Download or read book The Modernist Cult of Ugliness written by L. Higgins and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2002-08-19 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Cult of Ugliness', Ezra Pound's phrase, powerfully summarizes the ways in which modernists such as Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and T.E. Hulme - the self styled 'Men of 1914' - responded to the 'horrid or sordid or disgusting' conditions of modernity by radically changing aesthetic theory and literary practices. Only the representation of 'ugliness', they protested, would produce the new, truly 'beautiful' work of art. Claiming membership in a cult, however playfully, was a crucial means of group and self-representation and promotion, a defense against personal, socio-economic, and artistic marginalization. Strategically, they dissociated the Beautiful from its traditional, troubling embodiment in female beauty, and from its more recent association with Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. In effect, the deliberate cultivation of ugliness provided the means to displace the misogyny and homophobia which governed individual and artistic responses and utterances. This feminist argument takes in texts such as John Ruskin's foundational art criticism, Eliot's uncollected literary journalism, Lewis's pro-fascism pamphlets of the 1930s, and the city poetry of Pound, Conrad Aiken, and Langston Hughes. Analyses of Whistler's paintings and the poetry of W.B. Yeats demonstrate that even those who claimed to be the most vigorous champions of Beauty were committed to aesthetic practices that disempowered female figures in order to articulate new truths of male artistic mastery.

Download or read book The Aesthetics of Ugliness in Contemporary Malayalam Cinema written by Sunitha Srinivas C and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2024-09-27 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cinema as an aesthetic construct exists in a specific historical and political context, reflecting the society and its aesthetic values. Visual representation of the Ugly, its politics and aestheticization, are deeply rooted in the screen space. Featuring unconventional characters, unembellished visuals, raw and gritty storytelling, the unaesthetic challenges conventional notions of beauty on screen. The physical, psychological, and social manifestations of the ugly are incorporated into the cinematic space through content, theme, physical representations, symbols, setting, dialogue, as well as the camera. Exploring the intricate connection between ugliness and the cinematic medium, the book focuses on identity, gender, and other manifestations of Ugly in contemporary Malayalam cinema. It meticulously analyses the portrayal of ugliness in characters, narratives, and visual aesthetics, thus highlighting societal norms and realities of life. The book is a must-read for film scholars, enthusiasts, and anyone interested in the intersection of aesthetics and storytelling.

Download or read book Ugliness written by Gretchen E. Henderson and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2015-11-15 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ugly as sin, the ugly duckling—or maybe you fell out of the ugly tree? Let’s face it, we’ve all used the word “ugly” to describe someone we’ve seen—hopefully just in our private thoughts—but have we ever considered how slippery the term can be, indicating anything from the slightly unsightly to the downright revolting? What really lurks behind this most favored insult? In this actually beautiful book, Gretchen E. Henderson casts an unfazed gaze at ugliness, tracing its long-standing grasp on our cultural imagination and highlighting all the peculiar ways it has attracted us to its repulsion. Henderson explores the ways we have perceived ugliness throughout history, from ancient Roman feasts to medieval grotesque gargoyles, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the Nazi Exhibition of Degenerate Art. Covering literature, art, music, and even the cutest possible incarnation of the term—Uglydolls—she reveals how ugliness has long posed a challenge to aesthetics and taste. She moves beyond the traditional philosophic argument that simply places ugliness in opposition to beauty in order to dismantle just what we mean when we say “ugly.” Following ugly things wherever they have trod, she traverses continents and centuries to delineate the changing map of ugliness and the profound effects it has had on the public imagination, littering her path with one fascinating tidbit after another. Lovingly illustrated with the foulest images from art, history, and culture, Ugliness offers an oddly refreshing perspective, going past the surface to ask what “ugly” truly is, even as its meaning continues to shift.

Download or read book On the Politics of Ugliness written by Sara Rodrigues and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-08-29 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ugliness or unsightliness is much more than a quality or property of an individual’s appearance—it has long functioned as a social category that demarcates access to social, cultural, and political spaces and capital. The editors of and authors in this collection harness intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches in order to examine ugliness as a political category that is deployed to uphold established notions of worth and entitlement. On the Politics of Ugliness identifies and challenges the harmful effects that labels and feelings of ugliness have on individuals and the socio-political order. It explores ugliness in relation to the intersectional processes of racialization, colonization and settler colonialism, gender-making, ableism, heteronormativity, and fatphobia. On the Politics of Ugliness asks that we fight against visual injustice and imagine new ways of seeing.

