernatural as described in drama, poetry and fiction, for example, by Homer, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, as well as more contemporary authors, such as Byron and Mary Shelley. Arguably the greatest source of the sublime for European art is the Bible, which begins with the creation of the world and ends with apocalypse and the Last Judgement. This display has been devised by curator Christine Riding.

Terror and the Cinematic Sublime

Terror and the Cinematic Sublime PDF Author: Todd A. Comer
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786472073
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This collection considers film in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Eleven essayists address Hollywood movies, indie film, and post-cinematic media, including theatrical films by directors such as Steven Spielberg, Darren Aronofsky, Quentin Tarantino and Spike Lee, and post-cinematic works by Wafaa Bilal, Douglas Gordon and Peter Tscherkassky, among others. All of the essays are written with an eye to what may be the central concept of our time, the sublime. The sublime--that which can be thought but not represented (the "unpresentable")--provides a ready tool for analyses of trauma, horror, catastrophe and apocalypse, the military-industrial complex, the end of humanism and the limits of freedom. Such essays take the pulse of our cultural moment, while also providing the reader with a sense of the nature of the sublime in critical work, and how it continues to evolve conceptually in the 21st century.

A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful PDF Author: Edmund Burke
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aesthetics
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description


The Sublime Today

The Sublime Today PDF Author: Gillian B. Pierce
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443845159
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
The Sublime Today considers contemporary applications of aesthetic philosophy and earlier theories of the sublime from Longinus, Boileau, Burke, Kant, and Hegel to current literary and cultural contexts. Today, aesthetic experience itself seems to be changing, given the rise of new media and new conditions for the viewing and the reception of works of art. How might the rhetoric of the sublime be used to both describe our current situation and help formulate constructive responses to it? The Sublime Today collects the work of scholars in literature, film, art, and media studies and provides a forum for investigating the contemporary relevance of the sublime, both as it has been understood historically and as it has been formulated by more recent theorists such as Jameson, Lyotard, Kristeva, and others. The volume includes essays on literary readings of the sublime in Coetze, Eggers, Lahiri, and Auster; essays on film and the visual arts in the work of François Ozon and in recent participatory art; and essays on how new technologies and media, as in media representations of 9/11, re-frame our relationship to the aesthetics of the sublime, especially as they intersect with questions of gender, the postcolonial, and the uneasy politics of terror.

The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference

The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference PDF Author: Christine Battersby
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134753799
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Christine Battersby is a leading thinker in the field of philosophy, gender studies and visual and literary aesthetics. In this important new work, she undertakes an exploration of the nature of the sublime, one of the most important topics in contemporary debates about modernity, politics and art. Through a compelling examination of terror, transcendence and the ‘other’ in key European philosophers and writers, Battersby articulates a radical ‘female sublime’. A central feature of The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is its engagement with recent debates around ‘9/11’, race and Islam. Battersby shows how, since the eighteenth century, the pleasures of the sublime have been described in terms of the transcendence of terror. Linked to the ‘feminine’, the sublime was closed off to flesh-and-blood women, to ‘Orientals’ and to other supposedly ‘inferior’ human types. Engaging with Kant, Burke, the German Romantics, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray and Arendt, as well as with women writers and artists, Battersby traces the history of these exclusions, while finding resources within the history of western culture for thinking human differences afresh The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is essential reading for students of continental philosophy, gender studies, aesthetics, literary theory, visual culture, and race and social theory.

Terror and the Postcolonial

Terror and the Postcolonial PDF Author: Elleke Boehmer
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119056195
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Terror and the Postcolonial is a major comparative study of terrorism and its representations in postcolonial theory, literature, and culture. A ground-breaking study addressing and theorizing the relationship between postcolonial studies, colonial history, and terrorism through a series of contemporary and historical case studies from various postcolonial contexts Critically analyzes the figuration of terrorism in a variety of postcolonial literary texts from South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East Raises the subject of terror as both an expression of globalization and a postcolonial product Features key essays by well-known theorists, such as Robert J. C. Young, Derek Gregory, and Achille Mbembe, and Vron Ware

The challenge of the sublime

The challenge of the sublime PDF Author: Hélène Ibata
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526117428
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
This book examines the links between the unprecedented visual inventiveness of the Romantic period in Britain and eighteenth-century theories of the sublime. Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), in particular, is shown to have directly or indirectly challenged visual artists to explore not just new themes, but also new compositional strategies and visual media such as panoramas and book illustrations, by arguing that the sublime was beyond the reach of painting. More significantly, it began to call into question mimetic representational models, causing artists to reflect about the presentation of the unpresentable and drawing attention to the process of artistic production itself, rather than the finished artwork.

The Terror of Possibility

The Terror of Possibility PDF Author: Kurt Fawver
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Therefore, as a new theory of the sublime aesthetic, this dissertation is, at very least, a novel formulation of an ancient and undervalued concept in art and critical theory and, at best, a work that unearths the deepest, heretofore unrecognized, layers of an aesthetic experience central to human perception.

The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies

The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies PDF Author: Peter Hayes
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019165079X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 791

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Book Description
Few scholarly fields have developed in recent decades as rapidly and vigorously as Holocaust Studies. At the start of the twenty-first century, the persecution and murder perpetrated by the Nazi regime have become the subjects of an enormous literature in multiple academic disciplines and a touchstone of public and intellectual discourse in such diverse fields as politics, ethics and religion. Forward-looking and multi-disciplinary, this handbook draws on the work of an international team of forty-seven outstanding scholars. The handbook is thematically divided into five broad sections. Part One, Enablers, concentrates on the broad and necessary contextual conditions for the Holocaust. Part Two, Protagonists, concentrates on the principal persons and groups involved in the Holocaust and attempts to disaggregate the conventional interpretive categories of perpetrator, victim, and bystander. It examines the agency of the Nazi leaders and killers and of those involved in resisting and surviving the assault. Part Three, Settings, concentrates on the particular places, sites, and physical circumstances where the actions of the Holocaust's protagonists and the forms of persecution were literally grounded. Part Four, Representations, engages complex questions about how the Holocaust can and should be grasped and what meaning or lack of meaning might be attributed to events through historical analysis, interpretation of texts, artistic creation and criticism, and philosophical and religious reflection. Part Five, Aftereffects, explores the Holocaust's impact on politics and ethics, education and religion, national identities and international relations, the prospects for genocide prevention, and the defense of human rights.