Download or read book The Aesthetics of Murder written by Joel Black and published by . This book was released on 1991-09 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What connects the Romantic essays of Thomas De Quincey and the violent cinema of Brian De Palma? Or the "beautiful" suicides of Hedda Gabler and Yukio Mishima? Or the shootings of John Lennon and Ronald Reagan? In The Aesthetics of Murder, Joel Black explores the sometimes gruesome interplay between life and art, between actual violence and images of violence in a variety of literary texts, paintings, and films. Rather than exclude murder from critical consideration by dismissing it as a crime, Black urges us to ponder the killer's artistic role -- and our own experience as audience, witness, or voyeur. Black examines murder as a recurring, obsessive theme in the Romantic tradition, approaching the subject from an aesthetic rather than a moral, psychological, or philosophical perspective. And he brings into his discussion contemporary instances of sensational murders and assassinations, treating these as mimetic or cathartic activities in their own right. Combining historical documentation with theoretical insights, Black shows that the possibilities of representing violence -- and of experiencing it -- as art were recognized early in the nineteenth century as logical extensions of Romantic theories of the sublime. Since then, both traditional art forms and the modern mass media have contributed to the growing aestheticization of daily experience -- including murder, suicide, and terrorism." -- Book cover.
Download or read book Nineteenth century Aesthetics of Murder written by Anhiti Patnaik and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines how sex crime and serial killing became a legitimate subject of aesthetic representation and mass consumption in the nineteenth century. It also probes into the ethical implications of deriving pleasure fromconsumingsuch graphic representations of violence. Taking off from Jack the Ripper and the iconic Whitechapel murders of 1888, it argues thata new cultural paradigm ?the aesthetics of murder?was invented in England and France.To study the?aesthetics of murder?as countless influential critics have done is not to question whether an act of murder itself possesses beautiful or subblime qualities. Rather, it is to determine precisely howa topic as evil and abject as murder ismade beautiful in a work of art. It also questions what is at stake ethically for the reader or spectator who bears witness to such incommensurable violence. In three chapters, this dissertation delves into three important tropes ?the murderer, corpse, and witness ?through which this aesthetics of murder is analyzed. By examining a wide intersection of visual, literary, and cultural texts from the English and French tradition, it ultimately seeks to effect a rapprochement between nineteenth-century ethics and aesthetics. The primary artists and writers under investigationare Charles Baudelaire, Thomas De Quincey, Oscar Wilde, and Walter Sickert. In bringing together their distinctive styles and aesthetic philosophies, the dissertation opts for an interdisciplinary and comparative approach. It also aims to absolve these vwriters and artists from a longstanding charge of immorality and degeneracy, by firmly maintaining that the aestheticsof murder does not necessarily glorify or justify the act of murder. The third chapter on the ?witness? in fact, elucidates how writers like De Quincey and Wilde transferred the ethical imperative from the writer to the reader. The reader is appointed in the role of a murder witness who accidentally discovered the corpse on the crime scene. As a traumatized subject, the reader thus develops an ethicalobligation for justice and censorship.Keywords: Murderer, Corpse, Witness, Aesthetics, Ethics, Censorship, Abject,Sublime,Differend, Catharsis,Trauma, Victorian, Romantic, Decadent,Wilde,Baudelaire,DeQuincey,Sickert.
Download or read book Murder Under Her Skin written by Stephen Spotswood and published by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice • Rex Stout meets Agatha Christie with a fresh twist in the new Pentecost and Parker Mystery, a delightfully hardboiled high-wire act starring two daring women sleuths dead set on justice as they set out to solve a murder at a traveling circus “A delight.... It’s a pleasure to watch [Pentecost and Parker] sifting through red herrings and peeling secrets back like layers of an onion.” The New York Times Book Review Someone’s put a blade in the back of the Amazing Tattooed Woman, and Willowjean “Will” Parker’s former knife-throwing mentor has been stitched up for the crime. To uncover the truth, Will and her boss, world-famous detective Lillian Pentecost, travel to the circus, where they find a snake pit of old grudges, small-town crime, and secrets worth killing for. Will called Hart & Halloway’s Traveling Circus and Sideshow home for five years, and Ruby Donner, the circus’s tattooed ingenue, was her friend. To make matters worse, the prime suspect is Valentin Kalishenko, the man who taught Will everything she knows about putting a knife where it needs to go. To uncover the real killer and keep Kalishenko from a date with the electric chair, Will and Ms. Pentecost join the circus in sleepy Stoppard, Virginia, where the locals like their cocktails mild, the past buried, and big-city detectives not at all. The two swiftly find themselves lost in a funhouse of lies as Will begins to realize that her former circus compatriots aren’t playing it straight, and that her murdered friend might have been hiding a lot of secrets beneath all that ink.