Download or read book Ugliness and Judgment written by Timothy Hyde and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel interpretation of architecture, ugliness, and the social consequences of aesthetic judgment When buildings are deemed ugly, what are the consequences? In Ugliness and Judgment, Timothy Hyde considers the role of aesthetic judgment—and its concern for ugliness—in architectural debates and their resulting social effects across three centuries of British architectural history. From eighteenth-century ideas about Stonehenge to Prince Charles’s opinions about the National Gallery, Hyde uncovers a new story of aesthetic judgment, where arguments about architectural ugliness do not pertain solely to buildings or assessments of style, but intrude into other spheres of civil society. Hyde explores how accidental and willful conditions of ugliness—including the gothic revival Houses of Parliament, the brutalist concrete of the South Bank, and the historicist novelty of Number One Poultry—have been debated in parliamentary committees, courtrooms, and public inquiries. He recounts how architects such as Christopher Wren, John Soane, James Stirling, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe have been summoned by tribunals of aesthetic judgment. With his novel scrutiny of lawsuits for libel, changing paradigms of nuisance law, and conventions of monarchical privilege, he shows how aesthetic judgments have become entangled in wider assessments of art, science, religion, political economy, and the state. Moving beyond superficialities of taste in order to see how architectural improprieties enable architecture to participate in social transformations, Ugliness and Judgment sheds new light on the role of aesthetic measurement in our world.

Download or read book Walter Pater and Persons written by Stephen Cheeke and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-20 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walter Pater and Persons investigates the vital concept of the Person in the work of Walter Pater, a major influence on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. Stephen Cheeke explores the intersections of the person, persona, and personality in Pater's work; re-examines arguments about his famously personal prose style; traces Pater's ambivalent fascination with impersonality and asceticism; considers the poetics of personification in his writings about Greek myth and religion, in the divine logos of early Christianity, and in the theory of Platonic Universals; and explores his fascination with metempsychosis (the many persons through whom the individual soul transmigrates). Cheeke also explores the networks in which Pater was interpreted and misinterpreted by different persons and personalities, such as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and W.B Yeats. Their (mis)readings of Pater, and rebellions against his work from Decadent, antinomian, and 'mystical' perspectives, reveal the ways in which Pater's writing had always been in a critical dialogue with its own thinking, as well as a prescient one in relation to his reception. The philosophical question of 'what is a person?'--a crucial one for the nineteenth century, and with an increasing urgency in our own times--is illuminated throughout this work.

Download or read book The Modernist World written by Allana Lindgren and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-05 with total page 650 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Modernist World is an accessible yet cutting edge volume which redraws the boundaries and connections among interdisciplinary and transnational modernisms. The 61 new essays address literature, visual arts, theatre, dance, architecture, music, film, and intellectual currents. The book also examines modernist histories and practices around the globe, including East and Southeast Asia, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and Oceania, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and the Arab World, as well as the United States and Canada. A detailed introduction provides an overview of the scholarly terrain, and highlights different themes and concerns that emerge in the volume. The Modernist World is essential reading for those new to the subject as well as more advanced scholars in the area – offering clear introductions alongside new and refreshing insights.

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 Victorian Aesthetic Conditions written by E. Clements and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-11 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The multidisciplinary aesthetics of Walter Pater, the nineteenth century's most provocative critic, are explored by an international team of scholars. 'True aesthetic criticism' takes place working across the arts, Pater insists: acknowledging the differences between media, but seeking possibilities of interconnection.

Download or read book Literature and Fascination written by Sibylle Baumbach and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-07-30 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring literary fascination as a key concept of aesthetic attraction, this book illuminates the ways in which literary texts are designed, presented, and received. Detailed case studies include texts by William Shakespeare, S.T. Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Don DeLillo, and Ian McEwan.

Download or read book Cross Cultural Issues in Art written by Steven Leuthold and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-12-16 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cross-Cultural Issues in Art provides an engaging introduction to aesthetic concepts, expanding the discussion beyond the usual Western theorists and Western examples. Steven Leuthold discusses both contemporary and historical issues and examples, incorporating a range of detailed case studies from African, Asian, European, Latin American, Middle Eastern and Native American art. Individual chapters address broad intercultural issues in art, including Art and Culture, Primitivism and Otherness, Colonialism, Nationalism, Art and Religion, Symbolism and Interpretation, Style and Ethnicity, A Sense of Place, Art and Social Order, Gender, and the Self, considering these themes as constructs that frame our understanding of art. Cross-Cultural Issues in Art draws upon ideas and case studies from cultural and critical studies, art history, ethno-aesthetics and area studies, visual anthropology, and philosophy, and will be useful for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in these fields.

