Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics

Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics PDF Author: Simone Pfleger
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228019141
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 138

Get Book

Book Description
While heteronormativity continues to permeate nearly all threads of the socio-cultural fabric, several early twenty-first-century German films offer insight into how we might challenge that dominance and disrupt its linear construction of time. Examining the fluidity of time in eight contemporary films of the Berlin School, Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics foregrounds how queer conceptualizations of temporality can engage notions of subjectivity, relationality, and intimacy in visual representations. Each film depicts figures that grapple with an unattainable desire for connection, placed in landscapes shaped by hegemonic heteronormative intimacies, and a linear temporal organization of life that conforms to mainstream, traditional rhythms, and milestones. Simone Pfleger proposes a new model for viewing non-normative relationality and intimacies, using the concept of untimeliness as an analytical framework for examining content and aesthetics. In these films, untimeliness provides an alternative to the romanticization of progress by charting how the filmic figures understand themselves and relate to one another in various spheres: work, love, sex, home, family, and self. Ultimately, Pfleger shows how the texts uncover a temporary promise of breaking free from restrictive social structures, even as they make clear that this schism cannot and should not be permanent. By proposing time as a critical lens through which to investigate our relationships and intimacies, Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics offers a new way to think about film and encourages moviegoers to turn the analysis back toward themselves and their own desires, expectations, assumptions, and adherence to or deviation from normative narratives in their own lives.

Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics

Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics PDF Author: Simone Pfleger
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228019141
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 138

Get Book

Book Description
While heteronormativity continues to permeate nearly all threads of the socio-cultural fabric, several early twenty-first-century German films offer insight into how we might challenge that dominance and disrupt its linear construction of time. Examining the fluidity of time in eight contemporary films of the Berlin School, Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics foregrounds how queer conceptualizations of temporality can engage notions of subjectivity, relationality, and intimacy in visual representations. Each film depicts figures that grapple with an unattainable desire for connection, placed in landscapes shaped by hegemonic heteronormative intimacies, and a linear temporal organization of life that conforms to mainstream, traditional rhythms, and milestones. Simone Pfleger proposes a new model for viewing non-normative relationality and intimacies, using the concept of untimeliness as an analytical framework for examining content and aesthetics. In these films, untimeliness provides an alternative to the romanticization of progress by charting how the filmic figures understand themselves and relate to one another in various spheres: work, love, sex, home, family, and self. Ultimately, Pfleger shows how the texts uncover a temporary promise of breaking free from restrictive social structures, even as they make clear that this schism cannot and should not be permanent. By proposing time as a critical lens through which to investigate our relationships and intimacies, Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics offers a new way to think about film and encourages moviegoers to turn the analysis back toward themselves and their own desires, expectations, assumptions, and adherence to or deviation from normative narratives in their own lives.

Body Aesthetics

Body Aesthetics PDF Author: Sherri Irvin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019871677X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Get Book

Book Description
This volume contains 16 original essays on the aesthetics of the body and bodily experience. Contributors in philosophy, sociology, dance, disability theory, race studies, feminist theory, medicine and law explore topics from beauty and sexual attractiveness to national identity and the somatic aesthetics of racialised police violence.

The Aesthetic Body

The Aesthetic Body PDF Author: Erec R. Koch
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780874130102
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 398

Get Book

Book Description
Those two developments converge to construct an aesthetic body; that is, in its full etymological sense, a body whose principal functions are the production of sensation and affectivity. This study examines the importance of the body in the determination of sensibility and passion in French culture of the seventeenth century." "The Aesthetic Body will engage readers with interests in literature, philosophy, the history of ideas, the history of science and medicine, cultural history, and political theory of the French early modem period."--Jacket.

The Body Aesthetic

The Body Aesthetic PDF Author: Tobin Siebers
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472086733
Category : Aesthetics
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book

Book Description
Establishes the body's undeniable presence and strangeness as the material out of which human beings are made

Panorama

Panorama PDF Author: Wilhelm Wurzer
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1847143660
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Get Book

Book Description
The new electronic age has seen a radical transition from book to screen, a development which has obscured the fact that it is not what we see which matters but how we see what we see. We live in a time when the visible needs to be retheorised.Panorama presents a broad analysis of philosophies of the visible in art and culture, particularly in painting, film, photography, and literature. The work of key philosophers--Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Barthes, Blanchot, Foucault, Bataille, Derrida, Lyotard and Deleuze--is examined in the context of visibility, expressivity, the representational and the postmodern. Contributors: Zsuzsa Baross, Robert Burch, Alessandro Carrera, Dana Hollander, Lynne Huffer, Volker Kaiser, Reginald Lilly, Robert S. Leventhal, Janet Lungstrum, Ladelle McWhorter, Ludwig Nagl, Anne Tomiche, James R. Watson, Lisa Zucker