Download or read book The Murder of Art written by Thomas Crombez and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The murder of art. It sounds like the title of a thriller. That is exactly what the history of aesthetics is. Western philosophical tradition begins with a condemnation of art. The Greek philosopher Plato banished artists and poets from his ideal society. All they could produce were false shadow images. In contrast, from the eighteenth century onwards, art was also glorified by numerous thinkers. According to the Romantics, art was the bearer of a truth that escaped the concepts of philosophy. The murder of art, or the glorification of art. In both cases, art functioned as a challenge to philosophy. This book traces the history of aesthetics. At the same time, it provides a cross section of the history of philosophy.
Download or read book The Art of Cruelty written by Maggie Nelson and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2012-08-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is criticism at its best." —Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times Writing in the tradition of Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry, Maggie Nelson has emerged as one of our foremost cultural critics with this landmark work about representations of cruelty and violence in art. From Sylvia Plath’s poetry to Francis Bacon’s paintings, from the Saw franchise to Yoko Ono’s performance art, Nelson’s nuanced exploration across the artistic landscape ultimately offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.
Download or read book The Aesthetics of Care written by Josephine Donovan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-06-02 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction -- The aesthetics of modernity -- Willa Cather's aesthetic transitions -- The aesthetics of care -- Animal ethics and literary criticism -- Tolstoy's animals -- Local-color animals -- Coetzee's animals -- Metaphysical meat: "becoming men" and animal sacrifice -- The transgressive sublime, katharsis, and animal sacrifice -- Caring to hear, caring to see: art as emergence -- Conclusion
Download or read book Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics written by Frederic Spotts and published by Harry N. Abrams. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Available again, the classic, unprecedented look at how the strategies and ideals of the Third Reich were informed by Adolf Hitler's artistic aspirations. "Grimly fascinating . . . A book that will rightly find its place among the central studies of Nazism. . . . Invaluable." --The New York Times
Download or read book The Secret History written by Donna Tartt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-19 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK • INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A contemporary literary classic and "an accomplished psychological thriller ... absolutely chilling" (Village Voice), from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Goldfinch. Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality. “A remarkably powerful novel [and] a ferociously well-paced entertainment.... Forceful, cerebral, and impeccably controlled.” —The New York Times
Download or read book Over Her Dead Body written by Elisabeth Bronfen and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1846, Edgar Allen Poe wrote that 'the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world'. The conjuction of death, art and femininity forms a rich and disturbing strata of Western culture, explored here in fascinating detail by Elisabeth Bronfen. Her examples range from Carmen to Little Nell, from Wuthering Heights to Vertigo, from Snow White to Frankenstein. The text is richly illustrated throughout with thirty-seven paintings and photographs. The argument that this book presents is that narrative and visual representations of death can be read as symptoms of our culture and because the feminine body is culturally constructed as the superlative site of "other" and "not me", culture uses art to dream the deaths of beautiful women.
Download or read book Murder the Aesthetic written by egrigz and published by . This book was released on 2015-02-05 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts written by Thomas De Quincey and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2015-02-26 with total page 49 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed - a knife - a purse - and a dark lane...' In this provocative and blackly funny essay, Thomas de Quincey considers murder in a purely aesthetic light and explains how practically every philosopher over the past two hundred years has been murdered - 'insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him'. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859). Thomas de Quincey's Confessions and an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings is available in Penguin Classics.