Download or read book Metaphors of Confinement written by Monika Fludernik and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 841 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy offers a historical survey of imaginings of the prison as expressed in carceral metaphors in a range of texts about imprisonment from Antiquity to the present as well as non-penal situations described as confining or restrictive. These imaginings coalesce into a 'carceral imaginary' that determines the way we think about prisons, just as social debates about punishment and criminals feed into the way carceral imaginary develops over time. Examining not only English-language prose fiction but also poetry and drama from the Middle Ages to postcolonial, particularly African, literature, the book juxtaposes literary and non-literary contexts and contrasts fictional and nonfictional representations of (im)prison(ment) and discussions about the prison as institution and experiential reality. It comments on present-day trends of punitivity and foregrounds the ethical dimensions of penal punishment. The main argument concerns the continuity of carceral metaphors through the centuries despite historical developments that included major shifts in policy (such as the invention of the penitentiary). The study looks at selected carceral metaphors, often from two complementary perspectives, such as the home as prison or the prison as home, or the factory as prison and the prison as factory. The case studies present particularly relevant genres and texts that employ these metaphors, often from a historical perspective that analyses development through different periods.

Download or read book The Fire that Breaks written by Daniel Westover and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-27 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fire that Breaks brings together an international team of scholars to explore for the first time Hopkins’s extended influence on the poets and novelists who have defined modern and contemporary Anglo-American literature since the advent of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Histories of the Normal and the Abnormal written by Waltraud Ernst and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-09-27 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating volume tackles the history of the terms 'normal' and 'abnormal'. Originally meaning 'as occurring in nature', normality has taken on significant cultural gravitas and this book recognizes and explores that fact. The essays engage with the concepts of the normal and the abnormal from the perspectives of a variety of academic disciplines – ranging from art history to social history of medicine, literature, and science studies to sociology and cultural anthropology. The contributors use as their conceptual anchors the works of moral and political philosophers such as Canguilhem, Foucault and Hacking, as well as the ideas put forward by sociologists including Durkheim and Illich. With contributions from a range of scholars across differing disciplines, this book will have a broad appeal to students in many areas of history.

Download or read book A Companion to Modernist Poetry written by David E. Chinitz and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-06-23 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A COMPANION TO MODERNIST POETRY A Companion to Modernist Poetry A Companion to Modernist Poetry presents contemporary approaches to modernist poetry in a uniquely in-depth and accessible text. The first section of the volume reflects the attention to historical and cultural context that has been especially fruitful in recent scholarship. The second section focuses on various movements and groupings of poets, placing writers in literary history and indicating the currents and countercurrents whose interaction generated the category of modernism as it is now broadly conceived. The third section traces the arcs of twenty-one poets’ careers, illustrated by analyses of key works. The Companion thus offers breadth in its presentation of historical and literary contexts and depth in its attention to individual poets; it brings recent scholarship to bear on the subject of modernist poetry while also providing guidance on poets who are historically important and who are likely to appear on syllabi and to attract critical interest for many years to come. Edited by two highly respected and notable critics in the field, A Companion to Modernist Poetry boasts a varied list of contributors who have produced an intense, focused study of modernist poetry.

Download or read book Hunks Hotties and Pretty Boys written by Steven L. Davis and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-08-11 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: White, heterosexual, middle-class men have long served as the standard for masculine “beauty,” even if such men have refused to embrace this term. This study seeks to denaturalize this standard by exploring the connections between beauty and the broad spectrum of masculinities. The chapters included in Hunks, Hotties, and Pretty Boys contribute primarily to the field of gender studies, specifically masculinity studies. They consider twentieth-century representations of male beauty through a variety of mediums: performance, literature, art, photography, film and television. Although the contributors hail from both the humanities and the social sciences, all share a concern for how beauty informs, shapes, defines, and re-defines our understanding of masculinity itself. These scholars investigate a range of historical periods and draw from a broad scope of critical approaches. Some interrogate male beauty through the female gaze and look to the influence of female performance on notions of masculine beauty. Others examine how queer and racial constructions of male beauty refuse and offer alternatives to hegemonic models of identity. Another revisits previous philosophical and theoretical conceptions of beauty, only to deconstruct gendered conceptions of the beautiful and the sublime. In all, these essays complicate masculine beauty by examining Chicano, Asian, working class, and female constructions of male beauty in Western culture.

Download or read book Modernism written by Michael H. Whitworth and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This guide helps readers to engage with the major critical debates surrounding literary modernism. A judicious selection of key critical works on literary modernism Presents a critical history from the earliest reviews to the most recent theoretical assessments Shows how modernist writers understood and constructed modernism. Shows how succeeding generations have developed those constructions and brought new interpretations to bear on the subject Discusses how modernism relates to modernity and odernization, and to other literary and cultural movements Texts have been selected for their relevance to the questions surrounding modernism, and for their accessibility to readers with a limited knowledge of the modernist canon Includes a glossary and an annotated bibliography.