The Conservative Aesthetic

The Conservative Aesthetic PDF Author: Stephen J. Mexal
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793632626
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
The Conservative Aesthetic: Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West offers an alternative origin story for American conservatism, tracing it to a circle of writers, artists, and thinkers in the late nineteenth century who yoked popular understandings of Darwin to western literary aesthetics. That circle included writer Owen Wister, artist Frederic Remington, entertainer William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, and a young Theodore Roosevelt. The book explores how their lives and their writing intertwined with their conservative sensibilities. For them, going west was akin to time travel, a retrogression into an earlier and hardier age. It was through those retrogressions into the American state of nature, they imagined, that society could discover its finest and fittest citizens. Such a society would be the modern realization of Thomas Jefferson’s century-old dream of a “natural aristocracy.” Theirs was a new conservatism, rooted not in a history of European monarchy but rather in stories about American individualism and the frontier west, updated for the age of Darwin.

The Conservative Aesthetic

The Conservative Aesthetic PDF Author: Stephen J. Mexal
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793632626
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 365

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Conservative Aesthetic: Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West offers an alternative origin story for American conservatism, tracing it to a circle of writers, artists, and thinkers in the late nineteenth century who yoked popular understandings of Darwin to western literary aesthetics. That circle included writer Owen Wister, artist Frederic Remington, entertainer William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, and a young Theodore Roosevelt. The book explores how their lives and their writing intertwined with their conservative sensibilities. For them, going west was akin to time travel, a retrogression into an earlier and hardier age. It was through those retrogressions into the American state of nature, they imagined, that society could discover its finest and fittest citizens. Such a society would be the modern realization of Thomas Jefferson’s century-old dream of a “natural aristocracy.” Theirs was a new conservatism, rooted not in a history of European monarchy but rather in stories about American individualism and the frontier west, updated for the age of Darwin.

Irony and Outrage

Irony and Outrage PDF Author: Dannagal Goldthwaite Young
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190913088
Category : Mass media
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This text explores the aesthetics, underlying logics, and histories of two seemingly distinct genres - liberal political satire and conservative opinion talk - making the case that they should be thought of as the logical extensions of the psychology of the left and right, respectively.

Building the Wall

Building the Wall PDF Author: Robert Schenkkan
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
ISBN: 0822237148
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 49

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Book Description
On January 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. Over the next sixteen months, events would unravel that test every American’s strength of character: executive actions, an immigration round-up of unprecedented scale, and a declaration of martial law. Rick finds himself caught up as the frontman of the new administration’s edicts and loses his humanity. In a play that recalls George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Nazi regime, BUILDING THE WALL is a terrifying and gripping exploration of what happens if we let fear win.

The Outrage Industry

The Outrage Industry PDF Author: Jeffrey M. Berry
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190498463
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
A stimulating expose on how the roots of today's partisan rage lie in the "outrage industry" - deregulated, commodified media markets that will do anything for money and attention.

Communities of Sense

Communities of Sense PDF Author: Beth Hinderliter
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822390973
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Communities of Sense argues for a new understanding of the relation between politics and aesthetics in today’s globalized and image-saturated world. Established and emerging scholars of art and culture draw on Jacques Rancière’s theorization of democratic politics to suggest that aesthetics, traditionally defined as the “science of the sensible,” is not a depoliticized discourse or theory of art, but instead part of a historically specific organization of social roles and communality. Rather than formulating aesthetics as the Other to politics, the contributors show that aesthetics and politics are mutually implicated in the construction of communities of visibility and sensation through which political orders emerge. The first of the collection’s three sections explicitly examines the links between aesthetics and social and political experience. Here a new essay by Rancière posits art as a key site where disagreement can be staged in order to produce new communities of sense. In the second section, contributors investigate how sense was constructed in the past by the European avant-garde and how it is mobilized in today’s global visual and political culture. Exploring the viability of various models of artistic and political critique in the context of globalization, the authors of the essays in the volume’s final section suggest a shift from identity politics and preconstituted collectivities toward processes of identification and disidentification. Topics discussed in the volume vary from digital architecture to a makeshift museum in a Paris suburb, and from romantic art theory in the wake of Hegel to the history of the group-subject in political art and performance since 1968. An interview with Étienne Balibar rounds out the collection. Contributors. Emily Apter, Étienne Balibar, Carlos Basualdo, T. J. Demos, Rachel Haidu, Beth Hinderliter, David Joselit, William Kaizen, Ranjanna Khanna, Reinaldo Laddaga, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, Reinhold Martin, Seth McCormick, Yates McKee, Alexander Potts, Jacques Rancière, Toni Ross

