American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions

American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions PDF Author: Cindy Weinstein
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231156170
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
These diverse essays recast the place of aesthetics in production & consumption of American literature. Contributors showcase the interpretive possibilities available to those who bring politics, culture, ideology, & conceptions of identity into their critiques, combining close readings of individual works & authors with theoretical discussions.

American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions

American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions PDF Author: Cindy Weinstein
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231156170
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 442

Get Book Here

Book Description
These diverse essays recast the place of aesthetics in production & consumption of American literature. Contributors showcase the interpretive possibilities available to those who bring politics, culture, ideology, & conceptions of identity into their critiques, combining close readings of individual works & authors with theoretical discussions.

Dimensions of Aesthetic Encounters

Dimensions of Aesthetic Encounters PDF Author: Robert E. Innis
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438488262
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
We encounter in our lives things and situations that elicit from us special forms of attention. They affect and inform us in various ways, drawing us in and holding us in their grasp or turning us away. Works of art of all sorts, and nature in its myriad manifestations, exemplify these luring and repelling qualities and potencies. Dimensions of Aesthetic Encounters explores central perceptual, interpretative, and semiotic dimensions of these encounters, combining a wide range of examples and intellectual resources from pragmatist, hermeneutical, and semiotic frameworks. Practicing a kind of "method of rotation" Robert E. Innis breaks down barriers in aesthetic theory and shows their complementary powers. Recurring themes link each chapter, throwing a powerful light on aesthetic encounters by foregrounding such pivotal notions as play, fundedness and the role of memory, the defining quality of an artwork, energies of objects, potencies, rhythm, form, presentational abstraction, medium, symbolization, intuition, role of the body, and the non-argumentative nature of art.

The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature

The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature PDF Author: Mary Esteve
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139436201
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Mary Esteve provides a study of crowd representations in American literature from the antebellum era to the early twentieth century. As a central icon of political and cultural democracy, the crowd occupies a prominent place in the American literary and cultural landscape. Esteve examines a range of writing by Poe, Hawthorne, Lydia Maria Child, Du Bois, James, and Stephen Crane among others. These writers, she argues, distinguish between the aesthetics of immersion in a crowd and the mode of collectivity demanded of political-liberal subjects. In their representations of everyday crowds, ranging from streams of urban pedestrians to swarms of train travellers, from upper-class parties to lower-class revivalist meetings, such authors seize on the political problems facing a mass liberal democracy - problems such as the stipulations of citizenship, nation formation, mass immigration and the emergence of mass media. Esteve examines both the aesthetic and political meanings of such urban crowd scenes.

The Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature

The Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature PDF Author: Bryce Traister
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108889387
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
This Companion covers American literary history from European colonization to the early republic. It provides a succinct introduction to the major themes and concepts in the field of early American literature, including new world migration, indigenous encounters, religious and secular histories, and the emergence of American literary genres. This book guides readers through important conceptual and theoretical issues, while also grounding these issues in close readings of key literary texts from early America.

The Aesthetic Dimension of Visual Culture

The Aesthetic Dimension of Visual Culture PDF Author: Jakub Stejskal
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443824321
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
How can aesthetic enquiry contribute to the study of visual culture? There seems to be little doubt that aesthetic theory ought to be of interest to the study of visual culture. For one thing, aesthetic vocabulary has far from vanished from contemporary debates on the nature of our visual experiences and its various shapes, a fact especially pertinent where dissatisfaction with vulgar value relativism prevails. Besides, the very question—ubiquitous in the debates on visual culture—of what is natural and what is acquired in our visual experiences has been a topic in aesthetics at least since the Enlightenment. And last but not least, despite attempts to study visual culture without employing the concept of art, there is no prospect of this central subject of aesthetic theory ebbing away from visual studies. The essays compiled in this volume show a variety of points of intersection and involvement between aesthetics and visual studies; some consider the future of visual art, some the conditions and characteristics of contemporary visual aesthetic experience, while others take on the difficult question of the relation between visual representation and reality. What unites them is their authors’ willingness to think about contemporary visual culture in the conceptual frame of aesthetics. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophical aesthetics, art history, and cultural studies.

The Aesthetic Dimension

The Aesthetic Dimension PDF Author: Herbert Marcuse
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807024007
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description
Developing a concept briefly introduced in Counterrevolution and Revolt, Marcuse here addresses the shortcomings of Marxist aesthetic theory and explores a dialectical aesthetic in which art functions as the conscience of society. Marcuse argues that art is the only form or expression that can take up where religion and philosophy fail and contends that aesthetics offers the last refuge for two-dimensional criticism in a one-dimensional society.

Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature

Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature PDF Author: Silvia Schultermandl
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000390985
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature discusses the extent to which transnational concepts of identity and community are cast within nationalist frameworks. It analyzes how the different narrative perspectives in texts by Olaudah Equiano, Catharina Maria Sedgwick, Henry James, Jamaica Kincaid, and Mohsin Hamid shape protagonists’ complex transnational subjectivities, which exist between or outside national frameworks but are nevertheless interpellated through the nation-state and through particular myths about liberal, sentimental, or cosmopolitan subjects. The notion of ambivalent transnational belonging yields insights into the affective appeal of the transnational as a category of analysis, as an aesthetic experience, and as an idea of belonging. This means bringing the transnational into conversation with the aesthetic and the affective so we may fully address the new conceptual challenges faced by literary studies due to the transnational turn in American studies.

Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature

Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature PDF Author: David Greven
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317130111
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Expanding our understanding of the possibilities and challenges inherent in the expression of same-sex desire before the Civil War, David Greven identifies a pattern of what he calls ’gender protest’ and sexual possibility recurring in antebellum works. He suggests that major authors such as Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne consciously sought to represent same-sex desire in their writings. Focusing especially on conceptions of the melancholia of gender identification and shame, Greven argues that same-sex desire was inextricably enmeshed in scenes of gender-role strain, as exemplified in the extent to which The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym depicts masculine identity adrift and in disarray. Greven finds similarly compelling representations of gender protest in Fuller’s exploration of the crisis of gendered identity in Summer on the Lakes, in Melville’s representation of Redburn’s experience of gender nonconformity, and in Hawthorne’s complicated delineation of desire in The Scarlet Letter. As Greven shows, antebellum authors not only took up the taboo subjects of same-sex desire and female sexuality, but were adept in their use of a variety of rhetorical means for expressing the inexpressible.

Criminal Genius in African American and US Literature, 1793–1845

Criminal Genius in African American and US Literature, 1793–1845 PDF Author: Erin Forbes
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421443759
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
"An investigation on how the development of conceptions of genius relate to struggles over enslavement and carceral practices"--

REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, Volume 38

REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, Volume 38 PDF Author: Laura Bieger
Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
ISBN: 3381108727
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description
Celebrating the 80th birthday of Winfried Fluck, this volume of REAL gathers leading US-American and European literary scholars from English and American Studies to engage some of his classic essays, covering topics that range from the aesthetics of early American literature to the history of our digital present and from the Americanization of literary studies to the search for American democratic culture. Each of the volume's twelve dialogues consists of a republished essay by Fluck and a response by one his interlocutors, written specifically for this occasion. Contributors include field-defining scholars, long-time companions, and colleagues whose intellectual trajectory has been impacted by Fluck's incisive metacriticism and his reception-oriented approach to literary and cultural history. The twelve dialogues reassess debates that have shaped literary studies in the late twentieth century and they inquire into the paradigmatic shifts that are currently reorganizing the field.