Download or read book Aesthetic Formations written by Birgit Meyer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-07-20 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the incorporation of newly accessible mass media into practices of religious mediation in a variety of settings including the Pentecostal Church and Islamic movements, as well as the use of religious forms and image in the sphere of radio and cinema.
Download or read book Phantom Formations written by Marc Redfield and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marc Redfield maintains that the literary genre of the Bildungsroman brings into sharp focus the contradictions of aesthetics, and also that aesthetics exemplifies what is called ideology. He combines a wide-ranging account of the history and theory of aesthetics with close readings of novels by Goethe, George Eliot, and Gustave Flaubert. For Redfield, these fictions of character formation demonstrate the paradoxical relation between aesthetics and literature: the notion of the Bildungsroman may be expanded to apply to any text that can be figured as a subject producing itself in history, which is to say any text whatsoever. At the same time, the category may be contracted to include only a handful of novels, (or even none at all), a paradox that has led critics to denigrate the Bildungsroman as a phantom genre.
Download or read book Aesthetics in Performance written by Angela Hobart and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In various ways, the essays presented in this volume explore the structures and aesthetic possibilities of music, dance and dramatic representation in ritual and theatrical situations in a diversity of ethnographic contexts in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Each essay enters into a discussion of the "logic" of aesthetic processes exploring their social and political and symbolic import. The aim is above all to explore the way artistic and aesthetic practices in performance produce and structure experience.
Download or read book Popular Hindi Cinema written by Ronie Parciack and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-20 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The popular Hindi film industry is the largest in India and the most conspicuous film industry in the non-Western world. This book analyses the pivotal visual and narrative conventions employed in popular Hindi films through the combined prism of film studies and classical Indian philosophy and ritualism. The book shows the films outside Western paradigms, as visual manifestations and outcomes of the evolution of classical Hindu notions and esthetic forms. These include notions associated with the Advaita-Vedānta philosophical school and early Buddhist thought, concepts and dynamism stemming from Hindu ritualism, rasa esthetic theories, as well as Brahmanic notions such as dharma (religion, law, order), and mokṣa (liberation). These are all highly abstract notions which the author defines as "the unseen": a cluster of diversified concepts denoting what subsists beyond the phenomenal, what prevails beyond the empirical world of saṁsāra and stands out of this world (alaukika), while simultaneously being embodied and transformed within visual filmic imagery, codes and semiotics that are teased out and analyzed. A culturally sensitive reading of popular Hindi films, the interpretations put forward are also applicable to the Western context. They enable a fuller understanding of religious phenomena outside the primary religious field, within the vernacular arenas of popular culture and mass communication. The book is of interest to scholars in the fields of Indology, modern Indian studies, film, media and cultural studies.
Download or read book Pilgrimage as Moral and Aesthetic Formation in Augustine s Thought written by Sarah Stewart-Kroeker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-26 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Augustine's dominant image for the human life is peregrinatio, which signifies at once a journey to the homeland (a pilgrimage) and the condition of exile from the homeland. For Augustine, all human beings are, in the earthly life, exiles from their true homeland: heaven. Some, but not all, become pilgrims seeking a way back to the heavenly homeland, a return mediated by the incarnate Christ. Becoming a pilgrim begins with attraction to beauty. The return journey therefore involves formation, both moral and aesthetic, in loving rightly. This image has occasioned a lot of angst in ethical thought in the last century. Augustine's vision of Christian life as a pilgrimage, his critics allege, casts a pall of groaning and longing over this life in favor of happiness in the next. Augustine's eschatological orientation robs the world of beauty and ethics of urgency. In Pilgrimage as Moral and Aesthetic Formation in Augustine's Thought, Sarah Stewart-Kroeker responds to Augustine's critics by elaborating the Christological continuity between the earthly journey and the eschatological home. Through this cohesive account of pilgrimage as a journey toward the right ordering of the desire for beauty and love for God and neighbour, Stewart-Kroeker reveals the integrity of Augustine's vision of moral and aesthetic vision. From the human desire for beauty to the embodied practice of Christian sacraments, Stewart-Kroeker develops an account of the relationship between beauty and morality as the linchpin of an Augustinian moral theology.
Download or read book Aesthetics in Performance written by Angela Hobart and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In various ways, the essays presented in this volume explore the structures and aesthetic possibilities of music, dance and dramatic representation in ritual and theatrical situations in a diversity of ethnographic contexts in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Each essay enters into a discussion of the "logic" of aesthetic processes exploring their social and political and symbolic import. The aim is above all to explore the way artistic and aesthetic practices in performance produce and structure experience. Angela Hobart is the coordinating lecturer at Goldsmiths College on Intercultural Therapy and lectures at the British Museum on the Art and Culture of South East Asia. Bruce Kapferer is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Adjunct Professor at James Cook University and Honorary Professor at University College London.
