Aesthetic Subjects

Aesthetic Subjects PDF Author: Pamela R. Matthews
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816639939
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 534

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Book Description
Recent calls for a return to aesthetics occur precisely at a moment when it is increasingly evident that nothing concerning aesthetics is self-evident anymore. Determined to recover the value of aesthetic experience for artistic, cultural, and social analysis, the contributors to this volume--prominent scholars in literature, philosophy, art history, architecture, history, and anthropology--begin from a shared recognition that ideological readings of the aesthetic have provided invaluable insights, in particular, that analyses of aesthetics within historical and social contexts tell us a great deal about the experience of aesthetic encounters. From multiple and complementary perspectives, the contributors address topics as varied as Nabokov and Dickens, Caravaggio and Shelley Winters, gender and sexuality, advertising and AIDS. Taken together, their essays constitute a sustained and multifarious effort to resituate aesthetic pleasure in the mixed, impure conditions characteristic of every social practice and experience, however privileged or marginalized, and to ask what happens to the aesthetic if we consider it apart from--or at least in tension with--its historically dominant discursive formulations. As such, this volume establishes a renewed sense of aesthetic discourse and its usefulness as a tool for understanding culture.

Aesthetic Subjects

Aesthetic Subjects PDF Author: Pamela R. Matthews
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816639939
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 534

Get Book

Book Description
Recent calls for a return to aesthetics occur precisely at a moment when it is increasingly evident that nothing concerning aesthetics is self-evident anymore. Determined to recover the value of aesthetic experience for artistic, cultural, and social analysis, the contributors to this volume--prominent scholars in literature, philosophy, art history, architecture, history, and anthropology--begin from a shared recognition that ideological readings of the aesthetic have provided invaluable insights, in particular, that analyses of aesthetics within historical and social contexts tell us a great deal about the experience of aesthetic encounters. From multiple and complementary perspectives, the contributors address topics as varied as Nabokov and Dickens, Caravaggio and Shelley Winters, gender and sexuality, advertising and AIDS. Taken together, their essays constitute a sustained and multifarious effort to resituate aesthetic pleasure in the mixed, impure conditions characteristic of every social practice and experience, however privileged or marginalized, and to ask what happens to the aesthetic if we consider it apart from--or at least in tension with--its historically dominant discursive formulations. As such, this volume establishes a renewed sense of aesthetic discourse and its usefulness as a tool for understanding culture.

Sublime Subjects

Sublime Subjects PDF Author: Giuseppe Civitarese
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351379593
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Sublime Subjects explores two fundamental questions: what is the start of humanity? When and how does a newborn child become a subject? These are relevant to psychoanalysis not only theoretically, but also in clinical practice, where the issue at stake is how to help the analysand’s mind to grow or, better, to increase the ability to give a meaning to experience. Giuseppe Civitarese here argues that the psychoanalytic theory of sublimation and the aesthetic theory of the sublime are theories of subjectivation that can illuminate each other and give us a better understanding of the birth of the psyche. The aesthetic experience in art and in psychoanalytic practice are concerned with the social constitution of the individual, understood at its pre-reflective, non-verbal or inter-corporeal level. It is at this level that, thanks to the encounter with a receptive other, the turbulences of sensations and proto-emotions become soothing rhythms, proto-ideas or sensible ideas at first and, once words are added, concepts. In Bionian terms, the at-one-ment between mother and baby is a form of primordial abstraction and occurs first in the dimension of the purely sensory and indistinct, and then in the affective space, which nonetheless is always a symbolic space if we take account that sociality is provided for the couple-system by the mother. It is exactly the intersubjective process of elevating toward conceptual thinking, but without ever detaching oneself from the thinking deposited in the body as procedural knowledge, that justifies the definition adopted here of human beings as Sublime Subjects. This book explores these topics not only through the lens of the concept of sublimation or the theory of the sublime, but also through those of masochism, hypochondria, truth and two readings of classical Freudian papers such as the clinical case of Dora and ‘Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning’. Sublime Subjects will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as literature and philosophy scholars.

Everyday Aesthetics

Everyday Aesthetics PDF Author: Katya Mandoki
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131713849X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Katya Mandoki advances in this book the thesis that it is not only possible but crucial to open up the field of aesthetics (traditionally confined to the study of art and beauty) toward the richness and complexity of everyday life. She argues that in every process of communication, whether face to face or through the media, fashion, and political propaganda, there is always an excess beyond the informative and functional value of a message. This excess is the aesthetic. Following Huizinga's view of play as an ingredient of any social environment, Mandoki explores how various cultural practices are in fact forms of playing since, for the author, aesthetics and play are Siamese twins. One of the unique contributions of this book is the elaboration and application of a semiotic model for the simultaneous analysis of social interactions in the four registers, namely visual, auditory, verbal and body language, to detect the aesthetic strategies deployed in specific situations. She argues that since the presentation of the self is targeted towards participants' sensibilities, aesthetics plays a key role in these modes of exchange. Consequently, the author updates important debates in this field to clear the way for a socio-aesthetic inquiry through contexts such as the family, school, medical, artistic or religious traditions from which social identities emerge.

Children and Violence

Children and Violence PDF Author: Bina D'Costa
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316673995
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Children's diverse experiences during periods of conflict, post-conflict and peacetime reveal that their roles in society and political communities are complex. Based on this premise, this book suggests that understanding children's roles involves a critical analysis of where the child is situated within her/his family, within socio-political networks and within the state. Through examining various case studies in South Asia, a region that is marked as much by its homogeneity as by its immense diversity, the book observes that significant tensions exist between universal and local approaches to childhood. It reflects how the development of international and national discourses on children's rights and protection is relevant to children's everyday lives in situations of conflict.

