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Georg Simmel is one of the most original German thinkers of the twentieth century and is considered a founding architect of the modern discipline of sociology. Ranging over fundamental questions of the relationship of self and society, his influential writings on money, modernity, and the metropolis continue to provoke debate today.
Fascinated by the relationship between culture, society, and economic life, Simmel took an interest in myriad phenomena of aesthetics and the arts.  A friend of writers and artists such as Auguste Rodin, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Stefan George, he wrote dozens of pieces engaging with topics such as the work of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Rodin, Japanese art, naturalism and symbolism, Goethe, “art for art’s sake”, art exhibitions, and the aesthetics of the picture frame.

This is the first collection to bring together Simmel’s finest writing on art and aesthetics, and many of the items appear in English in this volume for the first time. The more than forty essays show the protean breadth of Simmel’s reflections, covering landscape painting, portraiture, sculpture, poetry, theater, form, style, and representation. An extensive introduction by Austin Harrington gives an overview of Simmel’s themes and elucidates the significance of his work for the many theorists who would be inspired by his ideas.

Something of an outsider to the formal academic world of his day, Simmel wrote creatively with the flair of an essayist. This expansive collection of translations preserves the narrative ease of Simmel’s prose and will be a vital source for readers with an interest in Simmel’s trailblazing ideas in modern European philosophy, sociology, and cultural theory.

How the “glance” rather than the “gaze” in nineteenth-century literature and art anticipates the turn to modernism

The sweeping vantages that typify American landscape painting from the nineteenth century by Thomas Cole and other members of the Hudson River School are often interpreted for their geopolitical connotations, as visual attempts to tame the wild, alleviating fears of a savage frontier through views that subdue the landscape to the eye. But many literary figures of the era display a purposeful disdain for the “possessive gaze,” signaling a preference for subtle glances, often informed by early photography, Impressionism, new techniques in portraiture, and, soon after, the dawn of cinema. The visual subjectivities and contingencies introduced by these media made room for a visual counternarrative, one informed by a mode of seeing that moves fast and lightly across the surface of things.

Tavlin probes Nathaniel Hawthorne’s theory of the imagination at a turning point in the history of photography, when momentary glances take on new narrative potentials. The poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper toggles between gazes and glances, unsettling two competing forms of racialized seeing as they pertain to nineteenth-century Black life and racial hierarchies—the sentimental gaze and the slave trader’s glance—highlighting the life-and-death stakes of looking and looking away. Emily Dickinson’s syntactical oddities and her lifelong process of stitching and unstitching the poems that constitute her corpus all derive from a commitment to immanence associated with animal perception. Tavlin investigates, as well, Henry James’s vexed relationship to painterly Impressionism and William Carlos Williams’s imagist poetics as a response to early cinema’s use of the cut as the basis for a new visual grammar.

Each of these literary artists—via their own distinctive sensibilities and the artistic or technological counterparts that informed them—refuse the authoritative, all-possessive gaze in favor of the glance, a mode of seeing, thinking, and being that made way for the twentieth century’s twist on modernity. Glancing Visions will be of interest to scholars and teachers of American literature and literary history, visual culture, visual theory, aesthetic philosophy, and phenomenology.
 

In 2018 India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the world's tallest statue: a 597-foot figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel. Twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, it is but one of many massive statues built following India's economic reforms of the 1990s. In Gods in the Time of Democracy Kajri Jain examines how monumental icons emerged as a religious and political form in contemporary India, mobilizing the concept of emergence toward a radical treatment of art historical objects as dynamic assemblages. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork at giant statue sites in India and its diaspora and interviews with sculptors, patrons, and visitors, Jain masterfully describes how public icons materialize the intersections between new image technologies, neospiritual religious movements, Hindu nationalist politics, globalization, and Dalit-Bahujan verifications of equality and presence. Centering the ex-colony in rethinking key concepts of the image, Jain demonstrates how these new aesthetic forms entail a simultaneously religious and political retooling of the “infrastructures of the sensible.”