Download or read book Forms of Life written by Andreas Gailus and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Forms of Life, Andreas Gailus argues that the neglect of aesthetics in most contemporary theories of biopolitics has resulted in an overly restricted conception of life. He insists we need a more flexible notion of life: one attuned to the interplay and conflict between its many dimensions and forms. Forms of Life develops such a notion through the meticulous study of works by Kant, Goethe, Kleist, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Benn, Musil, and others. Gailus shows that the modern conception of "life" as a generative, organizing force internal to living beings emerged in the last decades of the eighteenth century in biological thought. At the core of this vitalist strand of thought, Gailus maintains, lies a persistent emphasis on the dynamics of formation and deformation, and thus on an intrinsically aesthetic dimension of life. Forms of Life brings this older discourse into critical conversation with contemporary discussions of biopolitics and vitalism, while also developing a rich conception of life that highlights, rather than suppresses, its protean character. Gailus demonstrates that life unfolds in the open-ended interweaving of the myriad forms and modalities of biological, ethical, political, psychical, aesthetic, and biographical systems.
Download or read book The Aesthetic Imperative written by Peter Sloterdijk and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wide-ranging book, renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk examines art in all its rich and varied forms: from music to architecture, light to movement, and design to typography. Moving between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, his analyses span the centuries, from ancient civilizations to contemporary Hollywood. With great verve and insight he considers the key issues that have faced thinkers from Aristotle to Adorno, looking at art in its relation to ethics, metaphysics, society, politics, anthropology and the subject. Sloterdijk explores a variety of topics, from the Greco-Roman invention of postcards to the rise of the capitalist art market, from the black boxes and white cubes of modernism to the growth of museums and memorial culture. In doing so, he extends his characteristic method of defamiliarization to transform the way we look at works of art and artistic movements. His bold and original approach leads us away from the well-trodden paths of conventional art history to develop a theory of aesthetics which rejects strict categorization, emphasizing instead the crucial importance of individual subjectivity as a counter to the latent dangers of collective culture. This sustained reflection, at once playful, serious and provocative, goes to the very heart of Sloterdijk’s enduring philosophical preoccupation with the aesthetic. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and aesthetics and will appeal to anyone interested in culture and the arts more generally.
Download or read book Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post apartheid South Africa written by Duane Jethro and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2019 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative book, Duane Jethro creates a framework for understanding the role of the senses in processes of heritage making. He shows how the senses were important for crafting and successfully deploying new, nation-building heritage projects in South Africa during the post-apartheid period. The book highlights how heritage dynamics are entangled in evocative, changing sensory worlds. Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post-Apartheid South Africa features five case studies that correlate with the five main Western senses. Examples include touch and the ruination of a series of art memorials; how vision was mobilised to assert the authority of the state sponsored Freedom Park project in Pretoria; how small memories of apartheid era social life in Cape Town informed contemporary struggles for belonging after forced removal; how taste informed debates about the attempted rebranding of Heritage Day as barbecue day; and how the sound of the vuvuzela, popularised during the FIFA 2010 Football World Cup, helped legitimise its unofficial African and South African heritage status. This book makes a valuable contribution to the field of sensory studies and, with its focus on aesthetics and material culture, is in synch with the broader material turn in the humanities. This is important reading for students and scholars of anthropology, sociology, sensory studies, and transnational studies.
Download or read book The Idea of Form written by Rodolphe Gasché and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against the assumption that aesthetic form relates to a harmonious arrangement of parts into a beautiful whole, this book argues that reason is the real theme of the "Critique of Judgment" as of the two earlier "Critiques." Since aesthetic judgment of the beautiful becomes possible only when the mind is confronted with things of nature, for which no determined concepts of understanding are available, aesthetic judgment is involved in an epistemological or, rather, para-epistemological task. The predicate "beautiful" indicates that something has minimal form and is cognizable. This book explores this concept of form, in particular the role of presentation ("Darstellung") in what Kant refers to as "mere form," which involves not only the understanding, but also reason as the faculty of ideas. Such a notion of form reveals why the beautiful can be related to the morally good. On the basis of this reinterpreted concept of form, most major concepts and themes of the "Critique of Judgment"--such as disinterestedness, free play, the sublime, genius, and beautiful arts--are examined by the author and shown in a new light.
Download or read book Formless Formation written by Sandra Ruiz and published by Minor Compositions. This book was released on 2021-05-27 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Formless Formation is an experimental project conceived and co-authored by two performance theorists working in critical aesthetics and political thought. The book is an insurgent revolt, walking side by side with plural and planetary anticolonial forces organizing against debt, expropriative extractive capital, environmental catastrophe, and the militarized policing of people and borders. It is in direct conversation with all Indigenous, Black, Brown, ecological, queer, diasporic movements and struggles against capitalist predatory formations across time and space. Through shared resonances across differing aesthetic life-worlds and solidarities that bypass the nation-state, Ruiz and Vourloumis bring to the forefront performative and aesthetic practices and methods that address current and future social organizing.
