Mimesis, Expression, Construction

Mimesis, Expression, Construction PDF Author: Fredric Jameson
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
ISBN: 1915672171
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 792

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Book Description
Mimesis, Expression, Construction brings Fredric Jameson's famous Duke University seminar on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory into print for the first time. Transcribed and edited from audio recordings taken by Octavian Esanu of the original seminar at Duke University in 2003, Mimesis, Expression, Construction reproduces Jameson and his students' engagement with Aesthetic Theory, one of the most influential theories of modernist aesthetics. The first and only published record of Jameson's teaching and pedagogic style, the seminar delves into modern and modernist aesthetics through the perspectives of Kant, Hegel, Freud, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche; Benjamin and other members of the Frankfurt School; the literary works of Thomas Mann and Samuel Beckett; the music of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg; the films of Chaplin, Vertov and Eisenstein; the aesthetic implications of psychoanalysis and biblical exegesis; classical music; and more. Presented in the format of a play, with stage setting, student interruptions and exchanges, interjections, auditory noises, and ambient sounds, and complemented with scans of students' notes, Mimesis, Expression, Construction is a groundbreaking addition to the work of one of the greatest modern cultural critics.

Aesthetic Subjects

Aesthetic Subjects PDF Author: Pamela R. Matthews
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816639939
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 534

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Book Description
Recent calls for a return to aesthetics occur precisely at a moment when it is increasingly evident that nothing concerning aesthetics is self-evident anymore. Determined to recover the value of aesthetic experience for artistic, cultural, and social analysis, the contributors to this volume--prominent scholars in literature, philosophy, art history, architecture, history, and anthropology--begin from a shared recognition that ideological readings of the aesthetic have provided invaluable insights, in particular, that analyses of aesthetics within historical and social contexts tell us a great deal about the experience of aesthetic encounters. From multiple and complementary perspectives, the contributors address topics as varied as Nabokov and Dickens, Caravaggio and Shelley Winters, gender and sexuality, advertising and AIDS. Taken together, their essays constitute a sustained and multifarious effort to resituate aesthetic pleasure in the mixed, impure conditions characteristic of every social practice and experience, however privileged or marginalized, and to ask what happens to the aesthetic if we consider it apart from--or at least in tension with--its historically dominant discursive formulations. As such, this volume establishes a renewed sense of aesthetic discourse and its usefulness as a tool for understanding culture.

Music as Philosophy

Music as Philosophy PDF Author: Michael Spitzer
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253060877
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Beethoven's late style is the language of his ninth symphony, the Missa Solemnis, the last piano sonatas and string quartets, the Diabelli Variations, the Bagatelles, as well as five piano sonatas, five string quartets, and several smaller piano works. Historically, these works are seen as forging a bridge between the Classical and Romantic traditions: in terms of their musical structure, they continue to be regarded as revolutionary. Spitzer's book examines these late works in light of the musical and philosophical writings of the German intellectual Theodor Adorno, and in so doing, attempts to reconcile the conflicting approaches of musical semiotics and critical theory. He draws from various approaches to musical, linguistic, and aesthetic meaning, relating Adorno to such writers as Derrida, Benjamin, and Habermas, as well as contemporary music theorists. Through analyses of Beethoven's use of specific musical techniques (including neo-Baroque fugues and counterpoint), Spitzer suggests that the composer's last works offer a philosophical and musical critique of the Enlightenment, and in doing so created the musical language of premodernism.

Culture Industry Today

Culture Industry Today PDF Author: Fabio A. Durão
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527553396
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
The concept of culture industry leads a double life. On the one hand, it appears as transparent, being used widely and freely in reference to a branch of business; on the other, it is a notion belonging to a critical tradition that wants to preserve the tension resulting from the juxtaposition of these two words. Culture Industry Today is a contribution to the latter trend, which takes into account the current prevalence of the former. By offering interpretations of the term in relation to philosophy, media, television, the Third World, the psyche and the culture of consumption, the book aims at showing the continued relevance of an expression whose muteness is the corroboration of its darkest content.

