Download or read book Parallel Myths written by J.F. Bierlein and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2010-06-16 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Unusually accessible and useful . . . An eye-opener to readers into the universality and importance of myth in human history and culture.”—William E. Paden, Chair, Department of Religion, University of Vermont For as long as human beings have had language, they have had myths. Mythology is our earliest form of literary expression and the foundation of all history and morality. Now, in Parallel Myths, classical scholar J. F. Bierlein gathers the key myths from all of the world's major traditions and reveals their common themes, images, and meanings. Parallel Myths introduces us to the star players in the world's great myths—not only the twelve Olympians of Greek mythology, but the stern Norse Pantheon, the mysterious gods of India, the Egyptian Ennead, and the powerful deities of Native Americans, the Chinese, and the various cultures of Africa and Oceania. Juxtaposing the most potent stories and symbols from each tradition, Bierlein explores the parallels in such key topics as creation myths, flood myths, tales of love, morality myths, underworld myths, and visions of the Apocalypse. Drawing on the work of Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, Karl Jaspers, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and others, Bierlein also contemplates what myths mean, how to identify and interpret the parallels in myths, and how mythology has influenced twentieth-century psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and literary studies. “A first-class introduction to mythology . . . Written with great clarity and sensitivity.”—John G. Selby, Associate Professor, Roanoke College

Download or read book The Slave Sublime written by Stacy J. Lettman and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this interdisciplinary work, Stacy J. Lettman explores real and imagined violence as depicted in Caribbean and Jamaican text and music, how that violence repeats itself in both art and in the actions of the state, and what that means for Caribbean cultural identity. Jamaica is known for having one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world, a fact that Lettman links to remnants of the plantation era—namely the economic dispossession and structural violence that still haunt the island. Lettman contends that the impact of colonial violence is so embedded in the language of Jamaican literature and music that violence has become a separate language itself, one that paradoxically can offer cultural modes of resistance. Lettman codifies Paul Gilroy's concept of the "slave sublime" as a remix of Kantian philosophy through a Caribbean lens to take a broad view of Jamaica, the Caribbean, and their political and literary history that challenges Eurocentric ideas of slavery, Blackness, and resistance. Living at the intersection of philosophy, literary and musical analysis, and postcolonial theory, this book sheds new light on the lingering ghosts of the plantation and slavery in the Caribbean.

Download or read book Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime written by Kant/Goldthwait and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When originally published in 1960, this was the first complete English translation since 1799 of Kant's early work on aesthetics. More literary than philosophical, Observations shows Kant as a man of feeling rather than the dry thinker he often seemed to readers of the three Critiques.

Download or read book A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful written by Edmund Burke and published by . This book was released on 1824 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Bart k and the Grotesque written by Julie A. Brown and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Bluebeard's Castle (1911), The Wooden Prince (1916/17), The Miraculous Mandarin (1919/24, rev. 1931) and Cantata Profana (1930), Bartók engaged scenarios featuring either overtly grotesque bodies or closely related transformations and violations of the body. In this book, Julie Brown argues that Bartók's concerns with stylistic hybridity (high-low, East-West, tonal-atonal-modal), the body, and the grotesque are inter-connected. All three were thoroughly implicated in cultural constructions of the Modern during the period in which Bartók was composing.

Download or read book The Impersonal Sublime written by Suzanne Guerlac and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of the sublime, which links the idea of aesthetic force with rhetorical impact and moral law, has been an important topic in discussion of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and the shift between them. This book argues that the sublime is equally important in understanding the shift from romanticism to modernism later in the century. The author studies the work of three French authors conventionally considered pivotal figures in the trajectory from romanticism to modernism: Hugo, father of romanticism; Baudelaire, precursor of symbolist modernism; and Lautreamont, hero of (post) modernism. She traces this literary-historical as Hugo's Quatre-vingt-treize and L'Homme qui rit, Baudelaire's Spleen de Paris and Petits poemes en prose, and Lautreamont's Chants de Maldoror and Poesies - all seen from a perspective of the aesthetics of the sublime. This perspective is developed through analyses of the treatises on the sublime by Longinus, Boileau, Burke, and Kant.

