American Aesthetics

American Aesthetics PDF Author: Walter B. Gulick
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438478577
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
Although there are distinctly American artists--Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Grandma Moses, Thomas Hart Benton, and Andy Warhol, for example--very little attention has been devoted to formulating any distinctively American characteristics of aesthetic judgment and practice. This volume takes a step in this direction, presenting an introductory essay on the possibility of such a distinctly American tradition, and a collection of essays exploring particular examples from a variety of angles. Some of the essays in this collection extend pragmatist and process insights about the important place aesthetics has in molding and assessing experience. Other essays examine the place of American aesthetics in relation to such particular forms of art as painting, literature, music, and film. Three essays attend to the aesthetic aspects of a flourishing life. In each of the essays, American aesthetics is understood to arise out of deeply felt personal, historical, and cultural backgrounds. Consequently, not only are such relatively abstract notions as harmony, fit, elegance, proportion, and the like involved in aesthetic judgment, but also religious, political, and social factors become embroiled in aesthetic discernment. Thus the ongoing pattern of American aesthetics is shown to be distinguishable from such other varieties of aesthetic thought as analytic aesthetics, New Criticism, and postmodern approaches to aesthetics.

American Aesthetics

American Aesthetics PDF Author: Walter B. Gulick
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438478577
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 430

Get Book

Book Description
Although there are distinctly American artists--Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Grandma Moses, Thomas Hart Benton, and Andy Warhol, for example--very little attention has been devoted to formulating any distinctively American characteristics of aesthetic judgment and practice. This volume takes a step in this direction, presenting an introductory essay on the possibility of such a distinctly American tradition, and a collection of essays exploring particular examples from a variety of angles. Some of the essays in this collection extend pragmatist and process insights about the important place aesthetics has in molding and assessing experience. Other essays examine the place of American aesthetics in relation to such particular forms of art as painting, literature, music, and film. Three essays attend to the aesthetic aspects of a flourishing life. In each of the essays, American aesthetics is understood to arise out of deeply felt personal, historical, and cultural backgrounds. Consequently, not only are such relatively abstract notions as harmony, fit, elegance, proportion, and the like involved in aesthetic judgment, but also religious, political, and social factors become embroiled in aesthetic discernment. Thus the ongoing pattern of American aesthetics is shown to be distinguishable from such other varieties of aesthetic thought as analytic aesthetics, New Criticism, and postmodern approaches to aesthetics.

African American Arts

African American Arts PDF Author: Sharrell D. Luckett
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 168448152X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Trans Identity as Embodied Afrofuturism / Amber Johnson -- "I Luh God" : Erica Campbell, Trap Gospel and the Moral Mask of Language Discrimination / Sammantha McCalla -- The Conciliation Project as a Social Experiment : Behind the Mask of Uncle Tomism and the Performance of Blackness / Jasmine Coles & Tawnya Pettiford-Wates.

Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life

Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life PDF Author: Alexandra Kingston-Reese
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609386752
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life gives us a new way to view contemporary art novels, asking the key question: How do contemporary writers imagine aesthetic experience? Examining the works of some of the most popular names in contemporary fiction and art criticism, including Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Siri Hustvedt, Ben Lerner, Rachel Kushner, and others, Alexandra Kingston-Reese finds that contemporary art novels are seeking to reconcile the negative feelings of contemporary life through a concerted critical realignment in understanding artistic sensibility, literary form, and the function of the aesthetic. Kingston-Reese reveals how contemporary writers refract and problematize aesthetic experience, illuminating an uneasiness with failure: firstly, about the failure of aesthetic experiences to solve and save; and secondly, the literary inability to articulate the emotional dissonance caused by aesthetic experiences now.

