Download or read book The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction written by Jean-Michel Ganteau and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-05-08 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book visits vulnerability in contemporary British fiction, considering vulnerability in its relation to poetics, politics, ethics, and trauma. Vulnerability and risk have become central issues in contemporary culture, and artistic productions have increasingly made it their responsibility to evoke various types of vulnerabilities, from individual fragilities to economic and political forms of precariousness and dispossession. Informed by trauma studies and the ethics of literature, this book addresses such issues by focusing on the literary evocations of vulnerability and analyzing various aspects of vulnerable form as represented and performed in British narratives, from contemporary classics by Peter Ackroyd, Pat Barker, Anne Enright, Ian McEwan, and Jeanette Winterson, to less canonical texts by Nina Allan, Jon McGregor, and N. Royle. Chapters on romance, elegy, the ghost story, and the state-of-the-nation novel draw on a variety of theoretical approaches from the fields of trauma studies, affect theory, the ethics of alterity, the ethics of care, and the ethics of vulnerability, among others. Showcasing how the contemporary novel is the privileged site of the expression and performance of vulnerability and vulnerable form, the volume broaches a poetics of vulnerability based on categories such as testimony, loss, unknowing, temporal disarray, and performance. On top of providing a book-length evocation of contemporary fictions of vulnerability and vulnerable form, this volume contributes significantly to considerations of the importance of Trauma Studies to Contemporary Literature.
Download or read book An Aesthetics of Vulnerability written by Jakob Winnberg and published by Goteborg University Department of English. This book was released on 2003 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a Ph.D. dissertation. Arguing against the view that postmodernism is marked by ""the waning of affect,"" this book investigates the fate of sentimentality in postmodernist fiction. The investigation focuses on the novels of the British author, Graham Swift, tracing in them the emergence of a blending of representations of sentimentality with a postmodernist aesthetics and a postmodern ethico-spiritual imagination - a blending resulting in what is designated by the shorthand ""the sentimentum."" The expression of the sentimentum is further shown to rely on Swift's move toward the fulfillment of an aesthetic of vulnerability, which neutralizes the opposition between irony and sentimentality, and which also corresponds to an ethics of vulnerability that has found its formulation in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Through close readings of Swift's novels, from The Sweet Shop Owner to Last Orders, it is shown how both the aesthetics and the ethics of vulnerability are gradually more pronounced and affirmed through each successive installment in Swift's oeuvre. Ultimately, though, the ambition of the book is to bring attention to an aesthetic and thematic configuration that may be found in a number of postmodernist novels. Hence, the study is concluded by comparative and complementary readings of novels by Julian Barnes, Penelope Lively and Jeanette Winterson that illustrate the wider relevance of the concepts of the sentimentum and of aesthetics of vulnerability."
Download or read book Through the Dark Field written by Susie Paulik Babka and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theological discourse in the West has consistently valued the word over the image. Aesthetics, which discerns the criteria and value of the beautiful and what "pleases the senses," is the discipline that prioritizes sensual intelligence over the rational; this book advocates a reconsideration of the doctrine of the incarnation through an aesthetics of vulnerability, in which the ethical optics of attention to the vulnerable other becomes the standpoint in which to ponder the significance of "God became human." Relying on such diverse thinkers as Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Karl Rahner, and Masao Abe, Susie Paulik Babka explores visual art, images, and poetry as theological sources, designating what Blanchot called "a region where impossibility is no longer deprivation, but affirmation."
Download or read book Creaturely Poetics written by Anat Pick and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-26 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Simone Weil once wrote that "the vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence." With these words, she established a relationship among vulnerability, beauty, and existence that transcends the boundaries separating the species. Her conception of a radical ethics and aesthetics could be characterized as a new "poetics of species," that forces us to rethink the significance of the body, both human and animal. Exploring the "logic of flesh," or how art and culture use the body to mark species identity, Anat Pick reimagines a poetics that begins with the vulnerability of bodies, not the omnipotence of thought. Offering a powerful alternative to more personalist visions of morality, Pick proposes a "creaturely" approach based on the shared embodiedness of humans and animals and a postsecular perspective on human-animal relations. She turns to literature, film, and other cultural texts that prioritize the inhuman and challenge the familiar inventory of the human (consciousness, language, morality, and dignity). She reintroduces Weil's crucially important work and its elaboration of themes such as witnessing, commemoration, and collective memory, and she moves away from assumptions about animal "otherness" and nonhuman subjectivities. Pick identifies the "animal" within all humans, emphasizing the corporeal and its issues of power and freedom. In her creaturely view, powerlessness is the point at which both aesthetic and ethical thinking must begin.
