The Aesthetics of Disturbance

The Aesthetics of Disturbance
Author: David Graver
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 1995
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780472105076

Explores interconnections among early 20th-century visual, literary, and performance art


The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai

The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai
Author: Gary Bettinson
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2014-11-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9888139290

The widely acclaimed films of Wong Kar-wai are characterized by their sumptuous yet complex visual and sonic style. This study of Wong’s filmmaking techniques uses a poetics approach to examine how form, music, narration, characterization, genre, and other artistic elements work together to produce certain effects on audiences. Bettinson argues that Wong’s films are permeated by an aesthetic of sensuousness and “disturbance” achieved through techniques such as narrative interruptions, facial masking, opaque cuts, and other complex strategies. The effect is to jolt the viewer out of complete aesthetic absorption. Each of the chapters focuses on a single aspect of Wong’s filmmaking. The book also discusses Wong’s influence on other filmmakers in Hong Kong and around the world. The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai will appeal to all who are interested in authorship and aesthetics in film studies, to scholars in Asian studies, media and cultural studies, and to anyone with an interest in Hong Kong cinema in general, and Wong’s films in particular. “In this carefully written study, Gary Bettinson offers a critical assessment not only of the stylistic features of Wong Kar-wai’s films but also of the scholarship that has developed around them. Arguing against the facile culturalism that tends to dominate such scholarship, this book does full justice to Wong’s cinematic methods in a series of impressively well-informed and informative readings.” —Rey Chow, Duke University


Silvestre Revueltas

Silvestre Revueltas
Author: Roberto Kolb-Neuhaus
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 737
Release: 2023
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 019975148X

"To this day, both at home and beyond Mexico's borders, Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940) has been systematically portrayed as a nationalist composer. Unknown or ignored, his private and public writings destroy this myth straight out. The then-fashionable musicking of a presumed Mexicanness was far from Revueltas' mind. Strongly inspired by the Soviet Revolution, his dream was to find ways to sound the voice of the social people, not only those wandering the Mexican streets but also the gypsy miners in Spain, the black slaves in the U.S. South, and those in Cuba in colonial times. The various soundings of such social actors account for the diversity of aesthetics in his works, explored in this book through a correlation of the musical texts with the composer's writings as well as his political activism: he was not only active at home as a leading member of the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, but also significantly as a member of the Mexican delegation visiting Republican Spain in the midst of the war against Franco's fascist troupes. With few exceptions, though, most of his works seek to transcend standards of political art expression, such as program music or scores variously linked to word or image. Significantly, Revueltas' early instrumental works appear to abstract a musical ontology from the time and space of his diverse and multiple social actors through a daringly free use of montage and collage. Avant-garde rebellion and satire are also present in his best-known late works. Revueltas's is a unique and provocative decolonial art that pokes fun at the cosmopolitanistic fantasies of his Eurocentric peers at home as well as exoticizing expectations abroad. Unveiling the sense behind Revueltas's irony and the form political passion takes on in his music is the intention behind Kolb-Neuhaus's hermeneutic approach, which intertwines Revueltian art with his writings and political actions"--


Occult Aesthetics

Occult Aesthetics
Author: K.J. Donnelly
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2014-02
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0199773505

Table of Contents 1. Introduction: The Lock of Synchronization 2. Synchronization: McGurk and Beyond 3. Sound Montage 4. Occult Aesthetics 5. Isomorphic Cadences: Film as 'Musical' 6. 'Visual' Sound Design: the Sonic Continuum 7. 'Pre' and 'Post' Sound 8. Wildtrack Asynchrony 9. Conclusion: Final Speculations Bibliography Index.


The Aesthetics of Education

The Aesthetics of Education
Author: Tyson E. Lewis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2012-06-14
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1441157719

A groundbreaking work, applying Ranciere's theories of aesthetics and politics to the field of teaching, analysing the works of Dewey, Freire and other education thinkers.


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

Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life
Author: Alexandra Kingston-Reese
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2020-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1609386760

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


Slash

Slash
Author: Robin T. Harrison
Publisher:
Total Pages: 60
Release: 1975
Genre: Slash (Logging)
ISBN:


The Politics of Aesthetics

The Politics of Aesthetics
Author: Marc Redfield
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2003
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780804747509

This book suggests that modern cultural and critical institutions have persistently associated questions of aesthetics and politics with literature, theory, technics, and Romanticism. Its first section examines aesthetic nationalism and the figure of the body, focusing on writings by Benedict Anderson, J. G. Fichte, and Matthew Arnold, and arguing that uneasy acts of aestheticization (of media technology) and abjection (of the maternal body) undergird the production of the national body as “imagined community.” Subsequent chapters on Paul de Man, Friedrich Schlegel, and Percy Shelley explore the career of the gendered body in the aesthetic tradition and the relationship among aesthetics, technics, politics, and figurative language. The author accounts for the hysteria that has characterized media representations of theory, explains why and how Romanticism has remained a locus of extravagant political hopes and anxieties, and, in a sequence of close readings, uncovers the “anaesthetic” condition of possibility of the politics of aesthetics.


A Genealogy of Cyborgothic

A Genealogy of Cyborgothic
Author: Dongshin Yi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351962507

In his provocative and timely study of posthumanism, Dongshin Yi adopts an imaginary/imaginative approach to exploring the transformative power of the cyborg, a strategy that introduces balance to the current discourses dominated by the practicalities of technoscience and the dictates of anthropocentrism. Proposing the term "cyborgothic" to characterize a new genre that may emerge from gothic literature and science fiction, Yi introduces mothering as an aesthetic and ethical practice that can enable a posthumanist relationship between human and non-human beings. Yi examines the cyborg's literary manifestations in novels, including The Mysteries of Udolpho, Frankenstein, Dracula, Arrowsmith, and He, She and It, alongside philosophical and critical texts such as Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment, John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism and System of Logic, William James's essays on pragmatism, ethical treaties on otherness and things, feminist writings on motherhood, and recent studies of posthumanism. Arguing humans imagine the cyborg in ways that are seriously limited by fear of the unknown and current understandings of science and technology, Yi identifies in gothic literature a practice of the beautiful that extends the operation of sensibility, heightened by gothic manifestations or situations, to surrounding objects and people so that new feelings flow in and attenuate fear. In science fiction, which demonstrates how society has accommodated science, Yi locates ethical corrections to the anthropocentric trajectory that such accommodation has taken. Thus, A Genealogy of Cyborgothic imagines a new literary genre that helps envision a cyborg-friendly, non-anthropocentric posthuman society. Encoded with gothic literature's aesthetic embrace of fear and science fiction's ethical criticism of anthropocentrism, the cyborgothic retains the prospective nature of these genres and develops mothering as an aesthetico-ethical practice that both humans and cyborgs should perform.