Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment, Thierry de Duve argues in the first volume of Aesthetics at Large, is as relevant to the appreciation of art today as it was to the enjoyment of beautiful nature in 1790.
The Invisible Dragon made a lot of noise for a little book When it was originally published in 1993 it was championed by artists for its forceful call for a reconsideration of beauty-and savaged by more theoretically oriented critics who dismissed the very concept of beauty as naive, igniting a debate that has shown no sign of flagging.
Even though it's frequently asserted that we are living in a golden age of scripted television, television as a medium is still not taken seriously as an artistic art form, nor has the stigma of television as "e;chewing gum for the mind"e; really disappeared.
An Unnatural Attitude traces a style of musical thought that coalesced in the intellectual milieu of the Weimar Republic-a phenomenological style that sought to renew contact with music as a worldly circumstance.
Informed by a provocative exhibition at the Louvre curated by the author, The Severed Head unpacks artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present.
For the Enlightenment mind, from Moses Mendelssohn's focus on the moment of surprise at the heart of the work of art to Herder's imagining of the seismic moment at which language was discovered, it is the flash of recognition that nails the essence of the work, the blink of an eye in which one's world changes.
Leo Bersani's career spans more than fifty years and extends across a wide spectrum of fields-including French studies, modernism, realist fiction, psychoanalytic criticism, film studies, and queer theory.
Ranging from Homer to Picasso, and from the Iranian Revolution to The Wizard of Oz, this spirited and radiant book awakens us anew to the role of color in our livesOur lives are saturated by color.
A groundbreaking study of the development of form in eighteenth-century aesthetics In this original work, Abigail Zitin proposes a new history of the development of form as a concept in and for aesthetics.
A passionate and moving tribute to the captivating power of dance, not just as an art form but as a language that transcends barriers "e;[A] smart, bracing book of reflection, analysis, memoir and history.
An invigorating exploration of the pleasures and social importance of conversationTalking Cure is a timely and enticing excursion into the art of good conversation.
Beyond Reasonrelates Wagner's works to the philosophical and cultural ideas of his time, centering on the four music dramas he created in the second half of his career:Der Ring des Nibelungen,Tristan und Isolde,Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, andParsifal.
Interpreting Music is a comprehensive essay on understanding musical meaning and performing music meaningfully-"e;interpreting music"e; in both senses of the term.
This book explores relationships between intermedial theater, consciousness, memory, objects, subjectivity, and affect through productive engagement with the performance aesthetics, socio-cognitive theory, and critical methodology of transversal poetics alongside other leading philosophical approaches to performance.
Paul de Man - literary critic, literary philosopher, "e;American deconstructionist"e; - changed the landscape of criticism through his rigorous theories and writings.
In Thinking of Others, Ted Cohen argues that the ability to imagine oneself as another person is an indispensable human capacity--as essential to moral awareness as it is to literary appreciation--and that this talent for identification is the same as the talent for metaphor.
A seminal figure in the philosophy of history, culture, and language, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) also produced some of the most important and original works in the history of aesthetic theory.
What are the archives of gay and lesbian leather histories, and how have contemporary artists mined these archives to create a queer politics of the present?
The writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari offer the most enduring and controversial contributions to the theory and practice of art in post-war Continental thought.
We are used to seeing the everyday as an ordinary aspect of life, something that we need to overcome; whereas it actually plays a crucial role in any event of our lives.
Artistic Research: Charting a Field in Expansion provides a multidisciplinary overview of different discourses and practices, exploring cutting-edge questions from the burgeoning field of artistic research.
No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s.