Tag: Aesthetics

A History of Six Ideas An Essay in Aesthetics


Free Download A History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics by Władysław Tatarkiewicz
English | PDF | 1980 | 395 Pages | ISBN : 9400988079 | 44.2 MB
The history of aesthetics, like the histories of other sciences, may be treated in a two-fold manner: as the history of the men who created the field of study, or as the history of the questions that have been raised and resolved in the course of its pursuit. The earlier History of Aesthetics (3 volumes, 1960-68, English-language edition 1970-74) by the author of the present book was a history of men, of writers and artists who in centuries past have spoken up concerning beauty and art, form and crea tivity. The present book returns to the same subject, but treats it in a different way: as the history of aesthetic questions, concepts, theories. The matter of the two books, the previous and the present, is in part the same; but only in part: for the earlier book ended with the 17th century, while the present one brings the subject up to our own times. And from the 18th century to the 20th much happened in aesthetics; it was only in that period that aesthetics achieved recognition as a separate science, received a name of its own, and produced theories that early scholars and artists had never dreamed of.

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World Literature and Ecology The Aesthetics of Commodity Frontiers, 1890-1950


Free Download Michael Niblett, "World Literature and Ecology: The Aesthetics of Commodity Frontiers, 1890-1950"
English | 2020 | pages: 264 | ISBN: 3030385833, 3030385809 | PDF | 3,4 mb
Located at the intersection of world-literary studies and the environmental humanities, this book analyses how fiction and poetry respond to the ecological transformations entailed by commodity frontiers. Examining the sugar, cacao, coal, and oil frontiers in Trinidad, Brazil, and Britain, World Literature and Ecology shows how literary texts have registered the relationship between the re-making of biophysical natures and struggles around class, race, and gender. It combines a materialist theory of world-literature with the insights of the world-ecology perspective to generate compelling new readings of writers such as Rhys Davies, Yseult Bridges, Lewis Jones, José Lins do Rego, Ellen Wilkinson, Jorge Amado, Gwyn Thomas, and Ralph de Boissière. The book represents a timely intervention into a series of field-defining debates around peripheral realisms and modernisms, ecocriticism, and the energy humanities.

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The Paradox of Existence Philosophy and Aesthetics in the Young Schelling (Topoi Library, 5)


Free Download Leonardo V. Distaso, "The Paradox of Existence: Philosophy and Aesthetics in the Young Schelling (Topoi Library, 5)"
English | 2004 | pages: 186 | ISBN: 9048166683, 1402024908 | PDF | 1,3 mb
This book is not a merely historical reconstruction of Schelling’s thought; its main goal is to provide a contribution for a better comprehension of the importance of the philosophical quest of the young German philosopher from within, which represents a turning point for the whole thought of modernity. I did not describe the various fields of Schelling’s work, but I pointed out the central position of his Aesthetics, through the analysis of the inner mechanisms of his concepts. This mechanism, in my opinion, shows the reason why an Aesthetic philosophy is possible, and why its origin can be traced to Kant’s Aesthetics (particularly in Kant’s Critique of Judgement) and in the speculations of the early post-Kantian philosophy. The young Schelling’s philosophical problems precede his encounter with Fichte’s philosophy. Schelling discovers these problems, related to Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Wolff, Leibniz and Kant, in the protestant college of the Stift in Tübingen. Fichte confirmed the necessity of an urgent reform of transcendental philosophy, and offered to the young philosopher a philosophical dictionary and an orientation. Schelling exploited these resources with a great degree of autonomy, independence and originality. In these years Hölderlin’s influence on Schelling was much greater. Schelling’s and Hölderlin’s speculations, in these crucial years, were tightly connected.

