BiblioVault - Books about Aesthetics

Radio Corpse

Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound

Daniel Tiffany

Harvard University Press, 1995

About the origins of Anglo-American poetic modernism, one thing is certain: it started with a notion of the image, described variously by Ezra Pound as an ideogram and a vortex. We have reason to be less confident, however, about the relation between these puzzling conceptions of the image and the doctrine of literary positivism that is generally held to be the most important legacy of Imagism. No satisfactory account exists, moreover, of what bearing these foundational principles may have on Pound's later engagement with fascism. Nor is it clear how figures such as the vortex and the ideogram might contribute generally to our understanding of modern visual culture and its compulsive appeal.

Radio Corpse addresses these issues and offers a fundamental revision of one of the most powerful and persistent aesthetic ideologies of modernism. Focusing on the necrophilic dimension of Pound's earliest poetry and on the inflections of materiality authorized by the modernist image, Daniel Tiffany establishes a continuum between Decadent practice and the incipient avant-garde, between the prehistory of the image and its political afterlife, between what Pound calls the "corpse language" of late Victorian poetry and a conception of the image that borrows certain "radioactive" qualities from the historical discovery of radium and the development of radiography. Emphasizing the phantasmic effects of translation (and exchange) in Pound's poetry, Tiffany argues that the cadaverous--and radiological--properties of the image culminate, formally and ideologically, in Pound's fascist radio broadcasts during World War II. Ultimately, the invisibility of these "radiant" images places in question basic assumptions regarding the optical character of images--assumptions currently being challenged by imageric technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography.

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Rancière's Sentiments

Davide Panagia

Duke University Press, 2018

In Rancière’s Sentiments Davide Panagia explores Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics of politics as it informs his radical democratic theory of participation. Attending to diverse practices of everyday living and doing—of form, style, and scenography—in Rancière’s writings, Panagia characterizes Rancière as a sentimental thinker for whom the aesthetic is indistinguishable from the political. Rather than providing prescriptions for political judgment and action, Rancière focuses on how sensibilities and perceptions constitute dynamic relations between persons and the worlds they create. Panagia traces this approach by examining Rancière’s modernist sensibilities, his theory of radical mediation, the influence of Gustave Flaubert on Rancière’s literary voice, and how Rancière juxtaposes seemingly incompatible objects and phenomena to create moments of sensorial disorientation. The power of Rancière’s work, Panagia demonstrates, lies in its ability to leave readers with a disjunctive sensibility of the world and what political thinking is and can be.

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Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media

D. N. Rodowick

Duke University Press, 2001

In Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media D. N. Rodowick applies the concept of “the figural” to a variety of philosophical and aesthetic issues. Inspired by the aesthetic philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard, the figural defines a semiotic regime where the distinction between linguistic and plastic representation breaks down. This opposition, which has been the philosophical foundation of aesthetics since the eighteenth century, has been explicitly challenged by the new electronic, televisual, and digital media. Rodowick—one of the foremost film theorists writing today—contemplates this challenge, describing and critiquing the new regime of signs and new ways of thinking that such media have inaugurated.
To fully comprehend the emergence of the figural requires a genealogical critique of the aesthetic, Rodowick claims. Seeking allies in this effort to deconstruct the opposition of word and image and to create new concepts for comprehending the figural, he journeys through a range of philosophical writings: Thierry Kuntzel and Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier on film theory; Jacques Derrida on the deconstruction of the aesthetic; Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin on the historical image as a utopian force in photography and film; and Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault on the emergence of the figural as both a semiotic regime and a new stratagem of power coincident with the appearance of digital phenomena and of societies of control.
Scholars of philosophy, film theory, cultural criticism, new media, and art history will be interested in the original and sophisticated insights found in this book.

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Reading Zen in the Rocks

The Japanese Dry Landscape Garden

François Berthier

University of Chicago Press, 2005

The Japanese dry landscape garden has long attracted—and long baffled—viewers from the West. While museums across the United States are replicating these "Zen rock gardens" in their courtyards and miniature versions of the gardens are now office decorations, they remain enigmatic, their philosophical and aesthetic significance obscured. Reading Zen in the Rocks, the classic essay on the karesansui garden by French art historian François Berthier, has now been translated by Graham Parkes, giving English-speaking readers a concise, thorough, and beautifully illustrated history of these gardens.

Berthier's guided tour of the famous garden of Ryoanji (Temple) in Kyoto leads him into an exposition of the genre, focusing on its Chinese antecedents and affiliations with Taoist ideas and Chinese landscape painting. He traces the roles of Shinto and Zen Buddhism in the evolution of the garden and also considers how manual laborers from the lowest classes in Japan had a hand in creating some of its highest examples. Parkes contributes an equally original and substantive essay which delves into the philosophical importance of rocks and their "language of stone," delineating the difference between Chinese and Japanese rock gardens and their relationship to Buddhism. Together, the two essays compose one of the most comprehensive and elegantly written studies of this haunting garden form.

