Aesthetics

In Film Fables Jacques Ranciere turns his critical eye to the history of modern cinema. Combining an extraordinary breadth of analysis with an attentiveness to detail born from an obvious love of cinema, Ranciere shows us new ways of looking at and...

This study is a fresh and original attempt to liberate the theory of criticism from the limitations of connoisseurship, and the assumptions of aesthetics from the difficulties and paradoxes of aesthetic relativism. It presents a picture of what...

The Work of Difference addresses a fundamental ontological question: What is literature? And at the heart of this question, it argues, is the problem of the new. How is it that new works or new forms are possible within the rule-governed orders of...

What is the nature of aesthetic experience? Ha Poong Kim suggests that a genuine aesthetic experience is a perceptual state of consciousness, free of thought. He characterises it as subjectless, objectless, timeless, revelatory, and joyous. It is a state...

Though philosopher Alfred North Whitehead did not dedicate any books or articles specifically to aesthetics, aesthetic motifs nonetheless permeate his entire body of work. Despite this, aestheticians have devoted little attention to Whitehead. In this...

Objects are all around us - and images of objects, advertisements for objects. Things are no longer merely purely physical or economic entities: within the visual economy of advertising, they are inescapably moral. Any object, regardless of its nature,...

Musically Sublime rewrites musically the history and philosophy of the sublime. Music enables us to reconsider the traditional course of sublime feeling on a track from pain to pleasure. Resisting the notion that there is a single format for sublime...

This book is based on the comprehensive investigations of the literary forms of philosophy around 1800 conducted within research project 'Heuristics between Science and Poetry'. It presents new research on the debates on the concept of the symbol from...

By interrogating the terms and concepts most central to cultural change, Future Theory interrogates how theory can play a central role in dynamic transition. It demonstrates how entangled the highly politicized spheres of cultural production, scientific...

Shortlisted, 2021 Memory Studies Association First Book Award The Fact of Resonance returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which theories of the novel developed, seeking in sound an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative...

More than any other area of late-twentieth-century thinking, gender theory and its avatars have been to a large extent a Franco-American invention. In this book, a leading Franco-American scholar traces differences and intersections in the development of...

This is a broad-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink aesthetic and literary studies in terms of an "anthropology" of symbolic media generally. Central to the author's argument is the proposition that the idea of literature-at least as it has been...

Current philosophies of art remain sadly dominated by visions of its end and lamentations of decline. Defining the very notions of art and the aesthetic as special products of Western modernity, they suggest that postmodern challenges to traditional high...

A concise yet thorough introduction to aesthetics in the form of an alphabetic guide. Written in a clear and engaging style, Aesthetics A-Z provides authoritative coverage of the main concepts, arguments, problems and key figures in aesthetics and the...

According to the literary humanist, works of imaginative literature have an objective meaning which is fixed at the time of their production and which is the same for all readers, then and thereafter, not subject to the vagaries of individual readers'...

The prominence of the imagination in David Hume's philosophy has been recognised by generations of readers. In this rich study, Timothy Costelloe gives us the most complete picture yet of Hume's view of imagination and its place in his philosophy.Book...

Already in 1929, Walter Benjamin described "a one hundred per cent image-space." Such an image space saturates our world now more than ever, constituting the visibility in which we live. The Supermarket of the Visible analyzes this space and the icons...

Figures of Simplicity explores a unique constellation of figures from philosophy and literature-Heinrich von Kleist, Herman Melville, G. W. Leibniz, and Alexander Baumgarten-in an attempt to recover alternative conceptions of aesthetics and dimensions...

By contextualizing Walter Pater's aestheticism alongside Alexandre Kojeve's and Georges Bataille's readings of Hegelianism, this book shows that Pater's aestheticism constitutes both a philosophy of death and at the same time a philosophy of the...

Against the assumption that aesthetic form relates to a harmonious arrangement of parts into a beautiful whole, this book argues that reason is the real theme of the Critique of Judgment as of the two earlier Critiques. Since aesthetic judgment of the...

Current philosophical discussions of self-deception remain steeped in disagreement and controversy. In The Self-Deceiving Muse, Alan Singer proposes a radical revision of our commonplace understanding of self-deception. Singer asserts that...

In the past two decades, African American filmmakers like Spike Lee have made significant contributions to the dialogue about race in the United States by adapting techniques from classic film noir to black American cinema. This book is the first to...

Aesthetics has typically been regarded as an arena where claims about truth cannot be made as questions about art seem to involve more matters of taste than knowledge. In Real Beauty, however, Eddy Zemach maintains that beauty, ugliness, gracefulness,...

This volume brings together essays by leading philosophers of art who consider what can be learned from the meaning of art about society, morality, and life in general. This subject inevitably leads to discussion of other issues. Is art distinct from...

Though many well-known German philosophers have devoted considerable attention to music and its aesthetics, surprisingly few of their writings on the subject have been translated into English. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, a philosopher, and Oliver Furbeth, a...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780307387974Author David ShieldsFormat PaperbackPage Count 240Imprint Random House IncPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 204gDimensions(mm) 203mm *...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Glitter reveals the complexity of an object often dismissed as frivolous. Nicole Seymour describes how glitter's consumption and status have...

In this third installment of his classic 'Foundations' trilogy, Michel Serres takes on the history of geometry and mathematics. Even more broadly, Geometry is the beginnings of things and also how these beginnings have shaped how we continue to think...

Half a century after his shocking samurai-style suicide, Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) remains a deeply controversial figure. Though his writings and life-story continue to fascinate readers around the world, Mishima has often been scorned by scholars, who...

Artful Truths offers a concise guide to the fundamental philosophical questions that arise when writing a literary work about your own life. Bringing a philosopher's perspective to a general audience, Helena de Bres addresses what a memoir is, how the...

This book, by one of the most challenging contemporary thinkers, begins with an essay that introduces the principal concern sustained in the four succeeding ones: Why are there several arts and not just one? This question focuses on the point of maximal...

Everyone deplores narcissism, especially in others. The vain are by turns annoying or absurd, offending us whether they are blissfully oblivious or proudly aware of their behavior. But are narcissism and vanity really as bad as they seem? Can we avoid...

An important reconsideration of ideology by one of this century's most eminent theorists.This long-awaited volume by one of the major figures of twentieth-century thought represents perhaps the most provocative, serious, and important rethinking of...

By exploring central issues in the philosophy of literature, illustrated by a wide range of novels, poems, and plays, Philosophy of Literature gets to the heart of why literature matters to us and sheds new light on the nature and interpretation of...

There has long been a need for a work on the philosophy of beauty treating fundamental problems against the background of the history of aesthetics - ancient and medieval as well as modern and contemporary.This book answers that need with the...

Why do gardens matter so much and mean so much to people? That is the intriguing question to which David Cooper seeks an answer in this book. Given the enthusiasm for gardens in human civilization ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, it is surprising...

As the sunset swings into view, you think, "That's beautiful." You take a bite of cake and you think, "Wow, that's sweet"-maybe too sweet. You hear that new song and it blows you away. You play it for your friends. The novel is wonderful, the movie...

Elaborating the history, variety, pervasiveness, and function of the adornments and ornaments with which we beautify ourselves, this book takes in human prehistory, ancient civilizations, hunter-foragers, and present-day industrial societies to tell a...

This volume builds on two recent developments in philosophy on the relationship between art and science: the notion of representation and the role of values in theory choice and the development of scientific theories. Its aim is to address questions...

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature contains twenty-three newly commissioned essays by major philosophers and literary scholars that investigate literature as a form of attention to human life. Various forms of attention are considered under...