Sex, Violence, and the Avant-Garde

Sex, Violence, and the Avant-Garde PDF Author: Richard D. Sonn
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271036648
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
"A study of anarchism in twentieth-century France during the interwar years. Focuses on anarchist demands for personal autonomy and sexual liberation. Argues that these ideals, as well as anarchist hatred of the government, found favor with members of the artistic avant-garde, especially the surrealists"--Provided by publisher.

Sex, Violence, and the Avant-Garde

Sex, Violence, and the Avant-Garde PDF Author: Richard D. Sonn
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271036648
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
"A study of anarchism in twentieth-century France during the interwar years. Focuses on anarchist demands for personal autonomy and sexual liberation. Argues that these ideals, as well as anarchist hatred of the government, found favor with members of the artistic avant-garde, especially the surrealists"--Provided by publisher.

Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-garde

Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-garde PDF Author: Christine Froula
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231508786
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde traces the dynamic emergence of Woolf's art and thought against Bloomsbury's public thinking about Europe's future in a period marked by two world wars and rising threats of totalitarianism. Educated informally in her father's library and in Bloomsbury's London extension of Cambridge, Virginia Woolf came of age in the prewar decades, when progressive political and social movements gave hope that Europe "might really be on the brink of becoming civilized," as Leonard Woolf put it. For pacifist Bloomsbury, heir to Europe's unfinished Enlightenment project of human rights, democratic self-governance, and world peace—and, in E. M. Forster's words, "the only genuine movement in English civilization"— the 1914 "civil war" exposed barbarities within Europe: belligerent nationalisms, rapacious racialized economic imperialism, oppressive class and sex/gender systems, a tragic and unnecessary war that mobilized sixty-five million and left thirty-seven million casualties. An avant-garde in the twentieth-century struggle against the violence within European civilization, Bloomsbury and Woolf contributed richly to interwar debates on Europe's future at a moment when democracy's triumph over fascism and communism was by no means assured. Woolf honed her public voice in dialogue with contemporaries in and beyond Bloomsbury— John Maynard Keynes and Roger Fry to Sigmund Freud (published by the Woolfs'Hogarth Press), Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and many others—and her works embody and illuminate the convergence of aesthetics and politics in post-Enlightenment thought. An ambitious history of her writings in relation to important currents in British intellectual life in the first half of the twentieth century, this book explores Virginia Woolf's narrative journey from her first novel, The Voyage Out, through her last, Between the Acts.

The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde

The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde PDF Author: Alyce Mahon
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691141614
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
"This is the first book to examine the cultural history of Marquis de Sade's (1740-1814) philosophical ideas and their lasting influence on political and artistic debates. An icon of free expression, Sade lived through France's Reign of Terror, and his writings offer both a pitiless mirror on humanity and a series of subversive metaphors that allow for the exploration of political, sexual, and psychological terror. Generations of avant-garde writers and artists have responded to Sade's philosophy as a means of liberation and as a radical engagement with social politics and sexual desire, writing fiction modelled on Sade's novels, illustrating luxury editions of his works, and translating his ideas into film, photography, and painting. In The Sadean Imagination, Alyce Mahon examines how Sade used images and texts as forms that could explore and dramatize the concept of terror on political, physical, and psychic levels, and how avant-garde artists have continued to engage in a complex dialogue with his works. Studying Sade's influence on art from the French Revolution through the twentieth century, Mahon examines works ranging from Anne Desclos's The Story of O, to images, texts, and films by Man Ray, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean-Jacques Lebel, and Peter Brook. She also discusses writings and responses to Sade by feminist theorists including Angela Carter and Judith Butler. Throughout, she shows how Sade's work challenged traditional artistic expectations and pushed the boundaries of the body and the body politic, inspiring future artists, writers, and filmmakers to imagine and portray the unthinkable"--

The Art of Cruelty

The Art of Cruelty PDF Author: Maggie Nelson
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0393343146
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"This is criticism at its best." —Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times Writing in the tradition of Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry, Maggie Nelson has emerged as one of our foremost cultural critics with this landmark work about representations of cruelty and violence in art. From Sylvia Plath’s poetry to Francis Bacon’s paintings, from the Saw franchise to Yoko Ono’s performance art, Nelson’s nuanced exploration across the artistic landscape ultimately offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.