Reading Zen in the Rocks is fully illustrated with photographs of all the major gardens discussed, making it a handsome addition to the library of anyone interested in gardening, Eastern philosophy, and the combination of the two that the karesansui so superbly represents.

Praise for the French edition:

"A small book of rare depth, remarkably illustrated, on one of the most celebrated and beautiful rock gardens of the monasteries of Kyoto."—L'Humanité

"Through Le Jardin de Ryoanji, Berthier teaches us to read the zen in the rocks, to discover the language offered by the garden at Ryoanji. Enigmatic, poetic, and disconcerting, an enriching journey through a work of art of surprising modernity, Le Jardin de Ryoanji is a work that will interest all the amateurs of Japanese art and Eastern philosophy."—Lien Horticole

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Realism with a Human Face

Hilary Putnam

Harvard University Press, 1990

The time has come to reform philosophy, says Hilary Putnam, one of America’s great philosophers. He calls upon philosophers to attend to the gap between the present condition of their subject and the human aspirations that philosophy should and once did claim to represent. Putnam’s goal is to embed philosophy in social life.

The first part of this book is dedicated to metaphysical questions. Putnam rejects the contemporary metaphysics that insists on describing both the mind and the world from a God’s-eye view. In its place he argues for pluralism, for a philosophy that is not a closed systematic method but a human practice connected to real life. Philosophy has a task, to be sure, but it is not to provide an inventory of the basic furniture of the universe or to separate reality in itself from our own projections. Putnam makes it clear that science is not in the business of describing a ready-made world, and philosophy should not be in that business either.

The author moves on to show that the larger human context in which science matters is a world of values animated by ethics and aesthetic judgments. No adequate philosophy should try to explain away ethical facts. The dimension of history is added in the third part of the book. Here Putnam takes up a set of American philosophers, some firmly within and others outside the canon of analytic philosophy, such as William James and C. S. Peirce, and he explores the pragmatist contribution to philosophy from James to Quine and Goodman.

This book connects issues in metaphysics with cultural and literary issues and argues that the collapse of philosophical realism does not entail a fall into the abyss of relativism and postmodern skepticism. It is aimed primarily at philosophers but should appeal to a wide range of humanists and social scientists.

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The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968-1973)

Volume II, Aesthetics and Ontology

Daniel Fairfax

Amsterdam University Press, 2021

The uprising which shook France in May 1968 also had a revolutionary effect on the country’s most prominent film journal. Under editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma embarked on a militant turn that would govern the journal's work over the next five years. Inspired by Marxist and psychoanalytic theory, the "red years" of Cahiers du cinéma produced a theoretical outpouring that was seminal for the formation of film studies and is still of vital relevance for the contemporary audiovisual landscape.

The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973) gives an overview of this period in the journal’s history and its aftermath, combining biographical accounts of the critics who wrote for Cahiers in the post 1968 period with theoretical explorations of their key texts.

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Reframing Reality

The Aesthetics of the Surrealist Object in French and Czech Cinema

Alison Frank

Intellect Books, 2013

The surrealist object is an everyday item that takes on multiple associations by provoking the viewer’s imagination. It also poses a specific challenge for some filmmakers who seek to apply surrealist ideas and approaches when making feature-length narrative films. In Reframing Reality, Alison Frank looks specifically at French and Czech films, including works by Luis Buñuel, Jan Švankmajer, as well as the contemporary hit Amélie by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, in order to offer a new take on surrealist film.

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Refugee Talk

Propositions on Ethics and Aesthetics

Eva

Pluto Press, 2022

An innovative approach to the refugee crisis through a focus on language use, discourse and representation

'A wide-ranging, erudite and multi-faceted analyses of the fundamental problem of who gets to be counted as human' - Kate Evans

What does it mean to be a refugee? What political questions do they raise? Through what political rhetoric is their experiences parsed? The ongoing refugee crisis has sparked all these questions and more.

Refugee Talk uses conversation as a research method and ethical practice to approach the representation of and the discourse about and by the refugee. Though refugees who cross borders are routinely registered, filed, and detained, the individual stories they carry are just as routinely overlooked or ignored. When language itself becomes another border that excludes refugees, the need for a new vocabulary that decriminalizes and re-humanizes the refugee experience asserts itself.

The authors engage theoretically with thinkers from Hannah Arendt to Paolo Freire and Kwame A. Appiah and structure the book around conversations with academics, activists, journalists, and refugee artists and writers. The result is a comprehensive humanities approach that places ethics and aesthetics at its core.