Charles Sheeler

Charles Sheeler PDF Author: Mark Rawlinson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000213471
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Charles Sheeler was the stark poet of the machine age. Photographer of the Ford Motor Company and founder of the painting movement Precisionism, he is remembered as a promoter of - and apologist for - the industrialised capitalist ethic. This major new rethink of one of the key figures of American modernism argues that Sheeler's true relationship to progress was in fact highly negative, his 'precisionism' both skewed and imprecise. Covering the entire oeuvre from photography to painting and drawing attention to the inconsistencies, curiosities and 'puzzles' embedded in Sheeler's work, Rawlinson reveals a profound critique of the processes of rationalisation and the conditions of modernity. The book argues finally for a re-evaluation of Sheeler's often dismissed late work which, it suggests, may only be understood through a radical shift in our understanding of the work of this prominent figure.

Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger

Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger PDF Author: Wesley Phillips
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137487259
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger explains how two notoriously opposed German philosophers share a rethinking of the possibility of metaphysics via notions of music and waiting. This is connected to the historical materialist project of social change by way of the radical Italian composer Luigi Nono.

Adorno on Music

Adorno on Music PDF Author: Robert W. Witkin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136215441
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Adorno is one of the leading cultural thinkers of the twentieth century. This is the first detailed account of Adorno's texts on music from a sociological perspective. In clear, non-technical language, Robert Witkin guides the reader through the complexities of Adorno's argument about the link between music and morality and between musical works and social structure. It was largely through these works Adorno established the right of the arts to be acknowledged as a moral and critical force in the development of a modern society. By recovering them for non-musicologists, Witkin adds immeasurably to our appreciation of this giant of twentieth-century thought.

Adorno's Poetics of Form

Adorno's Poetics of Form PDF Author: Josh Robinson
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438469853
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description


Inventions of a Present

Inventions of a Present PDF Author: Fredric Jameson
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1804292419
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
A novel is an act, an intervention, which, most often, the nave reader takes as a representation. The novel intervenes to modify or correct our conventional notions of a situation and, in the best and most intense cases, to propose a wholly new idea of what constitutes an event or of the very experience of living. The most interesting contemporary novels are those which try-and sometimes manage-to awaken our sense of a collectivity behind individual experience, revealing a relationship between the isolated subjectivity and a class or community. But even if this happens (which is rare), one must go on to find traces of collective praxis hidden away within the awakened feeling of inter-connection. And since it is in the sense of the nation and nationality that collectivity is most often expressed, there is an urgent need to disengage the possibilities of genuine action within these areas. This sweeping collection of essays ranges from the elusive politics of North American literature to the sometimes frozen narrative experiences of the eastern countries and the Soviet Union and beyond. This is a voyage traversing the globe, discovering a common kinship between each literary destination in late capitalism itself.

Adorno's Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth

Adorno's Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth PDF Author: Owen Hulatt
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231542208
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In Adorno's Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth, Owen Hulatt undertakes an original reading of Theodor W. Adorno's epistemology and its material underpinnings, deepening our understanding of his theories of truth, art, and the nonidentical. Hulatt's novel interpretation casts Adorno's theory of philosophical and aesthetic truth as substantially unified, supporting the thinker's claim that both philosophy and art are capable of being true. For Adorno, truth is produced when rhetorical "texture" combines with cognitive "performance," leading to the breakdown of concepts that mediate the experience of the consciousness. Both philosophy and art manifest these features, although philosophy enacts these conceptual issues directly, while art does so obliquely. Hulatt builds a robust argument for Adorno's claim that concepts ineluctably misconstrue their objects. He also puts the still influential thinker into conversation with Hegel, Husserl, Frazer, Sohn-Rethel, Benjamin, Strawson, Dahlhaus, Habermas, and Caillois, among many others.