Nordic Dialogues on Children and Families

Nordic Dialogues on Children and Families PDF Author: Susanne Garvis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317202988
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
This book brings together key authors from the Nordic countries (Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland) to discuss theoretical and empirical research on families and children. Sharing the Nordic perspective from each of the five countries, the book highlights key ideas within and across the countries. The chapters provide an understanding of the history of the Nordic perspectives of family and children, present current innovative research on solutions to complex issues, and explore contemporary issues. Nordic countries continually attain high scores in lifestyle measures, quality of life and children’s outcomes. Much of this has to do with the specific culture and policy of the Nordic countries. Written by academics within the region who are well regarded for contributing to academic and public debate, this book will appeal to an international audience interested in the Nordic perspective and social policy around family and children.

Cultural Politics of Targeted Killing

Cultural Politics of Targeted Killing PDF Author: Kyle Grayson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317238974
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
The deployment of remotely piloted air platforms (RPAs) - or drones - has become a defining feature of contemporary counter-insurgency operations. Scholarly analysis and public debate has primarily focused on two issues: the legality of targeted killing and whether the practice is effective at disrupting insurgency networks, and the intensive media and activist scrutiny of the policy processes through which targeted killing decisions have been made. While contributing to these ongoing discussions, this book aims to determine how targeted killing has become possible in contemporary counter-insurgency operations undertaken by liberal regimes. Each chapter is oriented around a problematisation that has shaped the cultural politics of the targeted killing assemblage. Grayson argues that in order to understand how specific forms of violence become prevalent, it is important to determine how problematisations that enable them are shaped by a politico-cultural system in which culture operates in conjunction with technological, economic, governmental, and geostrategic elements. The book also demonstrates that the actors involved - what they may be attempting to achieve through the deployment of this form of violence, how they attempt to achieve it, and where they attempt to achieve it - are also shaped by culture. The book demonstrates how the current social relations prevalent in liberal societies contain the potential for targeted killing as a normal rather than extraordinary practice. It will be of great use for academic specialists and graduate students in international studies, geography, sociology, cultural studies and legal studies.

The Subject and Other Subjects

The Subject and Other Subjects PDF Author: Tobin Siebers
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472096737
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
DIVAdvances a new theory on the nature of subjectivity and notions of identity /div

Teaching through Stories

Teaching through Stories PDF Author: Margareta Häggström
Publisher: Waxmann Verlag
ISBN: 3830989865
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
This book aims to meet the demands on teaching and learning in the twenty-first century, and in specific, how teacher education may transform pedagogical approaches and didactic methods to support future teachers in enhancing needful skills. In particular, it focuses on the pedagogical approach of Storyline, and how a Storyline can be applied in teacher education. It argues that teacher education benefits from the potency of various disciplines while applying an interdisciplinary methodology. Storyline is a problem-based, cross-curricular approach, based on learning through an evolving narrative, created in collaboration between teacher and students. It includes a variety of didactic tools, and inclusiveness towards different learners. Using Storyline in teacher education arranges for teacher educators to integrate alternative structures, that enable interdisciplinary cooperation and topic-based teaching. The authors have incorporated Storyline in many different ways, which contextualizes throughout the book. The book provides an overview of Storyline and introduces improved and new theoretical perspectives on this approach, including many practical examples.

Senses in Cities

Senses in Cities PDF Author: Kelvin E.Y. Low
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315527359
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Urban landscapes are usually thought of first and foremost as engineered formations designed for functionality. It is quite clear, however, that cities and towns are sites of social structure, scenes of diversity, and hotbeds of transgressions. They are also sources of satisfying social relationships, settings for actions negotiated on an everyday basis, and opportunities for kinesthetic and aesthetic experiences. Within these processes, the senses mediate engagement with the optimism of urban growth, the comfort of urban traditions, and a consciousness of the diverse relationships that embellish urban living, but also with the repellent sights and sounds that invade zones of comfort. This book examines how qualities of place and their sensuous reorganisation elucidate particular sociocultural expressions and practices in urban life. The collection illuminates how urban environments are distinguished, valued, or reconfigured with the senses as media for evaluating authentic spaces and places that endure and change over time.

Aesthetics of Religion

Aesthetics of Religion PDF Author: Alexandra K. Grieser
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110461013
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description
This volume is the first English language presentation of the innovative approaches developed in the aesthetics of religion. The chapters present diverse material and detailed analysis on descriptive, methodological and theoretical concepts that together explore the potential of an aesthetic approach for investigating religion as a sensory and mediated practice. In dialogue with, yet different from, other major movements in the field (material culture, anthropology of the senses, for instance), it is the specific intent of this approach to create a framework for understanding the interplay between sensory, cognitive and socio-cultural aspects of world-construction. The volume demonstrates that aesthetics, as a theory of sensory knowledge, offers an elaborate repertoire of concepts that can help to understand religious traditions. These approaches take into account contemporary developments in scientific theories of perception, neuro-aesthetics and cultural studies, highlighting the socio-cultural and political context informing how humans perceive themselves and the world around them. Developing since the 1990s, the aesthetic approach has responded to debates in the study of religion, in particular striving to overcome biased categories that confined religion either to texts and abstract beliefs, or to an indisputable sui generis mode of experience. This volume documents what has been achieved to date, its significance for the study of religion and for interdisciplinary scholarship.