Days of Reading

Days of Reading PDF Author: Marcel Proust
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141963395
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
In these inspiring essays about why we read, Proust explores all the pleasures and trials that we take from books, as well as explaining the beauty of Ruskin and his work, and the joys of losing yourself in literature as a child. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves – and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives – and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

John Ruskin

John Ruskin PDF Author: James S. Dearden
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9781841270463
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Despite professing a dislike of having his portrait taken, John Ruskin's footsteps were dogged by portrait painters, sculptors, caricaturists and photographers from the cradle to the grave and beyond. A thoroughly accessible book it lists and describes some 331likenesses made between 1822 and 1998. The three introductory chapters to this book survey Ruskin portraiture and the portraits, his general physical appearance througout his life, his hands, his mouth, his various illnesses and their effect on his appearance, his clothes, style of dress, size, tailors, their bills, etc. These opening chapters include many descriptions and reminiscences by Ruskin's friends and acquaintances, and those who portrayed him. The principal part of the book deals with the individual portraits, their history, where and why they were made, what Ruskin was doing at that time of his life and what his connection was with the artists in question. He was portrayed so regularly that this section is also effectively a potted Ruskin biography, based on the portraits. A 'catalogue raisonne' of the Ruskin portraits follows where the physical details of the works are listed, together with details of reproductions, exhibitions and provenance.

The Sympathy of Things

The Sympathy of Things PDF Author: Lars Spuybroek
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474243886
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Book Description
'If there is one thing we can learn from John Ruskin, it is that each age must find its own way to beauty' writes Lars Spuybroek in The Sympathy of Things, his ground-breaking work which proposes a radical new aesthetics for the digital era. Spuybroek argues that we must 'undo' the twentieth century and learn to understand the aesthetic insights of the nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin, from which he distils pointers for the contemporary age. Linking philosophy, design, and the digital, with art history, architecture, and craft, Spuybroek explores the romantic notion of 'sympathy', a core concept in Ruskin's aesthetics, re-evaluating it as the driving force of the twenty-first century aesthetic experience. For Ruskin, beauty always comprises variation, imperfection and fragility, three concepts that wholly disappeared from our mindsets during the twentieth century, but which Spuybroek argues to be central to contemporary aesthetics and design. Revised throughout, and a new foreword by philosopher Brian Massumi, this is a new edition of a seminal work which has drawn praise from fields as diverse as digital architecture and speculative realism, and will continue to be influential as it wrests Ruskin's ideas out of the Victorian era and reconstructs them for the modern age.

John Ruskin

John Ruskin PDF Author: John Ruskin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description


On Art and Life

On Art and Life PDF Author: John Ruskin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101651148
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 74

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Book Description
Includes two of John Ruskin's famous essays: "The Nature of the Gothic" and "The Work of Iron" from his book The Stones of Venice. Ruskin's insights into the need for individual artistic freedom, and his disdain for the mass-production art of the Victorian era, radically altered society's perception of creative design and remain powerfully relevant to our ideas of beauty today.

John Ruskin

John Ruskin PDF Author: Christopher Newall
Publisher: Paul Holberton Publishing
ISBN: 9781907372575
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Known as a writer on art, architecture, nature, landscape, economics and history, John Ruskin (1819-1900) also produced extraordinary drawings and watercolours that offer insight into the workings of his mind and are testimony to the scrupulous attention he gave to everything that interested him. In his drawings, Ruskin revealed a range of emotional responses, from euphoric delight in pattern, colour and texture to utter despondency at what he came to perceive as the ultimate corruption of all things. Accompanying a landmark exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, in 2014, this book explores a private but hugely revealing aspect of Ruskin's creative life. -- from back cover.

Ruskin and Modernism

Ruskin and Modernism PDF Author: Giovanni Cianci
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403913609
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
The extent of John Ruskin's influence has long been acknowledged, though his impact on the development of Anglo-American modernism has received little systematic attention. In this volume, published to mark the centenary of Ruskin's death, a group of international scholars consider what is often an awkward and conflicted relation. Ruskin's voluminous writings are seen to shelter an incipient modernism whose antipathy to a degraded modernity, powerfully predicts a major current within the work of the new century.

John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption

John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption PDF Author: David Melville Craig
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813925585
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
The first book on the Victorian critic and public intellectual John Ruskin by a scholar of religion and ethics, this work recovers both Ruskin's engaged critique of economic life and his public practice of moral imagination. With its reading of Ruskin as an innovative contributor to a tradition of ethics concerned with character, culture, and community, this book recasts established interpretations of Ruskin's place in nineteenth-century literature and aesthetics, challenges nostalgic diagnoses of the supposed historical loss of virtue ethics, and demonstrates the limitations of any politics that eschews common purpose as vital to individual agency and social welfare. Although Ruskin's moralistic efforts did not always allow for democratic individuality, equality, and contestation, his eclecticism, Craig argues, helps to correct these problems. Further, Ruskin's interdisciplinary explorations of beauty, work, nature, religion, politics, and economic value reveal the ways in which his insights into the practical connections between aesthetics and ethics, and culture and character, might be applied to today's debates about liberal modernity today. With the triumph of global capitalism, and the near-silence of any opposing voice, Ruskin's model of an engaged reading of culture and his public practice of moral imagination deserve renewed attention. This book provides students in religion, politics, and social theory with a timely reintroduction to this timeless figure.

Human-Built World

Human-Built World PDF Author: Thomas P. Hughes
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022612066X
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
To most people, technology has been reduced to computers, consumer goods, and military weapons; we speak of "technological progress" in terms of RAM and CD-ROMs and the flatness of our television screens. In Human-Built World, thankfully, Thomas Hughes restores to technology the conceptual richness and depth it deserves by chronicling the ideas about technology expressed by influential Western thinkers who not only understood its multifaceted character but who also explored its creative potential. Hughes draws on an enormous range of literature, art, and architecture to explore what technology has brought to society and culture, and to explain how we might begin to develop an "ecotechnology" that works with, not against, ecological systems. From the "Creator" model of development of the sixteenth century to the "big science" of the 1940s and 1950s to the architecture of Frank Gehry, Hughes nimbly charts the myriad ways that technology has been woven into the social and cultural fabric of different eras and the promises and problems it has offered. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, optimistically hoped that technology could be combined with nature to create an Edenic environment; Lewis Mumford, two centuries later, warned of the increasing mechanization of American life. Such divergent views, Hughes shows, have existed side by side, demonstrating the fundamental idea that "in its variety, technology is full of contradictions, laden with human folly, saved by occasional benign deeds, and rich with unintended consequences." In Human-Built World, he offers the highly engaging history of these contradictions, follies, and consequences, a history that resurrects technology, rightfully, as more than gadgetry; it is in fact no less than an embodiment of human values.

To See Clearly

To See Clearly PDF Author: Suzanne Fagence Cooper
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1787476995
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
'To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, religion, all in one' John Ruskin - born 200 years ago, in February 1819 - was the greatest critic of his age: a critic not only of art and architecture but of society and life. But his writings - on beauty and truth, on work and leisure, on commerce and capitalism, on life and how to live it - can teach us more than ever about how to see the world around us clearly and how to live it. Dr Suzanne Fagence Cooper delves into Ruskin's writings and uncovers the dizzying beauty and clarity of his vision. Whether he was examining the exquisite carvings of a medieval cathedral or the mass-produced wares of Victorian industry, chronicling the beauties of Venice and Florence or his own descent into old age and infirmity, Ruskin saw vividly the glories and the contradictions of life, and taught us how to see them as well.