On Slowness

On Slowness PDF Author: Lutz Koepnick
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231538251
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Get Book

Book Description
Speed is an obvious facet of contemporary society, whereas slowness has often been dismissed as conservative and antimodern. Challenging a long tradition of thought, Lutz Koepnick instead proposes we understand slowness as a strategy of the contemporary—a decidedly modern practice that gazes firmly at and into the present's velocity. As he engages with late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century art, photography, video, film, and literature, Koepnick explores slowness as a critical medium to intensify our temporal and spatial experiences. Slowness helps us register the multiple layers of time, history, and motion that constitute our present. It offers a timely (and untimely) mode of aesthetic perception and representation that emphasizes the openness of the future and undermines any conception of the present as a mere replay of the past. Discussing the photography and art of Janet Cardiff, Olafur Eliasson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Michael Wesely; the films of Peter Weir and Tom Tykwer; the video installations of Douglas Gordon, Willie Doherty, and Bill Viola; and the fiction of Don DeLillo, Koepnick shows how slowness can carve out spaces within processes of acceleration that allow us to reflect on alternate temporalities and durations.

Thinking Through the Body

Thinking Through the Body PDF Author: Richard Shusterman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107019060
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 383

Get Book

Book Description
A richly rewarding vision of the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics, with fourteen essays by the originator of the field.

Black Time and the Aesthetic Possibility of Objects

Black Time and the Aesthetic Possibility of Objects PDF Author: Daphne Lamothe
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469675323
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 135

Get Book

Book Description
The decades following the civil rights and decolonization movements of the sixties and seventies—termed the post-soul era—created new ways to understand the aesthetics of global racial representation. Daphne Lamothe shows that beginning around 1980 and continuing to the present day, Black literature, art, and music resisted the pull of singular and universal notions of racial identity. Developing the idea of "Black aesthetic time"—a multipronged theoretical concept that analyzes the ways race and time collide in the process of cultural production—she assesses Black fiction, poetry, and visual and musical texts by Paule Marshall, Zadie Smith, Tracy K. Smith, Dionne Brand, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Stromae, among others. Lamothe asks how our understanding of Blackness might expand upon viewing racial representation without borders—or, to use her concept, from the permeable, supple place of Black aesthetic time. Lamothe purposefully focuses on texts told from the vantage point of immigrants, migrants, and city dwellers to conceptualize Blackness as a global phenomenon without assuming the universality or homogeneity of racialized experience. In this new way to analyze Black global art, Lamothe foregrounds migratory subjects poised on thresholds between not only old and new worlds, but old and new selves.

Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism

Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism PDF Author: Ewa Płonowska Ziarek
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231530900
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Get Book

Book Description
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.

The Untimely Present

The Untimely Present PDF Author: Idelber Avelar
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822324157
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book

Book Description
The Untimely Present examines the fiction produced in the aftermath of the recent Latin American dictatorships, particularly those in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Idelber Avelar argues that through their legacy of social trauma and obliteration of history, these military regimes gave rise to unique and revealing practices of mourning that pervade the literature of this region. The theory of postdictatorial writing developed here is informed by a rereading of the links between mourning and mimesis in Plato, Nietzsche's notion of the untimely, Benjamin's theory of allegory, and psychoanalytic / deconstructive conceptions of mourning. Avelar starts by offering new readings of works produced before the dictatorship era, in what is often considered the boom of Latin American fiction. Distancing himself from previous celebratory interpretations, he understands the boom as a manifestation of mourning for literature's declining aura. Against this background, Avelar offers a reassessment of testimonial forms, social scientific theories of authoritarianism, current transformations undergone by the university, and an analysis of a number of novels by some of today's foremost Latin American writers--such as Ricardo Piglia, Silviano Santiago, Diamela Eltit, João Gilberto Noll, and Tununa Mercado. Avelar shows how the 'untimely' quality of these narratives is related to the position of literature itself, a mode of expression threatened with obsolescence. This book will appeal to scholars and students of Latin American literature and politics, cultural studies, and comparative literature, as well as to all those interested in the role of literature in postmodernity.