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The Religion of Reality

Inquiry into the Self, Art, and Transcendence

Didier Maleuvre

Catholic University of America Press, 2006

The book first argues that religious feeling persists in the secular western mind; that it has taken refuge in the unlikeliest of camps, indeed with the supposed debunker of religious creed: the rationalist existential ego.

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Remixing Wong Kar-wai

Music, Bricolage, and the Aesthetics of Oblivion

Giorgio Biancorosso

Duke University Press, 2025

Like his fellow filmmakers Stanley Kubrick, Quentin Tarantino, and Sofia Coppola, Wong Kar-wai crafts the soundtracks of his films by jettisoning original scores in favor of commercial recordings. In Remixing Wong Kar-wai, Giorgio Biancorosso examines the combinatorial practice at the heart of Wong’s cinema to retheorize musical borrowing, appropriation, and repurposing. Wong’s irrepressible penchant for poaching music from other films—whether old Chinese melodramas, Hollywood blockbusters, or European art films—subsumes familiar music under his own brand of cinema. As Wong combs through musical and cinematic archives and splices disparate music together, exceedingly well-known music loses its previous associations and acquires an infinite new constellation of meanings in his films. Drawing on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage, Biancorosso contends that Wong’s borrowing is akin to a practice of creative destruction in which Wong becomes a bricoleur who remixes music at hand to create new and complete, self-sustaining statements. By outlining Wong’s modus operandi of indiscriminate borrowing and remixing, Biancorosso prompts readers to reconsider the significance of transforming preexisting music into new compositions for film and beyond.

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Renunciation

Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Philosophers, and Artists

Ross Posnock

Harvard University Press, 2016

Renunciation as a creative force in the careers of writers, philosophers, and artists is the animating idea behind Ross Posnock’s new book. Taking up acts of abandonment, rejection, and refusal that have long baffled critics, he shows how renunciation has reframed the relationship of artists and intellectuals to society in productive and unpredictable ways.

In a work of remarkable synthesis that includes traditions and genres from antiquity to postmodernity, Posnock discovers connections among disparate figures ranging from Lao Tzu to Dave Chappelle and Bob Dylan. The thread running through these acts of renunciation, he argues, is an aesthetic and ethical resistance to the demand that one’s words and actions be straightforward and immediately comprehensible. Modern art in particular valorizes the nonconceptual and the intuitive, seeking to make silence articulate and incompletion fertile.

Renouncers reject not only artistic and scholarly conventions but also the public roles that attend them. Wittgenstein, Rimbaud, and Glenn Gould brazenly flouted professional and popular expectations, demanding that philosophy, poetry, music play by new rules. Emerson and Nietzsche severed all institutional ties, while William James waged a guerrilla campaign from his post at Harvard against what all three considered to be the enemy: the pernicious philosophical insistence on rationality. Posnock also examines renunciations in light of World War II—the veterans J. D. Salinger and George Oppen, and the Holocaust survivor Paul Celan—while a fourth cluster includes the mystic Thomas Merton and the abstract painters Ad Reinhardt and Agnes Martin.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 1: Spring 1981

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 10: Autumn 1985

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 11: Spring 1986

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 12: Autumn 1986

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 13: Spring 1987

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 14: Autumn 1987

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 15: Spring 1988

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 16: Autumn 1988

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 17 & 18: Spring/Autumn 1989

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 2: Autumn 1981

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 29 & 30: Spring/Autumn 1996: The Pre-Columbian

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 31: Spring 1997: The Abject

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 32: Autumn 1997: Tradition, Translation, Treason

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 33: Spring 1998: Pre-Columbian States of Being

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 34: Autumn 1998: Architecture

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 35: Spring 1999: Intercultural China

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 36: Autumn 1999: Factura

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 37: Spring 2000

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 38: Autumn 2000

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 39: Spring 2001: African Works

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 40: Autumn 2001: Desedimenting Time

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 41: Spring 2002

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 42: Autumn 2002: West by Nonwest

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 43: Spring 2003: Islamic Arts

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2003

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 44: Autumn 2003

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 45: Spring 2004

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 46: Autumn 2004: Polemical Objects