Download or read book Sense and Essence written by Birgit Meyer and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2018-07-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contrary to popular perceptions, cultural heritage is not given, but constantly in the making: a construction subject to dynamic processes of (re)inventing culture within particular social formations and bound to particular forms of mediation. Yet the appeal of cultural heritage often rests on its denial of being a fabrication, its promise to provide an essential ground to social-cultural identities. Taking this paradoxical feature as a point of departure, and anchoring the discussion to two heuristic concepts—the "politics of authentication" and "aesthetics of persuasion"—the chapters herein explore how this tension is central to the dynamics of heritage formation worldwide.
Download or read book Creativity in Transition written by Maruška Svašek and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an era of intensifying globalization and transnational connectivity, the dynamics of cultural production and the very notion of creativity are in transition. Exploring creative practices in various settings, the book does not only call attention to the spread of modernist discourses of creativity, from the colonial era to the current obsession with ‘innovation’ in neo-liberal capitalist cultural politics, but also to the less visible practices of copying, recycling and reproduction that occur as part and parcel of creative improvization.
Download or read book Rethinking Mill s Ethics written by Colin Heydt and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2006-06-08 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discussion of John Stuart Mill's ethics has been dominated by concern with right and wrong action as determined by the principle of utility. Colin Heydt's book unearths the rich context of moral and socio-political debate that Mill did not have to make explicit to his Victorian readers, in order to enrich the philosophical analysis of his ethics and to show a famous and misunderstood moralist in a new light.
Download or read book Internationalist Aesthetics written by Edward Tyerman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2022 AATSEEL Best Book in Literary Studies, American Association of Teachers of Slavic and European Languages Honorable Mention, 2022 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, Modern Language Association Following the failure of communist revolutions in Europe, in the 1920s the Soviet Union turned its attention to fostering anticolonial uprisings in Asia. China, divided politically between rival military factions and dominated economically by imperial powers, emerged as the Comintern’s prime target. At the same time, a host of prominent figures in Soviet literature, film, and theater traveled to China, met with Chinese students in Moscow, and placed contemporary China on the new Soviet stage. They sought to reimagine the relationship with China in the terms of socialist internationalism—and, in the process, determine how internationalism was supposed to look and feel in practice. Internationalist Aesthetics offers a groundbreaking account of the crucial role that China played in the early Soviet cultural imagination. Edward Tyerman tracks how China became the key site for Soviet debates over how the political project of socialist internationalism should be mediated, represented, and produced. The central figure in this story, the avant-garde writer Sergei Tret’iakov, journeyed to Beijing in the 1920s and experimented with innovative documentary forms in an attempt to foster a new sense of connection between Chinese and Soviet citizens. Reading across genres and media from reportage and biography to ballet and documentary film, Tyerman shows how Soviet culture sought an aesthetics that could foster a sense of internationalist community. He reveals both the aspirations and the limitations of this project, illuminating a crucial chapter in Sino-Russian relations. Grounded in extensive sources in Russian and Chinese, this cultural history bridges Slavic and East Asian studies and offers new insight into the transnational dynamics that shaped socialist aesthetics and politics in both countries.
Download or read book Aesthetic Practices and Spatial Configurations written by Hannah Baader and published by Transcript Publishing. This book was released on 2024-03-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aesthetic practices shape and are shaped by spatial formations. The essays in this volume survey configurations of spaces as macro, micro and meso, and study from a transregional perspective the ways they are created, described, negotiated, and appropriated across cultures. The interdisciplinary studies range from art history to anthropology and literary studies, and investigate the interdependence between material forms and environmental contexts. They explore the periodic reinvention of spaces through architectural, pictorial, and discursive practices. This includes the geographical migration of images, objects, and practices from one space to another, across a variety of constellations and spatial scales, and the accretion of cultural values around such migration. Case studies range from a religious temple under construction in today's Sao Paolo, the place of African art in the museum collections of the former GDR, 18th-century religious architecture in Beirut, the historicization of modernist architecture in Iraq, the pictorial evocations of sacred rivers in 16th-century India, literary descriptions of the Mughal capital Fatpur Sikri, to cosmological arrangements in Buddhist caves of the 6th century, among other topics.
Download or read book Shine written by Krista A. Thompson and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-09 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Jamaican dancehalls competition for the video camera's light is stiff, so much so that dancers sometimes bleach their skin to enhance their visibility. In the Bahamas, tuxedoed students roll into prom in tricked-out sedans, staging grand red-carpet entrances that are designed to ensure they are seen being photographed. Throughout the United States and Jamaica friends pose in front of hand-painted backgrounds of Tupac, flashy cars, or brand-name products popularized in hip-hop culture in countless makeshift roadside photography studios. And visual artists such as Kehinde Wiley remix the aesthetic of Western artists with hip-hop culture in their portraiture. In Shine, Krista Thompson examines these and other photographic practices in the Caribbean and United States, arguing that performing for the camera is more important than the final image itself. For the members of these African diasporic communities, seeking out the camera's light—whether from a cell phone, Polaroid, or video camera—provides a means with which to represent themselves in the public sphere. The resulting images, Thompson argues, become their own forms of memory, modernity, value, and social status that allow for cultural formation within and between African diasporic communities.