Download or read book Investigative Aesthetics written by Matthew Fuller and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, artists are engaged in investigation. They probe corruption, state violence, environmental destruction and repressive technologies. At the same time, fields not usually associated with aesthetics make powerful use of it. Journalists and legal professionals pore over open source videos and satellite imagery to undertake visual investigations. This combination of diverse fields is what the authors call "investigative aesthetics": mobilising sensibilities often associated with art, architecture and other such practices to find new ways of speaking truth to power. This book draws on theories of knowledge, ecology and technology, evaluates the methods of citizen counter-forensics, micro-history and art, and examines radical practices such as those of Wikileaks, Bellingcat, and Forensic Architecture. Investigative Aesthetics takes place in the studio and the laboratory, the courtroom and the gallery, online and in the streets, as it strives towards the construction of a new 'common sensing'. The book is an inspiring introduction to a new field that brings together investigation and aesthetics to change how we understand and confront power today. To Nour Abuzaid for your brilliance, perseverance, and unshaken belief in the liberation of Palestine.
Download or read book Transgression and the Aesthetics of Evil written by Taran Kang and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2021-12-15 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genius and the Spirit of Transgression -- Symbols of the Morally Bad -- Evil and the Sublime -- Wicked Spectators.
Download or read book The Aesthetics of Violence written by Robert Appelbaum and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering an ambitious study of the aesthetics of violence across art, literature, film and theatre, this volume brings together traditional German aesthetic and social theory with the modern problem of violence in art. Written in an engaging style, the book includes examples ranging from Homer and Shakespeare to slasher films and performance art.
Download or read book Modernism and the Aesthetics of Violence written by Paul Sheehan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-24 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the subject of violence as it features in celebrated modernist works from the early twentieth century. It traces the modernist fascination with violence back to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when certain writers in France and England sought to celebrate dissident sexualities and stylized criminality.
Download or read book The Book of Evidence written by John Banville and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-03-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Banville’s stunning powers of mimicry are brilliantly on display in this engrossing novel, the darkly compelling confession of an improbable murderer. Freddie Montgomery is a highly cultured man, a husband and father living the life of a dissolute exile on a Mediterranean island. When a debt comes due and his wife and child are held as collateral, he returns to Ireland to secure funds. That pursuit leads to murder. And here is his attempt to present evidence, not of his innocence, but of his life, of the events that lead to the murder he committed because he could. Like a hero out of Nabokov or Camus, Montgomery is a chillingly articulate, self-aware, and amoral being, whose humanity is painfully on display.
Download or read book Surrealism and the Art of Crime written by Jonathan Paul Eburne and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Corpses mark surrealism's path through the twentieth century, providing material evidence of the violence in modern life. Though the shifting group of poets, artists, and critics who made up the surrealist movement were witness to total war, revolutionary violence, and mass killing, it was the tawdry reality of everyday crime that fascinated them. Jonathan P. Eburne shows us how this focus reveals the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the thought and artwork of the surrealists and establishes their movement as a useful platform for addressing the contemporary problem of violence, both individual and political. In a book strikingly illustrated with surrealist artworks and their sometimes gruesome source material, Eburne addresses key individual works by both better-known surrealist writers and artists (including André Breton, Louis Aragon, Aimé Césaire, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dalí) and lesser-known figures (such as René Crevel, Simone Breton, Leonora Carrington, Benjamin Péret, and Jules Monnerot). For Eburne "the art of crime" denotes an array of cultural production including sensationalist journalism, detective mysteries, police blotters, crime scene photos, and documents of medical and legal opinion as well as the roman noir, in particular the first crime novel of the American Chester Himes. The surrealists collected and scrutinized such materials, using them as the inspiration for the outpouring of political tracts, pamphlets, and artworks through which they sought to expose the forms of violence perpetrated in the name of the state, its courts, and respectable bourgeois values. Concluding with the surrealists' quarrel with the existentialists and their bitter condemnation of France's anticolonial wars, Surrealism and the Art of Crime establishes surrealism as a vital element in the intellectual, political, and artistic history of the twentieth century.