Download or read book Baudelaire and Caricature From the Comic to an Art of Modernity written by and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baudelaire's essays on caricature offered the first sustained defense of the value of caricature as a serious art, worthy of study in its own right. This book argues for the crucial importance of the essays for his conception of modernity, so fundamental to the subsequent history of modernism. From the theory of the comic formulated in De l'essence du rire to his discussions of Daumier, Goya, Hogarth, Cruikshank, Bruegel, Grandville, Gavarni, Charlet, and many others, Baudelaire develops not only an aesthetic of caricature but also a caricatural aesthetic--dual and contradictory, grotesque, ironic, violent, farcical, fantastic, and fleeting--that defines an art of modern life. In particular, Baudelaire's insistence on the dualism and ambiguity of laughter has radical implications for such emblems of modernity as the city and the flâneur who roams the streets. The modern city is the space of the comic, a kind of caricature, presenting the flâneur with an image of dualism, one's position as subject and object, implicated in the same urban experiences one seems to control. The theory of the comic invests the idea of modernity with reciprocity, one's status as laughter and object of laughter, thus preventing the subjective construction and appropriation of the world that has so often been linked with the project of modernism. Comic art reflects what Walter Benjamin later defined as Baudelairean allegory, at once representing and revealing the alienation of modern experience. But Baudelaire also transforms the dualism of the comic into a peculiarly modern unity-- the doubling of the comic artist enacted for the benefit of the audience, the self-generating and self-reflexive experience of the flâneur in a "communion" with the crowd. This study examines his views in the context of the history of comic theory and contemporary accounts of the individual artists. Complete with illustrations of the many works discussed, it illuminates the history and theory of caricature, the comic, and the grotesque, and adds to our understanding of modernism in literature and the visual arts.

Download or read book The Grotesque and the Unnatural written by and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Ambiguous Subjects written by Jennifer Wawrzinek and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the history of ideas, the aesthetic categories of the sublime and the grotesque have exerted a powerful force over the cultural imagination. Ambiguous Subjects is one of the first studies to examine the relationship between these concepts. Tracing the history of the sublime from the eighteenth century through Burke and Kant, Wawrzinek illustrates the ways in which the sublime has traditionally been privileged as an inherently masculine and imperialist mode of experience that polices and abjects the grotesque to the margins of acceptable discourse, and the way in which twentieth-century reconfigurations of the sublime increasingly enable the productive situating of these concepts within a dialogic relation as a means of instating an ethical relation to others. This book examines the articulations of both the sublime and the grotesque in three postmodern texts. Looking at novels by Nicole Brossard and Morgan Yasbincek, and the performance work of The Women’s Circus, Wawrzinek illuminates the ways in which these writers and performers restructure the spatial and temporal parameters of the sublime in order to allow various forms of highly contingent transcendence that always necessarily remain in relation to the grotesque body. Ambiguous Subjects illustrates how the sublime and the grotesque can co-exist in a manner where each depends on and is inflected through the other, thus enabling a notion of individuality and of community as contingent, but nevertheless very real, moments in time. Ambiguous Subjects is essential reading for anyone interested in aesthetics, continental philosophy, gender studies, literary theory, sociology and politics.

Download or read book The Music of Berlioz written by Julian Rushton and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2001 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ths text ffers an overall assessment of Berlioz's musical achievement as we approach the bicentary of his birth in 2003. This is a full-length musical study of the composer taking into account the rediscovered Messe solennelle.

Download or read book The Sublime in Antiquity written by James I. Porter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-07 with total page 713 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Detailed new account of the historical emergence and conceptual reach of the sublime both before and after Longinus.