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 47: Spring 2005

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2005

The contents of this issue are: Editorial, "Socrates' death," by Remo Guidieri; "Antimasque, Pageant: Restoration and Bethlem at Moorfields," by Christine Stevenson; "Picturing Madness in 1905: Giacomo Balla's La Pazza and the cycle The Living," by Christine Poggi; "Quoting Eros: Visual culture, irony and anachronism in Thomas Mann," by Filippo Fimiani; "Cosmos and warfare on a Classic Maya vase," by Oswaldo Chinchilla; "Women and political power: The inclusion and exclusion of noblewomen in Aztec pictorial histories," by Lori Boornazian Diel; "Ancestors and commemoration in Igbo Odo masquerades," by Benjamin Hufbauer and Bess Reed; "Style and the standardization of forms in certain arts of the Sepik," by Romain Chambrin; "The modality of time-maps: Quilting in the Pacific from another point of view," by Susanne Kuechler; Lectures, Documents and Discussions: "Slit drums on Atchin;" an unpublished manuscript by John Layard, edited and with an introduction by Haidy Geismar; "Style and meaning: Abelam art through Yolngu eyes," The 1998 Anthony Forge Lecture, by Howard Morphy; "Vodou in the age of mechanical reproduction," by Donald Cosentino; and "Heterosomatics: Remarks of an historian of women's bodies," by Barbara Duden.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 48: Autumn 2005: Permanent/Impermanent

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2005

The contents of this issue are: “Between Creation and Destruction,” by Finbarr Barry Flood and Zoë Sara Strother; “People Have Three Eyes: Ephemeral Art and the Archive in Southeastern Nigeria,” by Sarah Adams; “Beyond Monument Lies Empire: Mapping Songhay Space in Tenth- to Sixteenth-Century West Africa,” by Kristina Van Dyke; “Censorship and Iconoclasm—Unsettling Monuments,” by John Peffer; “Recycling Icons and Bodies in Chinese Anti-Buddhist Persecutions,” by Eric Reinders; “Modifications of Ancient Maya Sculpture,” by Bryan R. Just; “Roman Oscilla: An Assessment,” by Rabun Taylor; “Turning Tale into Vision: Time and Image in the Divina Commedia,” by Gervase Rosser; “Building outside Time in Alberti’s De re aedificatoria,” by Marvin Trachtenberg; and “Restoration as Re-creation at the Sainte-Chapelle,” by Meredith Cohen; and the documents and discussions “The Constitution of Pleasure: François-Joseph Belanger and the Chateau de Bagatelle,” by Taha Al-Douri; “Composing Vinteuil: Proust’s Unheard Music,” by Mauro Carbone; “Diskotel 1967: Israel and the Western Wall in the Aftermath of the Six Day War,” by Daniel Bertrand Monk; “The ‘Kulturbolschewiken’ I: Fluxus, the Abolition of Art, the Soviet Union, and ‘Pure Amusement,’” by Cuauhtémoc Medina; and “Aby Warburg in America Again: With an Edition of His Unpublished Correspondence with Edwin R. A. Seligman (1927–1928),” by Davide Stimilli.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 49/50: Spring/Autumn 2006

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2006

Res: Anthropology and Aesthetic is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal brings together, in an anthropological perspective, contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes textual and iconographic documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 5: Spring 1983

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 51: Spring 2007

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2007

Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal brings together, in an anthropological perspective, contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes textual and iconographic documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Volume 51 includes articles by Michael W. Meister, Michele Matteini, Ladislav Kesner, Yukio Lippit, Xavier Urcid, Anna Anquissola, Bissera Pentcheva, Friedrich T. Bach, Daniel Sherer, Noga Arikha, Erika Naginski, Haim Finkelstein, Nuit Banai, Laura Ilea, and Remo Guidieri.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 52: Fall 2007

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2007

Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal brings together, in an anthropological perspective, contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes textual and iconographic documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 53/54: Spring and Autumn 2008

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2008

This double volume includes: The value of forgery, Jonathan Hay; Affective operations of art and literature, Ernst van Alphen; Betty’s Turn, Stephen Melville; Richard Serra in Germany, Magdalena Nieslony; Beheadings and massacres, Federico Navarrete; Pliny the Elder and the identity of Roman art, Francesco de Angelis; Between nature and artifice, Francesca Dell’Acqua; Narrative cartographies, Gerald Guest; The artist and the icon, Alexander Nagel; Preliminary thoughts on Piranesi and Vico, Erika Naginski; Portable ruins, Alina Payne; Istanbul: The palimpsest city in search of its archi-text, Nebahat Avcioglu; The iconicity of Islamic calligraphy in Turkey, Irvin Cemil Schick; The Buddha’s house, Kazi Khalid Ashraf; A flash of recognition into how not to be governed, Natasha Eaton; Hasegawa’s fairy tales, Christine Guth; The paradox of the ethnographic-superaltern, Anna Brzyski, and contributions to “Lectures, Documents and Discussions” by Karen Kurczyncki, Mary Dumett, Emmanuel Alloa, Francesco Pellizzi, and Boris Groys.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 55/56: Absconding