Download or read book Viscous Expectations written by Cara Judea Alhadeff and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Orchestrating text and color photography through the lens of vulnerability, Cara Judea Alhadeff explores embodied democracy as the intersection of technology, aesthetics, eroticism, and ethnicity. She demonstrates the potential for social resistance and a rhizomatic reconceptualization of community rooted in difference--and a socio-erotic ethic of ambiguity that disrupts codified normalcy. Within the context of global corporatocracy, international development, the pharma-addictive health industry, petroleum-parenting, and arts-as-entertainment, she scrutinizes the emancipatory possibilities of social ecology, post-humanism, and the pedagogy of trauma. Confronting hegemonies of convenience culture, she lays the groundwork for a reticulated citizenry that requires theory-becoming-practice. Alhadeff's primary text and footnotes become parallel narratives, reflecting their intermedial content. As she integrates the personal and theoretical with the visual and textual, she mobilizes a comprehensive exploration of our bodies as contingent modes of relation. She cites philosophers and artists from Spinoza to Audre Lorde, Louise Bourgeois, and douard Glissant, who have explored collaborative and uncanny conditions of becoming vulnerable. In the context of multiple constituencies, creativity becomes a political imperative in which cognitive and somatic risk-taking gives voice to social justice.
Download or read book Vulnerability and the Art of Protection written by Marybeth Jeanette MacPhee and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on ethnographic research conducted in rural Morocco, Vulnerability and the Art of Protection examines how culture shapes health behavior in low-income households. The book explores local forms of social, cultural, and spiritual experience to discern when and how women caregivers heeded, ignored, and manipulated both scientific and folk knowledge about health dangers. The comparison illuminates links among the implicit structures of everyday life, embodied experience, and household health practices. MacPhee argues that recurring patterns of interiority, unity, balance, and purity in the organization of domestic life simultaneously generated an embodied index for discerning feelings of vulnerability and security at the level of the body, the household, and the community. This embodied index, in turn, mediated the ambiguous relationship between general knowledge about health dangers and the immediate contexts of lived experience. Case studies on the diverse protective strategies that Moroccan housewives used during pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding provide insight into the complexity of lived experience in a cultural context of medical pluralism, ethnic diversity, and social change. Instead of depicting culture as a static set of beliefs or practices, the analysis highlights the dynamic way that embodied sensibilities influenced women's interpretation of the relative degree of danger in particular contexts and their enactment of particular strategies of protection. The integration of concepts such as embodied experience, cultural aesthetics, intersubjectivity, and practical logic offers medical anthropologists and public health professionals a new context-specific way to conceptualize risk-perception and the cultural determinants of health behavior. This book is part of the Ethnographic Studies in Medical Anthropology Series, edited by Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh. "MacPhee's text provides a subtle critique of medical anthropological theory and intervenes in important ways into public health scholarship ... This book would be an excellent introductory text for undergraduates, or for students from public health and other research fields. The text would make a successful teaching tool for interdisciplinary classes as it introduces readers to important elements of anthropological theory while still being useful for students interested in more applied research." -- Journal of Anthropological Research
Download or read book Political Aesthetics written by Crispin Sartwell and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I suggest that although at any given place and moment the aesthetic expressions of a political system just are that political system, the concepts are separable. Typically, aesthetic aspects of political systems shift in their meaning over time, or even are inverted or redeployed with an entirely transformed effect. You cannot understand politics without understanding the aesthetics of politics, but you cannot understand aesthetics as politics. The point is precisely to show the concrete nodes at which two distinct discourses coincide or connive, come apart or coalesce."—from Political Aesthetics Juxtaposing and connecting the art of states and the art of art historians with vernacular or popular arts such as reggae and hip-hop, Crispin Sartwell examines the reach and claims of political aesthetics. Most analysts focus on politics as discursive systems, privileging text and reducing other forms of expression to the merely illustrative. He suggests that we need to take much more seriously the aesthetic environment of political thought and action.Sartwell argues that graphic style, music, and architecture are more than the propaganda arm of political systems; they are its constituents. A noted cultural critic, Sartwell brings together the disciplines of political science and political philosophy, philosophy of art and art history, in a new way, clarifying basic notions of aesthetics—beauty, sublimity, and representation—and applying them in a political context. A general argument about the fundamental importance of political aesthetics is interspersed with a group of stimulating case studies as disparate as Leni Riefenstahl's films and Black Nationalist aesthetics, the Dead Kennedys and Jeffersonian architecture.