Download or read book Bart k and the Grotesque written by Julie Brown and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The grotesque is one of art's most puzzling figures - transgressive, comprising an unresolveable hybrid, generally focussing on the human body, full of hyperbole, and ultimately semantically deeply puzzling. In Bluebeard's Castle (1911), The Wooden Prince (1916/17), The Miraculous Mandarin (1919/24, rev. 1931) and Cantata Profana (1930), Bart ngaged scenarios featuring either overtly grotesque bodies or closely related transformations and violations of the body. In a number of instrumental works he also overtly engaged grotesque satirical strategies, sometimes - as in Two Portraits: 'Ideal' and 'Grotesque' - indicating this in the title. In this book, Julie Brown argues that Bart concerns with stylistic hybridity (high-low, East-West, tonal-atonal-modal), the body, and the grotesque are inter-connected. While Bart eveloped each interest in highly individual ways, and did so separately to a considerable extent, the three concerns remained conceptually interlinked. All three were thoroughly implicated in cultural constructions of the Modern during the period in which Bart as composing.

Download or read book Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque written by Shun-Liang Chao and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How are we to define what is grotesque, in art or literature? Since the Renaissance the term has been used for anything from the fantastic to the monstrous, and been associated with many artistic genres, from the Gothic to the danse macabre. Shun-Liang Chao's new study adopts a rigorous approach by establishing contradictory physicality and the notion of metaphor as two keys to the construction of a clear identity of the grotesque. With this approach, Chao explores the imagery of Richard Crashaw, Charles Baudelaire, and Rene Magritte as individual exemplars of the grotesque in the Baroque, Romantic, and Surrealist ages, in order to suggest a lineage of this curious aesthetic and to cast light on the functions of the visual and of the verbal in evoking it.

Download or read book The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism written by Christophe Den Tandt and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dynamic reappraisal of American literary naturalism, Christophe Den Tandt connects late nineteenth-century fiction to its romantic, urban gothic roots and to recent discussions of the sublime in postmodern theory. Den Tandt focuses on aspects of naturalist novels -- their use of hyperbole and hysteria, of the grotesque and the abject, of uncanniness and mesmerism -- that have often been left in the periphery of naturalist discourse. He argues that realistic strategies of literary representation can never succeed in depicting the urban environment since the logic of the city rests on a network of hidden relations. Naturalist texts try to resolve this dilemma by opposing sublime components and realistic documentary elements.

Download or read book The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction written by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major critical work from one of the preeminent voices in science fiction scholarship reframes the genre as a way of understanding today’s world. As the application of technoscience increasingly transforms every aspect of life, science fiction has become an essential mode of imagining the horizons of possibility. Though the broad scope of science fiction may vary in artistic quality and sophistication, it shares a desire to imagine a collective future for the human species and the world. A strikingly high proportion of today’s films, commercial art, popular music, video games, and non-genre fiction are what Csicsery-Ronay calls “science fictional” —stimulating science-fictional habits of mind. We no longer treat science fiction as merely a genre-engine producing formulaic effects, but as a mode of awareness, which frames experiences as if they were aspects of science fiction. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction describes science fiction as a constellation of seven diverse cognitive attractions that are particularly formative of science-fictionality. These are the “seven beauties” of the title: fictive neology, fictive novums, future history, imaginary science, the science-fictional sublime, the science-fictional grotesque, and the Technologiade, or the epic of technoscience’s development into a global regime.

Download or read book The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom written by Robert R. Clewis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-09 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows how certain crucial concepts in Kant's aesthetics and practical philosophy fit together and deepen our understanding of his thought.

Download or read book Tragic Encounters written by Maksim Hanukai and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2023-05-16 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary scholars largely agree that the Romantic period altered the definition of tragedy, but they have confined their analyses to Western European authors. Maksim Hanukai introduces a new, illuminating figure to this narrative, arguing that Russia’s national poet, Alexander Pushkin, can be understood as a tragic Romantic poet, although in a different mold than his Western counterparts. Many of Pushkin’s works move seamlessly between the closed world of traditional tragedy and the open world of Romantic tragic drama, and yet they follow neither the cathartic program prescribed by Aristotle nor the redemptive mythologies of the Romantics. Instead, the idiosyncratic and artistically mercurial Pushkin seized upon the newly unstable tragic mode to develop multiple, overlapping tragic visions. Providing new, innovative readings of such masterpieces as The Gypsies, Boris Godunov, The Little Tragedies, and The Bronze Horseman, Hanukai sheds light on an unexplored aspect of Pushkin’s work, while also challenging reigning theories about the fate of tragedy in the Romantic period.