On Slowness

On Slowness PDF Author: Lutz Koepnick
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231538251
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Speed is an obvious facet of contemporary society, whereas slowness has often been dismissed as conservative and antimodern. Challenging a long tradition of thought, Lutz Koepnick instead proposes we understand slowness as a strategy of the contemporary—a decidedly modern practice that gazes firmly at and into the present's velocity. As he engages with late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century art, photography, video, film, and literature, Koepnick explores slowness as a critical medium to intensify our temporal and spatial experiences. Slowness helps us register the multiple layers of time, history, and motion that constitute our present. It offers a timely (and untimely) mode of aesthetic perception and representation that emphasizes the openness of the future and undermines any conception of the present as a mere replay of the past. Discussing the photography and art of Janet Cardiff, Olafur Eliasson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Michael Wesely; the films of Peter Weir and Tom Tykwer; the video installations of Douglas Gordon, Willie Doherty, and Bill Viola; and the fiction of Don DeLillo, Koepnick shows how slowness can carve out spaces within processes of acceleration that allow us to reflect on alternate temporalities and durations.

The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic

The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic PDF Author: Lauren M. E. Goodlad
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191044008
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
How did realist fiction alter in the effort to craft forms and genres receptive to the dynamism of an expanding empire and globalizing world? Do these nineteenth-century variations on the "geopolitical aesthetic" continue to resonate today? Crossing literary criticism, political theory, and longue durée history, The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic explores these questions from the standpoint of nineteenth-century novelists such as Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and Anthony Trollope, as well as successors including E. M. Forster and the creators of recent television serials. By looking at the category of "sovereignty" at multiple scales and in diverse contexts, Lauren M. E. Goodlad shows that the ideological crucible for "high" realism was not a hegemonic liberalism. It was, rather, a clash of modern liberal ideals struggling to distintricate themselves from a powerful conservative vision of empire while striving to negotiate the inequalities of power which a supposedly universalistic liberalism had helped to generate. The material occasion for the Victorian era's rich realist experiments was the long transition from an informal empire of trade that could be celebrated as liberal to a neo-feudal imperialism that only Tories could warmly embrace. The book places realism's geopolitical aesthetic at the heart of recurring modern experiences of breached sovereignty, forgotten history, and subjective exile. The Coda, titled "The Way We Historicize Now", concludes the study with connections to recent debates about "surface reading", "distant reading", and the hermeneutics of suspicion.

The Reactionary Mind

The Reactionary Mind PDF Author: Corey Robin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190692006
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Now updated to include Trump's election and the rise of global populism, Corey Robin's 'The Reactionary Mind' traces conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution.

The Difference Aesthetics Makes

The Difference Aesthetics Makes PDF Author: Kandice Chuh
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478002387
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
In The Difference Aesthetics Makes cultural critic Kandice Chuh asks what the humanities might be and do if organized around what she calls “illiberal humanism” instead of around the Western European tradition of liberal humanism that undergirds the humanities in their received form. Recognizing that the liberal humanities contribute to the reproduction of the subjugation that accompanies liberalism's definition of the human, Chuh argues that instead of defending the humanities, as has been widely called for in recent years, we should radically remake them. Chuh proposes that the work of artists and writers like Lan Samantha Chang, Carrie Mae Weems, Langston Hughes, Leslie Marmon Silko, Allan deSouza, Monique Truong, and others brings to bear ways of being and knowing that delegitimize liberal humanism in favor of more robust, capacious, and worldly senses of the human and the humanities. Chuh presents the aesthetics of illiberal humanism as vital to the creation of sensibilities and worlds capable of making life and lives flourish.

The Political Aesthetics of ISIS and Italian Futurism

The Political Aesthetics of ISIS and Italian Futurism PDF Author: Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498564372
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Through empirical analysis and theoretical reflection, this book shows that the aesthetics and politics of the Islamic State is “futurist.” ISIS overcomes postmodern pessimism and joins the modern, techno-oriented, and optimistic attitude propagated by Italian Futurism in the early twentieth century. The Islamic State does not only excel through the extensive use of high-tech weapons, social media, commercial bot, and automated text systems. By putting forward the presence of speeding cars and tanks, mobile phones, and computers, ISIS presents jihad life as connected to modern urban culture. Futurism praised violence as a means of leaving behind imitations of the past in order to project itself most efficiently into the future. A profound sense of crisis produces in both Futurism and jihadism a nihilistic attitude toward the present state of society that will be overcome through an exaltation of technology. Futurists were opposed to parliamentary democracy and sympathized with nationalism and colonialism. ISIS jihadism suggests a similarly curious combination of modernism and conservative values. The most obvious modern characteristic of this new image of fundamentalism is the highly aestheticized recruiting material.