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2009

This volume includes the editorial “The absconded subject of Pop,” by Thomas Crow; “Enlivening the soul in Chinese tombs,” by Wu Hung; “On the ‘true body’ of Huineng,” by Michele Matteini; “Apparition painting,” by Yukio Lippit; “Immanence out of sight,” by Joyce Cheng; “Absconding in plain sight,” by Roberta Bonetti; “Ancient Maya sculptures of Tikal, seen and unseen,” by Megan E. O’Neil; “Style and substance, or why the Cacaxtla paintings were buried,” by Claudia Brittenham; “The Parthenon frieze,” by Clemente Marconi; “Roma sotterranea and the biogenesis of New Jerusalem,” by Irina Oryshkevich; “Out of sight, yet still in place,” by Minou Schraven; “Behind closed doors,” by Melissa R. Katz; “Moving eyes,” by Bissera V. Pentcheva; “‘A secret kind of charm not to be expressed or discerned,’” by Rebecca Zorach; “Ivory towers,” by Richard Taws; “Boxed in,” by Miranda Lash; “A concrete experience of nothing,” by William S. Smith; “Believing in art,” by Irene V. Small; “Repositories of the unconditional,” by Gabriele Guercio; “From micro/macrocosm to the aesthetics of ruins and waste-bodies,” by Jeanette Zwingenberger; “Are shadows transparent?” by Roberto Casati; “Invisibility of the digital,” by Boris Groys; “Des formes et des catégories,” by Remo Guidieri; and “Further comments on ‘Absconding,’” by Francesco Pellizzi.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 57/58: Spring/Autumn 2010

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2010

This double volume of the renowned international journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics includes “Aesthetics’ non-recyclable ground” by Félix Duque; “Seeing through dead eyes” by Jonathan Hay; “The hidden aesthetic of red in the painted tombs of Oaxaca” by Diana Magaloni; “A consideration of the quatrefoil motif in Preclassic Mesoamerica” by Julia Guernsey; “Hunters, Sufis, soldiers, and minstrels” by Cynthia Becker; “Figures fidjiennes” by Marc Rochette; “A sacred landscape” by Rachel Kousser; “Military architecture as a political tool in the Renaissance” by Francesco Benelli; “The icon as performer and as performative utterance” by Marie Gasper-Hulvat; “Image and site” by Jas’ Elsner; “Untimely objects” by Ara H. Merjian; “Max Ernst in Arizona” by Samantha Kavky; “Form as revolt” by Sebastian Zeidler; “Embodiments and art beliefs” by Filippo Fimiani; “The theft of the goddess Amba Mata” by Deborah Stein; and contributions to “Lectures, Documents and Discussions” by Gottfried Semper, Spyros Papapetros, Erwin Panofsky, Megan R. Luke, Francesco Paolo Adorno, and Remo Guidieri.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 59/60: Spring/Autumn 2011

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2011

RES 59/60 includes “The making of architectural types” by Joseph Rykwert; “Traces of the sun and Inka kinetics” by Tom Cummins and Bruce Mannheim; “Inka water management and display fountains” by Carolyn Dean; “Guaman Poma’s pictures of huacas” by Lisa Trever; “Peruvian nature up close” by Daniela Bleichmar; and other papers.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 6: Autumn 1983

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 61/62: Spring/Autumn 2012: Sarcophagi

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2013

Res 61/62, Sarcophagi, is guest edited by Wu Hung and Jas Elsner. It includes “Chinese coffins from the first millennium b.c. and early images of the afterworld” by Alain Thote; “Art and personhood” by Björn Ewald; “Western Han sarcophagi and the transformation of Chinese funerary art” by Zheng Yan; “Reading identity on Roman strigillated sarcophagi” by Janet Huskinson; “‘A Tomb Both Great and Blameless’” by Richard Neer; “Funerary Spatiality” by Lillian Lan-ying Tseng; “‘Nero’s Tomb’ and the crisis of the third century” by Edmund Thomas; “Jouissance of death?” by Eugene Wang; “Reading images without texts on Roman sarcophagi” by Paul Zanker; “Decorative imperatives between concealment and display” by Jas Elsner; “Han sarcophagi” by Wu Hung; “Framing the dead on Roman sarcophagi” by Verity Platt; “Presentation, (re)animation, and the enchantments of technology” by Finbarr Barry Flood; “Death panels” by T. J. Clark; and contributions to Documents and Discussions by Andrew Scherer and Roberta Bonetti. Also included are contributions to Lectures—Color by Alexandre Tokovinine, Cameron L. McNeil, Timothy W. Pugh and Leslie G. Cecil, Leonardo Lopez Lujàn, Douglas K. Charles, and Warren R. DeBoer.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 63/64: Spring/Autumn 2013: Wet/Dry