Abstractionist Aesthetics

Abstractionist Aesthetics PDF Author: Phillip Brian Harper
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479865435
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
An artistic discussion on the critical potential of African American expressive culture In a major reassessment of African American culture, Phillip Brian Harper intervenes in the ongoing debate about the “proper” depiction of black people. He advocates for African American aesthetic abstractionism—a representational mode whereby an artwork, rather than striving for realist verisimilitude, vigorously asserts its essentially artificial character. Maintaining that realist representation reaffirms the very social facts that it might have been understood to challenge, Harper contends that abstractionism shows up the actual constructedness of those facts, thereby subjecting them to critical scrutiny and making them amenable to transformation. Arguing against the need for “positive” representations, Abstractionist Aesthetics displaces realism as the primary mode of African American representational aesthetics, re-centers literature as a principal site of African American cultural politics, and elevates experimental prose within the domain of African American literature. Drawing on examples across a variety of artistic production, including the visual work of Fred Wilson and Kara Walker, the music of Billie Holiday and Cecil Taylor, and the prose and verse writings of Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and John Keene, this book poses urgent questions about how racial blackness is made to assume certain social meanings. In the process, African American aesthetics are upended, rendering abstractionism as the most powerful modality for Black representation.

American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions

American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions PDF Author: Cindy Weinstein
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231156170
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
These diverse essays recast the place of aesthetics in production & consumption of American literature. Contributors showcase the interpretive possibilities available to those who bring politics, culture, ideology, & conceptions of identity into their critiques, combining close readings of individual works & authors with theoretical discussions.

Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts PDF Author: Juan G. Ramos
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 1683400593
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Bringing Latin American popular art out of the margins and into the center of serious scholarship, this book rethinks the cultural canon and recovers previously undervalued cultural forms as art. Juan Ramos uses "decolonial aesthetics," a theory that frees the idea of art from Eurocentric forms of expression and philosophies of the beautiful, to examine the long decade of the 1960s in Latin America--a time of cultural production that has not been studied extensively from a decolonial perspective. Ramos looks at examples of "antipoetry," unconventional verse that challenges canonical poets and often addresses urgent social concerns. He analyzes the militant popular songs of nueva canción by musicians such as Mercedes Sosa and Violeta Parra. He discusses films that use visually shocking images and melodramatic effects to tell the stories of Latin American nations. He asserts that these different art forms should not be studied in isolation but rather brought together as a network of contributions to decolonial art. These art forms, he argues, appeal to an aesthetic that involves all the senses. Instead of being outdated byproducts of their historical moments, they continue to influence Latin American cultural production today.

Arab American Aesthetics

Arab American Aesthetics PDF Author: Therí A. Pickens
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351596527
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 118

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Book Description
Arab American Aesthetics enlists a wide range of voices to explore, if not tentatively define, what could constitute Arab American aesthetics in literature, material culture, film, and theatre. This book seeks to unsettle current conversations within Arab American Studies that neglect aesthetics as a set of choices and constraints. Rather than divorce aesthetics from politics, the book sutures the two more closely together by challenging the causal relationship so often attributed to them. The conversations include formal choices, but also extend to the broad idea of what makes a work distinctly Arab American. That is, what about its beauty, ugliness, sublimity, or humor is explicitly tied to it as part of a tradition of Arab American arts? The book opens up the ways that we discuss Arab American literary and fine arts, so that we understand how Arab American identity and experience begets Arab American artistic enterprise. Split into three sections, the first offers a set of theoretical propositions for understanding aesthetics that traverse Arab American cultural production. The second section focuses on material culture as a way to think through the creation of objects as an aesthetic enterprise. The final section looks at narratives in theatre and how the impact of such a medium has the potential to recreate in both senses of the word: play and invention. By shifting the conversation from identity politics to the relationship between politics and aesthetics, this book provides an important contribution to Arab American studies. It will also appeal to students and scholars of ethnic studies, museum studies, and cultural studies.

