Aesthetics category: 1179 books
Theory at Yale
The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America
Language: English
Release Date: November 2, 2015
This book examines the affinity between “theory” and “deconstruction” that developed in the American academy in the 1970s by way of the “Yale Critics”: Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, sometimes joined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
With...
On Slowness
Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary
Language: English
Release Date: October 7, 2014
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...
Kafka's The Trial
Philosophical Perspectives
Language: English
Release Date: March 23, 2018
Kafka's novel The Trial, written from 1914 to 1915 and published in 1925, is a multi-faceted, notoriously difficult manifestation of European literary modernism, and one of the most emblematic books of the 20th Century. It tells the story of Josef K., a man accused of a crime he has no recollection...
by Hermann Kappelhoff
Language: English
Release Date: August 11, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: August 11, 2015
Hermann Kappelhoff casts the evolution of cinema as an ongoing struggle to relate audiences to their historical moment. Appreciating cinema's unique ability to bind concrete living conditions to individual experience (which existing political institutions cannot), he reads films by Sergei Eisenstein...
by
Language: English
Release Date: January 12, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: January 12, 2016
A rallying call for all those who have been disquieted or disgusted by the excesses of artistic modernism. This is a collection of ten provocative essays on the arts, by writers of varied orientations who share a skepticism about the exaggerated role of modernism and the successive avant-gardes in...
The Art of Gerhard Richter
Hermeneutics, Images, Meaning
Language: English
Release Date: October 22, 2015
The Art of Gerhard Richter: Hermeneutics, Images, Meaning presents the first philosophical investigation of, arguably, one of the most popular and important painters working today, Gerhard Richter. From monochrome painting and photo realism to conceptual art and gesture-expressive painting, Richter...
by Denis Diderot
Language: English
Release Date: December 9, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: December 9, 2010
Chance ordained that Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was not only a philosopher, playwright and writer, but also a salonnier. In other words, an art critic. In 1759, his friend Grimm entrusted him with a project that forced him to acquire "thoughtful notions concerning painting and sculpture"...
Pretentiousness
Why It Matters: An Essay
Language: English
Release Date: March 14, 2016
“A nimble case for pretentiousness as a willingness to take risks.” —The New York Times Book Review
*Pretentiousness *is for anyone who has braved being different, whether that’s making a stand against artistic consensus or running the gauntlet of the last bus home dressed differently...
Death-Devoted Heart:Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde
Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde
Language: English
Release Date: November 20, 2003
A tale of forbidden love and inevitable death, the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde recounts the story of two lovers unknowingly drinking a magic potion and ultimately dying in one another's arms. While critics have lauded Wagner's Tristan and Isolde for the originality and subtlety of the music,...
Timeless Simplicity
Creative Living in a Consumer Society
Language: English
Release Date: January 1, 2000
This is a book about simplicity; not destitution, parsimoniousness, or self-denial, but the restoration of wealth in the midst of an affluence in which we are starving the spirit. It is about the advantages of living a less cluttered, less stressful life than that which has become the norm in the...
by Robert Grudin
Language: English
Release Date: April 20, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: April 20, 2010
“If good design tells the truth,” writes Robert Grudin in this path-breaking book on esthetics and authority, “poor design tells a lie, a lie usually related . . . to the getting or abusing of power.”From the ornate cathedrals of Renaissance Europe to the much-maligned Ford Edsel...
Unnatural Wonders
Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life
Language: English
Release Date: March 14, 2017
Arthur C. Danto's essays not only critique bodies of work but reflect upon art's conceptual evolution as well, drawing for the reader a kind of "philosophical map" indicating how art and the criteria for judging it has changed over the twentieth century. In Unnatural Wonders the renowned...
Aisthesis
Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art
Language: English
Release Date: June 4, 2013
Composed in a series of scenes, Aisthesis–Rancière’s definitive statement on the aesthetic–takes its reader from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarmé to the Folies-Bergère, attend a lecture...
Félix Ravaisson
Selected Essays
Language: English
Release Date: October 20, 2016
This reader makes the key essays of 19th century French philosopher Félix Ravaisson available in English for the first time. In recent years, Ravaisson has emerged as an extremely important and influential figure in the history of modern European philosophy. The volume contains the classic 1838 dissertation...