Lustmord

Lustmord PDF Author: Maria Tatar
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216215
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
In a book that confronts our society's obsession with sexual violence, Maria Tatar seeks the meaning behind one of the most disturbing images of twentieth-century Western culture: the violated female corpse. This image is so prevalent in painting, literature, film, and, most recently, in mass media, that we rarely question what is at stake in its representation. Tatar, however, challenges us to consider what is taking place--both artistically and socially--in the construction and circulation of scenes depicting sexual murder. In examining images of sexual murder (Lustmord), she produces a riveting study of how art and murder have intersected in the sexual politics of culture from Weimar Germany to the present. Tatar focuses attention on the politically turbulent Weimar Republic, often viewed as the birthplace of a transgressive avant-garde modernism, where representations of female sexual mutilation abound. Here a revealing episode in the gender politics of cultural production unfolds as male artists and writers, working in a society consumed by fear of outside threats, envision women as enemies that can be contained and mastered through transcendent artistic expression. Not only does Tatar show that male artists openly identified with real-life sexual murderers--George Grosz posed as Jack the Ripper in a photograph where his model and future wife was the target of his knife--but she also reveals the ways in which victims were disavowed and erased. Tatar first analyzes actual cases of sexual murder that aroused wide public interest in Weimar Germany. She then considers how the representation of murdered women in visual and literary works functions as a strategy for managing social and sexual anxieties, and shows how violence against women can be linked to the war trauma, to urban pathologies, and to the politics of cultural production and biological reproduction. In exploring the complex relationship between victim and agent in cases of sexual murder, Tatar explains how the roles came to be destabilized and reversed, turning the perpetrator of criminal deeds into a defenseless victim of seductive evil. Throughout the West today, the creation of similar ideological constructions still occurs in societies that have only recently begun to validate the voices of its victims. Maria Tatar's book opens up an important discussion for readers seeking to understand the forces behind sexual violence and its portrayal in the cultural media throughout this century.

Sacred Discontent

Sacred Discontent PDF Author: Herbert N. Schneidau
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520031654
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description


Modernism and the Aesthetics of Violence

Modernism and the Aesthetics of Violence PDF Author: Paul Sheehan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107036836
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
This book addresses the subject of violence as it features in celebrated modernist works from the early twentieth century. It traces the modernist fascination with violence back to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when certain writers in France and England sought to celebrate dissident sexualities and stylized criminality.

Flesh Cinema

Flesh Cinema PDF Author: Ara Osterweil
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719088612
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film explores the groundbreaking representation of the body in experimental films of the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on sexually explicit films by Andy Warhol, Barbara Rubin, Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono and Paul Sharits, this book demonstrates how experimental cinema not only transformed American visual culture, but also the lives of those who created it. By situating these films in relation to the civil rights and sexual liberation movements, Flesh Cinema investigates how social politics continue to inform their meaning. Drawing upon unpublished archival materials, this book provides a rich account of the intimate artistic collaborations that inspired these films. Merging close readings with historical and biographical analysis, Flesh Cinema argues that queer forms of friendship were essential to the innovative representations of bodies on-screen. In doing so, it provides a fresh take on avant-garde cinema for film and art scholars and students.

Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements

Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements PDF Author: Aleš Erjavec
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822375664
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This collection examines key aesthetic avant-garde art movements of the twentieth century and their relationships with revolutionary politics. The contributors distinguish aesthetic avant-gardes —whose artists aim to transform society and the ways of sensing the world through political means—from the artistic avant-gardes, which focus on transforming representation. Following the work of philosophers such as Friedrich Schiller and Jacques Rancière, the contributors argue that the aesthetic is inherently political and that aesthetic avant-garde art is essential for political revolution. In addition to analyzing Russian constructivsm, surrealism, and Situationist International, the contributors examine Italian futurism's model of integrating art with politics and life, the murals of revolutionary Mexico and Nicaragua, 1960s American art, and the Slovenian art collective NSK's construction of a fictional political state in the 1990s. Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements traces the common foundations and goals shared by these disparate arts communities and shows how their art worked towards effecting political and social change. Contributors. John E. Bowlt, Sascha Bru, David Craven, Aleš Erjavec, Tyrus Miller, Raymond Spiteri, Miško Šuvakovic

Anarchism and eugenics

Anarchism and eugenics PDF Author: Richard Cleminson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526124491
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
At the heart of this book is what would appear to be a striking and fundamental paradox: the espousal of a ‘scientific’ doctrine that sought to eliminate ‘dysgenics’ and champion the ‘fit’ as a means of ‘race’ survival by a political and social movement that ostensibly believed in the destruction of the state and the removal of all hierarchical relationships. What explains this reception of eugenics by anarchism? How was eugenics mobilised by anarchists as part of their struggle against capitalism and the state? What were the consequences of this overlap for both anarchism and eugenics as transnational movements?