Download or read book Vulnerability in Resistance written by Judith Butler and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-13 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vulnerability and resistance have often been seen as opposites, with the assumption that vulnerability requires protection and the strengthening of paternalistic power at the expense of collective resistance. Focusing on political movements and cultural practices in different global locations, including Turkey, Palestine, France, and the former Yugoslavia, the contributors to Vulnerability in Resistance articulate an understanding of the role of vulnerability in practices of resistance. They consider how vulnerability is constructed, invoked, and mobilized within neoliberal discourse, the politics of war, resistance to authoritarian and securitarian power, in LGBTQI struggles, and in the resistance to occupation and colonial violence. The essays offer a feminist account of political agency by exploring occupy movements and street politics, informal groups at checkpoints and barricades, practices of self-defense, hunger strikes, transgressive enactments of solidarity and mourning, infrastructural mobilizations, and aesthetic and erotic interventions into public space that mobilize memory and expose forms of power. Pointing to possible strategies for a feminist politics of transversal engagements and suggesting a politics of bodily resistance that does not disavow forms of vulnerability, the contributors develop a new conception of embodiment and sociality within fields of contemporary power. Contributors. Meltem Ahiska, Athena Athanasiou, Sarah Bracke, Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Başak Ertür, Zeynep Gambetti, Rema Hammami, Marianne Hirsch, Elena Loizidou, Leticia Sabsay, Nükhet Sirman, Elena Tzelepis
Download or read book The Political Imaginary of Sexual Freedom written by Leticia Sabsay and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops a performative and relational approach to gendered and sexualised bodies conceived as distinct from the more limited individualistic idea of sexual identity and orientation that is at play within notions of progress in contemporary transnational sexual politics. Focusing on the psychosocial dimension of sexual life, Sabsay challenges accepted ideas of increased emancipation, and the steady extension of rights, offering instead a critique of the liberal imaginary that is at the base of the sexual rights-bearing subject. The book offers a notion of sexual embodiment that provides an alternative to individualism, one that is social, radically relational and psychically divided, and that implies a different conception of democratic sexual politics for our time.This book brings together political and cultural analysis of sexual rights discourse with a strong theory of the relational subject whose political investments and articulations depend on a political imaginary. This is a highly original and methodical text which will be of particular interest to academics and scholars of gender and sexuality studies, sociology, politics and psychology.
Download or read book Human Being Risk written by Mark Coeckelbergh and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whereas standard approaches to risk and vulnerability presuppose a strict separation between humans and their world, this book develops an existential-phenomenological approach according to which we are always already beings-at-risk. Moreover, it is argued that in our struggle against vulnerability, we create new vulnerabilities and thereby transform ourselves as much as we transform the world. Responding to the discussion about human enhancement and information technologies, the book then shows that this dynamic-relational approach has important implications for the evaluation of new technologies and their risks. It calls for a normative anthropology of vulnerability that does not ask which objective risks are acceptable, how we can become invulnerable, or which technologies threaten human nature, but which vulnerability transformations we want. To the extent that we can steer the growth of new technologies at all, this tragic and sometimes comic project should therefore be guided by what we want to become.
Download or read book Aesthetics Alienation written by Gary Tedman and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2012-06-29 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A complete and original theory of aesthetics based on Marx and Althusser in the modernist Marxist anti-humanist tradition (Brecht, Althusser, Benjamin, Adorno). The main concepts that arise from this work are: the aesthetic level of practice, aesthetic state apparatuses, aesthetic interpellation, and pseudo dialectics, all of which are used to understand the role of aesthetic experience and its place in everyday life. - In the space long thought as necessary to fill spanning the gap between Marx and Freud, the author proposes that aesthetics can be located and defined in a concrete way. We are therefore looking at a domain involving and implicating feelings, affections, dispositions, sensibilities and sensuality, as well as their social role in art, tradition, ritual, and taboo. With the classic Marxist concepts of base and superstructure divided into levels, economic, ideological, and political, the aesthetic level of practice is the area that has traditionally been mostly either missing or mislocated and, especially perhaps, misrepresented for political reasons. The importance of this level is that it fuels and supports the media, or as Althusser described it the 'traffic' (or mediation) between base and superstructure, although for Althusser this was ideological traffic. Here, this is also defined as aesthetic. From this vantage point, we begin to be able to see aesthetic state apparatuses, analyse how they function, both in the past, historically (for example firstly in art history), and today, in the contemporary political context, to grasp the role that art and feelings, along with affective alienation, plays in our culture as a complete and, in fact, cyclical reciprocating system. ,
Download or read book Melodrama written by Jonathan Goldberg and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-21 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a new queer theorization of melodrama, Jonathan Goldberg explores the ways melodramatic film and literature provide an aesthetics of impossibility. Focused on the notion of what Douglas Sirk termed the "impossible situation" in melodrama, such as impasses in sexual relations that are not simply reflections of social taboo and prohibitions, Goldberg pursues films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes that respond to Sirk's prompt. His analysis hones in on melodrama's original definition--a form combining music and drama--as he explores the use of melodrama in Beethoven's opera Fidelio, films by Alfred Hitchcock, and fiction by Willa Cather and Patricia Highsmith, including her Ripley novels. Goldberg illuminates how music and sound provide queer ways to promote identifications that exceed the bounds of the identity categories meant to regulate social life. The interaction of musical, dramatic, and visual elements gives melodrama its indeterminacy, making it resistant to normative forms of value and a powerful tool for creating new potentials.