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2013

RES 63/64, Wet/Dry, includes "Source and trace" by Christopher S. Wood; "Climatic variability and pictorial oscillation" by Whitney Davis; "Timelessness, fluidity, and Apollo's libation" by Milette Gaifman; "A liquid history: Blood and animation in late medieval art" by Beate Fricke; "Drawing blood" by Anne Dunlop; "Guercino's 'wet' drawing" by Nicola Suthor; "Volcano equals head equals kiln equals phallus: Connecting Gauguin's metaphors of the creative act" by Dario Gamboni; "On sources: Mythical and historical thinking in fin-de-siècle Vienna" by Mario Wimmer; "A Neolithic childhood: Children's drawings as prehistoric sources" by Barbara Wittmann; "The form of the indistinct: Picasso and the rise of generic creativity" by Gabriele Guercio; "Source and trace in Walter Benjamin's thought: About a polarity" by Chiara Cappelletto; "Modern architecture and prehistory: Retracing The Eternal Present" by Spyros Papapetros; and "The readymade metabolized: Fluxus in life" by David Joselit. Contributors to Lectures, Documents, and Discussions include Remo Guidieri; Félix Duque; Marvin Trachtenberg; Frank Fehrenbach; Alexander Nemerov; Robert Smithson and Alexander Nagel; Francesco Pellizzi; Jörg Trempler; Aurélie Verdier; Anna Begicheva and Natasha Kurchanova; and D. Graham Burnett, Jac Mullen, and Sal Randolph.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 65/66: 2014/2015

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press, 2015

This 35th anniversary issue includes Francesco Pellizzi, “Editorial: RES at 35”; Remo Bodei, “A constellation of words”; Stephen Houston, Barbara Fash, and David Stuart, “Masterful hands”; Mary Weismantel, “Encounters with dragons”; Guilhem Olivier, “Why give birth to enemies?”; Élodie Dupey García, “The materiality of color in the body ornamentation of Aztec gods”; Cristina Cruz González, “Crucifixion piety in New Mexico”; Duncan Caldwell, “A new ordering of Adena tablets based on a deeper reading of the McKensie Tablet”; Z. S. Strother, “A terrifying mimesis”; Wyatt MacGaffey, “Franchising minkisi in Loango”; Lisa Homann, “Alluring obscurity”; Clemente Marconi, “Pausanias and the figural decoration of Greek sacred architecture”; Bissera V. Pentcheva, “The aesthetics of landscape and icon at Sinai”; Paroma Chatterjee, “The gifts of the Gorgon”; Achim Timmermann, “Vain labor(?)”; Karen Overbey, “Seeing through stone”; Juan José Lahuerta, “The crucifixions of Velázquez and Zurbarán”; Noam Andrews, “The space of knowledge”; Katrin Seyler, “Heritage and artisanal empathy in the Republic of Tools”; Ines G. Županov, “The pulpit trap”; Edward Vazquez, “Antimatter”; Bret Rothstein, “Visual difficulty as a cultural system”; and contributions by Alessandra Russo, Éric Michaud, Maria H. Loh, and Ara H. Merjian; and the essay “Adieux aux armes,” by Remo Guidieri.

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Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 7 & 8: Spring/Autumn 1984

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, 9: Spring 1985

Francesco Pellizzi

Harvard University Press

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. Res also publishes iconographic and textual documents important to the history and theory of the arts.

Res appears twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. The journal is edited by Francesco Pellizzi. More information about Res is available at www.res-journal.org.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, volume 75-76 number 1 (2021)

The University of Chicago Press

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021

This is volume 75-76 issue 1 of Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics. RES is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal brings together, in an anthropological perspective, contributions by art historians, archaeologists, philosophers, critics, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. In addition, RES seeks to make available textual and iconographic documents of importance for the history and theory of the arts.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, volume 77-78 number 1 (2022)

The University of Chicago Press

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022

This is volume 77-78 issue 1 of Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics. RES is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal brings together, in an anthropological perspective, contributions by art historians, archaeologists, philosophers, critics, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. In addition, RES seeks to make available textual and iconographic documents of importance for the history and theory of the arts.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, volume 79-80 number 1 (2023)

The University of Chicago Press

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023

This is volume 79-80 issue 1 of Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics. RES is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal brings together, in an anthropological perspective, contributions by art historians, archaeologists, philosophers, critics, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. In addition, RES seeks to make available textual and iconographic documents of importance for the history and theory of the arts.

[more]

Res

Anthropology and Aesthetics, volume 81-82 number 1 (2024)

The University of Chicago Press

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2024

This is volume 81-82 issue 1 of Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics. RES is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal brings together, in an anthropological perspective, contributions by art historians, archaeologists, philosophers, critics, architects, artists, and others. Its field of inquiry is open to all cultures, regions, and historical periods. In addition, RES seeks to make available textual and iconographic documents of importance for the history and theory of the arts.