American Aesthetics

American Aesthetics PDF Author: Walter B. Gulick
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438478593
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
Although there are distinctly American artists—Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Grandma Moses, Thomas Hart Benton, and Andy Warhol, for example—very little attention has been devoted to formulating any distinctively American characteristics of aesthetic judgment and practice. This volume takes a step in this direction, presenting an introductory essay on the possibility of such a distinctly American tradition, and a collection of essays exploring particular examples from a variety of angles. Some of the essays in this collection extend pragmatist and process insights about the important place aesthetics has in molding and assessing experience. Other essays examine the place of American aesthetics in relation to such particular forms of art as painting, literature, music, and film. Three essays attend to the aesthetic aspects of a flourishing life. In each of the essays, American aesthetics is understood to arise out of deeply felt personal, historical, and cultural backgrounds. Consequently, not only are such relatively abstract notions as harmony, fit, elegance, proportion, and the like involved in aesthetic judgment, but also religious, political, and social factors become embroiled in aesthetic discernment. Thus the ongoing pattern of American aesthetics is shown to be distinguishable from such other varieties of aesthetic thought as analytic aesthetics, New Criticism, and postmodern approaches to aesthetics.

Postindian Aesthetics

Postindian Aesthetics PDF Author: Debra K. S. Barker
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816545200
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Postindian Aesthetics is a collection of critical, cutting-edge essays on Indigenous writers who are creatively and powerfully contributing to a thriving Indigenous literary aesthetic. This book argues for a literary canon that includes Indigenous literature that resists colonizing stereotypes of what has been and often still is expected in art produced by American Indians. The works featured are inventive and current, and the writers covered are visionaries who are boldly redefining Indigenous literary aesthetics. The artists covered include Orlando White, LeAnne Howe, Stephen Graham Jones, Deborah Miranda, Heid E. Erdrich, Sherwin Bitsui, and many others. Postindian Aesthetics is expansive and comprehensive with essays by many of today’s leading Indigenous studies scholars. Organized thematically into four sections, the topics in this book include working-class and labor politics, queer embodiment, national and tribal narratives, and new directions in Indigenous literatures. By urging readers to think beyond the more popularized Indigenous literary canon, the essays in this book open up a new world of possibilities for understanding the contemporary Indigenous experience. The volume showcases thought-provoking scholarship about literature written by important contemporary Indigenous authors who are inspiring critical acclaim and offers new ways to think about the Indigenous literary canon and encourages instructors to broaden the scope of works taught in literature courses more broadly. ContributorsEric Gary Anderson Ellen L. Arnold Debra K. S. Barker Laura J. Beard Esther G. Belin Jeff Berglund Sherwin Bitsui Frank Buffalo Hyde Jeremy M. Carnes Gabriel S. Estrada Stephanie Fitzgerald Jane Haladay Connie A. Jacobs Daniel Heath Justice Virginia Kennedy Denise Low Molly McGlennen Dean Rader Kenneth M. Roemer Susan Scarberry-García Siobhan Senier Kirstin L. Squint Robert Warrior

The Aesthetics of Solidarity

The Aesthetics of Solidarity PDF Author: Nichole M. Flores
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
ISBN: 1647120918
Category : Christian sociology
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
"Latinx Catholics have used Our Lady of Guadalupe as a symbol in democratic campaigns ranging from the United Farm Workers movement to the Chicano movement to the movement for just immigration reform. In diverse ways, these groups use Guadalupe's symbol and narrative to make claims about justice in society's basic structures (law, policy, institutions, for example) while seeking to generate greater participation and representation in US democracy. Yet, Guadalupe is illegible within a liberal political framework that seeks to protect society's basic structures from religious encroachment by relegating religious speech, practices, and symbols to the realm of the background culture. In response to this problem, religious ethicists have argued for expansions of the liberal framework that would make religious language, arguments, and practices communities legible within a pluralistic society without capitulating to anti-democratic modes of governance that undermine pluralism. What remains unexplored is the way that the aesthetic dimensions of particular religious traditions can be engaged toward cultivating a more participatory democracy that invites substantive contributions to society's common life from religious people and communities. Instead, in conversation with political liberalism, Latinx theological aesthetics, and Catholic social thought, The Aesthetics of Solidarity examines the use of particular religious symbols to make democratic claims and generate greater participation and presence in the life of US democracy. After evaluating liberalism's capacity for constructive engagement with religion toward strengthening democratic participation, the project employs Latinx theological aesthetics and Catholic social thought to offer a constructive framework for interpreting religious symbols in the context of a religiously pluralistic and participatory democratic life"--