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Temptation of Non-Being, The Negativity in Aesthetics


Free Download Artemy Magun, "Temptation of Non-Being, The: Negativity in Aesthetics "
English | ISBN: 1350429988 | 2024 | 286 pages | EPUB, PDF | 15 MB + 3 MB
Why do we enjoy artworks that depict disasters and suffering? Is this a hangover from the Modernist impulse to break the rules of harmony? Is there actually a proper way to perform negativity in art without resorting to nihilism? The Temptation of Non-Being uses these fundamental questions to paint a picture of contemporary art as beset by an outbreak of the negative, and to construct a new theory of art as a medium of complex negativity. The negative in art is explained not as a simple negation or destruction, but as a multifaceted, polymorphous structure with a vast range of strategies and techniques from parody and pastiche to defamiliarization and non-resemblance. Charting the depth of these negative practices, Artemy Magun shows how they become progressively more complex and explicit, illustrating them with interdisciplinary examples from Lars von Trier, Jacek Malczewski, Andrei Platonov and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. At the heart of this layered, nested structure lies an understanding of Modern aesthetics that helps to answer even more questions: how can the testing, probing nature of art lead to this preoccupation with the negative? Why does this negativity emerge in the first place? What can it tell us about art itself and how it functions in society? This is an erudite and provocative analysis that enriches the ongoing evaluation of both ‘high’ and ‘low’ art.

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Queer Anatomies Aesthetics and Desire in the Anatomical Image, 1700-1900


Free Download Queer Anatomies: Aesthetics and Desire in the Anatomical Image, 1700-1900 by Michael Sappol
English | July 11, 2024 | ISBN: 1350400866, 1350400874 | True EPUB/PDF | 280 pages | 22.97/27.7 MB
In centuries past, sexual body-parts and same-sex desire were unmentionables debarred from polite conversation and printed discourse. Yet one scientific discipline-anatomy-had license to represent and narrate the intimate details of the human body-anus and genitals included. Figured within the frame of an anatomical plate, presentations of dissected bodies and body-parts were often soberly technical. But just as often monstrous, provocative, flirtatious, theatrical, beautiful, and even sensual. Queer Anatomies explores overlooked examples of erotic expression within 18th and 19th-century anatomical imagery. It uncovers the subtle eroticism of certain anatomical illustrations, and the queerness of the men who made, used and collected them.

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Nietzsche as Stylist Aesthetics and Philosophy


Free Download Nietzsche as Stylist: Aesthetics and Philosophy by Martine Béland
English | May 14, 2024 | ISBN: 0228021103, 0228021111 | True EPUB | 248 pages | 2.3/1.3 MB
Although he had a short career, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was a prolific writer, publishing seventeen books in the span of seventeen years. Convinced that "style must live," he focused obsessively on a wide variety of factors that could potentially affect readers’ uptake of his work, from the craft of preface writing to punctuation choices to the aesthetics of book jackets.

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Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism (2024)


Free Download Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, "Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism"
English | 2012 | pages: 288 | ISBN: 0231161484, 0231161492 | EPUB | 16,1 mb
Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women’s literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women’s transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek’s political and aesthetic investigations concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women’s literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism’s experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the appreciation of art’s emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles.

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Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalizing World


Free Download Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalizing World By Raminder Kaur, Parul Dave-Mukherji, James Staples
2014 | 304 Pages | ISBN: 1472519302 | PDF | 6 MB
An investigation of arts and aesthetics in their widest senses and experiences, presenting a variety of perspectives ranging from the metaphysical to the political. Moving beyond art as an expression of the inner mind and invention of the individual self, the volume bridges the gap between changing perceptions of contemporary art and aesthetics and maps globalizing currents in a number of contexts and regions.The volume includes an impressive variety of case studies offered by established leaders in the field and original and emerging scholarly talent covering areas in India, Nepal, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Rwanda and Germany, as well as providing transnational or diasporic perspectives. From the contradictory demands made on successful artists from the south in the global art world such as Anish Kapoor, to images of war and puppetry created by female political prisoners, the volume compels creative and political interpretations of the ever-changing and globalizing terrain of arts and aesthetics.

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