[more]

Rethinking Borders

John Welchman

University of Minnesota Press, 1996

The Retrieval of the Beautiful

Thinking Through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics

Galen A. Johnson

Northwestern University Press, 2010

In this elegant new study Galen Johnson retrieves the concept of the beautiful through the framework of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics. Although Merleau-Ponty seldom spoke directly of beauty, his philosophy is essentially about the beautiful.

In Johnson’s formulation, the ontology of Flesh as element and the ontology of the Beautiful as elemental are folded together, for Desire, Love, and Beauty are part of the fabric of the world’s element, Flesh itself, the term at which Merleau-Ponty arrived to replace Substance, Matter, or Life as the name of Being.

Merleau-Ponty’s Eye and Mind is at the core of the book, so Johnson engages, as Merleau-Ponty did, the writings and visual work of Paul Cézanne, Auguste Rodin, and Paul Klee, as well as Rilke’s commentary on Cézanne and Rodin. From these widely varying aesthetics emerge the fundamental themes of the retrieval of the beautiful: desire, repetition, difference, rhythm, and the sublime. The third part of Johnson’s book takes each of these up in turn, bringing Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic thinking into dialogue with classical philosophy as well as Sartre, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Deleuze. Johnson concludes his final chapter with a direct dialogue with Kant and Merleau-Ponty, and also Lyotard, on the subject of the beautiful and the sublime. As we experience with Rodin’s Balzac, beauty and the sublime blend into one another when the beautiful grows powerful, majestic, mysterious, and transcendent.

[more]

Reverberations across Small-Scale British Theatre

Politics, Aesthetics and Forms

Edited by Patrick Duggan and Victor Ukaegbu

Intellect Books, 2013

Between 1960 and 2010, a new generation of British avant-garde theater companies, directors, designers, and performers emerged. Some of these companies and individuals have endured to become part of theater history while others have disappeared from the scene, mutated into new forms, or become part of the establishment. Reverberations across Small-Scale British Theatre at long last puts these small-scale British theater companies and personalities in the scholarly spotlight. By questioning what “Britishness” meant in relation to the small-scale work of these practitioners, contributors articulate how it is reflected in the goals, manifestos, and aesthetics of these companies.

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Rhetorical Homologies

Form, Culture, Experience

Barry Brummett

University of Alabama Press, 2009

A highly developed study of the relationships between rhetoric and public culture.

One of the most widely used ideas in scholarship of the humanities and social sciences is that of homology: a formal pattern structuring different kinds of texts, ideas, and experiences. Rhetorical Homologies explores the central meaning of this form in a variety of discourses and also examines the kind of homologies that shape audience responses to personal, public, and political issues. Barry Brummett is most interested in homologies among very different orders of experience and texts: experiences on the battlefield that are homologous to those at a dining room table, for instance. What the common patterns that underlie such cases mean, why they are interesting, and why homology is rhetorical are the subjects of this study.

Brummett focuses on a wide range of topics, from the homologies between rhetoric and weapons throughout history to the homology of ritual injuries as manifested in representations of Christian martyrs, Laurel and Hardy films, the African-American practice of playing the dozens, and televised professional wrestling. Brummett also explores the homology of the Wise Woman, using rhetorical representations of Sojourner Truth and Oprah Winfrey. In a concluding chapter, Brummett argues that the idea of homology is important in understanding how social life is organized in general and that the centrality of discourse in organizing experience makes rhetorical homologies an important perspective for general knowledge beyond the boundaries of this study.

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Rhythm and Noise

An Aesthetics of Rock

Theodore Gracyk

Duke University Press, 1996

You know it when you hear it, but can you say what it is? How you know? Why you either love or loathe it? What makes it original or derivative? To a music that tends to render its aficionados and detractors equally inarticulate, Theodore Gracyk brings a rare critical clarity. His book tells us once and for all what makes rock music rock. A happy marriage of aesthetic theory and the aesthetic practice that moved a generation, Rhythm and Noise is the only thorough-going account of rock as a distinct artistic medium rather than a species of popular culture.
What’s in a name? “Rock” or “Rock ’n’ Roll?” Grayck argues that rock and roll is actually a performance style, one in a number of musical styles comprising rock. What distinguishes rock, Gracyk tells us, is how it is mediated by technology: The art is in the recording. The lesson is a heady one, entailing a tour through the history of rock music from Elvis Presley’s first recordings in 1954 to Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994. Gracyk takes us through key recordings, lets us hear what rock musicians and their critics have to say, shows us how other kinds of music compare, and gives us the philosophical background to make more than passing sense of the medium. His work takes up the common myths and stereotypes about rock, popular and academic, and focuses on the features of the music that electrify fans and consistently generate controversy. When Elvis came to town, did southern sheriffs say that rock was barbaric and addictive? Well so did Theodor Adorno, in his way, and Allan Bloom, in his, and Gracyk takes aim at this charge as it echoes through the era of recorded music. He looks at what rock has to do with romanticism and, even more, with commercialism. And he questions the orthodoxy of making grand distinctions between “serious” and “popular” art.
Keenly attuned to the nuances of music and of all the ways that we can think about it, this exhilarating book tunes us in, as no other has, to the complex role of rock in American culture.