Download or read book The Undying written by Anne Boyer and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN GENERAL NONFICTION "The Undying is a startling, urgent intervention in our discourses about sickness and health, art and science, language and literature, and mortality and death. In dissecting what she terms 'the ideological regime of cancer,' Anne Boyer has produced a profound and unforgettable document on the experience of life itself." —Sally Rooney, author of Normal People "Anne Boyer’s radically unsentimental account of cancer and the 'carcinogenosphere' obliterates cliche. By demonstrating how her utterly specific experience is also irreducibly social, she opens up new spaces for thinking and feeling together. The Undying is an outraged, beautiful, and brilliant work of embodied critique." —Ben Lerner, author of The Topeka School A week after her forty-first birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver rather than the one needing care, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. A twenty-first-century Illness as Metaphor, as well as a harrowing memoir of survival, The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, corporate lies, John Donne, pro-pain ”dolorists,” the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism. It excoriates the pharmaceutical industry and the bland hypocrisies of ”pink ribbon culture” while also diving into the long literary line of women writing about their own illnesses and ongoing deaths: Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker, Susan Sontag, and others. A genre-bending memoir in the tradition of The Argonauts, The Undying will break your heart, make you angry enough to spit, and show you contemporary America as a thing both desperately ill and occasionally, perversely glorious. Includes black-and-white illustrations
Download or read book The Ethics of Vulnerability written by Erinn Gilson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-17 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As concerns about violence, war, terrorism, sexuality, and embodiment have garnered attention in philosophy, the concept of vulnerability has become a shared reference point in these discussions. As a fundamental part of the human condition, vulnerability has significant ethical import: how one responds to vulnerability matters, whom one conceives as vulnerable and which criteria are used to make such demarcations matters, how one deals with one’s own vulnerability matters, and how one understands the meaning of vulnerability matters. Yet, the meaning of vulnerability is commonly taken for granted and it is assumed that vulnerability is almost exclusively negative, equated with weakness, dependency, powerlessness, deficiency, and passivity. This reductively negative view leads to problematic implications, imperiling ethical responsiveness to vulnerability, and so prevents the concept from possessing the normative value many theorists wish it to have. When vulnerability is regarded as weakness and, concomitantly, invulnerability is prized, attentiveness to one’s own vulnerability and ethical response to vulnerable others remain out of reach goals. Thus, this book critiques the ideal of invulnerability, analyzes the problems that arise from a negative view of vulnerability, and articulates in its stead a non-dualistic concept of vulnerability that can remedy these problems.
Download or read book The Human Touch written by Chloé Arros and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-09-27 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Human Touch is a book focused on the creative processes at work in British contemporary improvisational theatre and how these processes draw on the humanity of the participants: their cognitive abilities, their lives, and their relationships to each other. Vulnerability is a main feature of both the book and of improvisational theatre, both part of the hurdles that improvisers face and a creative tool. Through a study of improvisation and vulnerability, the book teaches us both what makes improvisational theatre so human and opens the door to a reflection about how to use humanity and human emotions in performance. Most importantly, it delves into the cognitive and physiological processes at work in improvisation, a topic which is missing from most manuals and studies offered to students. This book is addressed to theatre students and provides both an important overview of the form’s history and a challenge to what is usually taught about improvisation.
Download or read book Victimhood and Vulnerability in 21st Century Fiction written by Jean-Michel Ganteau and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-04-21 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Visibilities: Victimhood and Other Forms of Vulnerability in 21st-century Fiction (eds. Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega) addresses the relationship between trauma and ethics, and moves one step further to engage with vulnerability studies in their relation to literature and literary form. It consists of an introduction and of twelve articles written by specialists from various European countries and includes an interview with US novelist Jayne Anne Philips, conducted by her translator into French, Marc Amfreville, addressing her latest novel, Quiet Dell, through the victimhood-vulnerability prism. The corpus of primary sources on which the volume is based draws on various literary backgrounds in English, from Britain to India, through the USA. All contributions are original.
Download or read book Vulnerability in Scandinavian Art and Culture written by Adriana Margareta Dancus and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-03-30 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this open access book, seventeen scholars discuss how contemporary Scandinavian art and media have become important arenas to articulate and stage various forms of vulnerability in the Scandinavian welfare states. How do discourses of privilege and vulnerability coexist and interact in Scandinavia? How do the Scandinavian countries respond to vulnerability given increased migration? How is vulnerability distributed in terms of margin and centre, normality and deviance? And how can vulnerability be used to move audiences towards each other and accomplish change? We address these questions in an interdisciplinary study that brings examples from celebrated and provocative fiction and documentary films, TV-series, reality TV, art installations, design, literature, graphic art, radio podcasts and campaigns on social media.