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Rhythm

Form and Dispossession

Vincent Barletta

University of Chicago Press, 2020

More than the persistent beat of a song or the structural frame of poetry, rhythm is a deeply imbedded force that drives our world and is also a central component of the condition of human existence. It’s the pulse of the body, a power that orders matter, a strange and natural force that flows through us. Virginia Woolf describes it as a “wave in the mind” that carries us, something we can no more escape than we could stop our hearts from beating.

Vincent Barletta explores rhythm through three historical moments, each addressing it as a phenomenon that transcends poetry, aesthetics, and even temporality. He reveals rhythm to be a power that holds us in place, dispossesses us, and shapes the foundations of our world. In these moments, Barletta encounters rhythm as a primordial and physical binding force that establishes order and form in the ancient world, as the anatomy of lived experience in early modern Europe, and as a subject of aesthetic and ethical questioning in the twentieth century.

A wide-ranging book covering a period spanning two millennia and texts from over ten languages, Rhythm will expand the conversation around this complex and powerful phenomenon.

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The Rhythm of Thought

Art, Literature, and Music after Merleau-Ponty

Jessica Wiskus

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Between present and past, visible and invisible, and sensation and idea, there is resonance—so philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued and so Jessica Wiskus explores in The Rhythm of Thought. Holding the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, the paintings of Paul Cézanne, the prose of Marcel Proust, and the music of Claude Debussy under Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological light, she offers innovative interpretations of some of these artists’ masterworks, in turn articulating a new perspective on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy.

More than merely recovering Merleau-Ponty’s thought, Wiskus thinks according to it. First examining these artists in relation to noncoincidence—as silence in poetry, depth in painting, memory in literature, and rhythm in music—she moves through an array of their artworks toward some of Merleau-Ponty’s most exciting themes: our bodily relationship to the world and the dynamic process of expression. She closes with an examination of synesthesia as an intertwining of internal and external realms and a call, finally, for philosophical inquiry as a mode of artistic expression. Structured like a piece of music itself, The Rhythm of Thought offers new contexts in which to approach art, philosophy, and the resonance between them.

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Ribbon of Darkness

Inferencing from the Shadowy Arts and Sciences

Barbara Maria Stafford

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Over the course of her career, Barbara Stafford has established herself the preeminent scholar of the intersections of the arts and sciences, articulating new theories and methods for understanding the sublime, the mysterious, the inscrutable. Omnivorous in her research, she has published work that embraces neuroscience and philosophy, biology and culture, pinpointing connections among each discipline’s parallel concerns. Ribbon of Darkness is a monument to the scope of her work and the range of her intellect. At times associative, but always incisive, the essays in this new volume take on a distinctly contemporary purpose: to uncover the ethical force and moral aspects of overlapping scientific and creative inquiries. This shared territory, Stafford argues, offers important insights into—and clarifications of—current dilemmas about personhood, the supposedly menial nature of manual skill, the questionable borderlands of gene editing, the potentially refining value of dualism, and the limits of a materialist worldview.

Stafford organizes these essays around three concepts that structure the book: inscrutability, ineffability, and intuitability. All three, she explains, allow us to examine how both the arts and the sciences imaginatively infer meaning from the “veiled behavior of matter,” bringing these historically divided subjects into a shared intellectual inquiry and imbuing them with an ethical urgency. A vanguard work at the intersection of the arts and sciences, this book will be sure to guide readers from either realm into unfamiliar yet undeniably fertile territory.

[more]

Richer Entanglements

Essays and Notes on Poetry and Poems

Gregory Orr

University of Michigan Press, 1993

A prominent younger poet's intensely personal reflections on his craft and his fellow writers.

[more]

Robert Bresson

Cinematic Style as Philosophy

Robert B. Pippin

University of Chicago Press

A philosophical engagement with Bresson’s many films, attentive to more than their religiosity.

Over a forty-year career, Robert Bresson developed one of the most distinctive cinematic styles in the history of filmmaking. Criticizing conventional movies as “filmed theater,” Bresson proposed instead a way of writing with images, which he called “cinematographs.” Robert B. Pippin argues here for a way of understanding how these stylistic innovations express a range of philosophical commitments, explorations of the possible sources of meaning in late modern life, and the implications of the absence of such sources.

[more]