Hunting the Sun upends all previous Faulkner biography, scholarship, and criticism by tracing to Honore de Balzac virtually everything in William Faulkner's oeuvre. Faulkner's work departs, often confusingly, from the traditional Romantic focus of novels. The reason for the confusion is that Faulkner was rewriting Balzac's La Comedie humaine, itself a prose revision of Dante's Divine Comedy, in order to create his own comedy. More specifically, Faulkner abandons the metaphysical basis of the earlier works and replaces them with a psychosexual one; for example, Balzac's "The Succubus" becomes Faulkner's "Carcassonne", which the American renders an erotic fantasy. Virtually all of Faulkner's major works, and many of the lesser ones, have direct sources in Balzac's work.

In her feminist inquiry into aesthetics and the sublime, Claire Raymond reinterprets the work of the American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981). Placing Woodman in a lineage of women artists beginning with nineteenth-century photographers Julia Margaret Cameron and Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden, Raymond compels a reconsideration of Woodman's achievement in light of the gender dynamics of the sublime. Raymond argues that Woodman's photographs of decrepit architecture allegorically depict the dissolution of the frame, a dissolution Derrida links to theories of the sublime in Kant's Critique of Judgement. Woodman's self-portraits, Raymond contends, test the parameters of the gaze, a reading that departs from the many analyses of Woodman's work that emphasize her dramatic biography. Woodman is here revealed as a conceptually sophisticated artist whose deployment of allegory and allusion engages a broader debate about Enlightenment aesthetics, and the sublime.

Two crucial moments in the formation and disintegration of musical modernity and the musical canon occurred at the turn of the seventeenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Dr Ljubica Ilic provides a fresh and close look at these moments, exploring the ways musical compositions shift to and away from ideological structures identified with modernity. The focus is on European art music whose grand narrative, defined by tonality and teleological development, begins in the seventeenth century and ends with twentieth-century modernisms. This particular musical "language game" coincides with historical changes in the phenomenological understanding of space and selfhood. A key concept of the book concerns musical compositions that remain without proper conclusions: if the wholesome (musical) work is a manifestation of wholesome subjectivity, the pieces Ilic explores deny it, reflecting conflict of the individual with previous beliefs, with contexts, and even within the self as the basic modern condition. The musical work is, in this case, still bounded and well-defined, but fractured by the incapability or refusal to satisfactorily conclude: the implicit cut forced upon it changes the expected musical flow or - speaking in spatial terms - it influences the musical form. By using the metaphor of space, Ilic explores: how the existence of a separate self as a primary feature of Western modernity becomes negotiated through awareness of the subject's own independence and individuality; innerness as something entirely separate from its surroundings; and the collective space of social interaction. Seeing musical storytelling as a metaphoric representation of selfhood, and modernity as a historical continuum, Ilic examines the boundaries and relationships between the musical work, the subject, and modern European history.

In this volume, a team of internationally respected contributors theorize the concept of aesthetic experience and its value. Exposing and expanding our restricted cultural and intellectual presuppositions of what constitutes aesthetic experience, the book aims to re-explore and affirm the place of aesthetic experience--in its evaluative, phenomenological and transformational sense--not only in relation to art and artists but to our inner and spiritual lives.

Literary scholarship has paid little serious attention to Habermas' philosophy, and, on the other hand, the reception of Habermas has given little attention to the role that literary practice can play in a broader theory of communicative action. David Colclasure's argument sets out to demonstrate that a specific, literary form of rationality inheres in literary practice and the public reception of literary works which provides a unique contribution to the political public sphere.

This book gathers research and writings that reflect on traditional and current global issues related to art and aesthetics, gender perspectives, body theories, knowledge and learning. It illustrates these core dimensions, which are bringing together philosophy, tradition and cultural studies and laying the groundwork for comparative research and dialogues between aesthetics, Chinese philosophies, Western feminist studies and cross-cultural thought. Pursuing an interdisciplinary approach, the book also integrates philosophical enquiries with cultural anthropology and contextual studies. As implied in the title, the main methodologies are cross-cultural and comparative studies, which touch on performances in art and aesthetics, social existence and education, and show that philosophical enquiries, aesthetical representation and gender politics are simultaneously historical, living and contextual. The book gathers a wealth of cross-cultural reflections on philosophical aesthetics, gender existence and cultural traditions. The critical thinking within will benefit undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in the area of comparative philosophies. It blends academic rigor with personal reflection, which is a critical practice in feminist philosophy itself.

Bringing Graham Harman's philosophy into direct confrontation with contemporary architectural theory in new and creative ways, Is There an Object-Oriented Architecture? provides a dialogue between Harman and six of the world's leading architectural thinkers, Adam Sharr, Lorens Holm, Jonathan Hale, Peg Rawes, Patrick Lynch and Peter Carl. Harman's object-oriented philosophy is one that sees the universe as a carnival of equal "objects" with no hierarchy between humans and nonhumans. In his model, unicorns, triangles, bicycles, neutrons, and humans are all things with enduring essences that outlast their partial transformations. It is a strikingly democratic vision of the universe that knocks humans off their ontological pedestal as arbiters of what is real. It also radically challenges the very precepts of architectural theory, the structure of which remains stubbornly human-centric as it seeks to give form to the human being's place at the centre of the cosmos. In this new book, each thinker develops the implications of Harman's philosophy for the future of architecture by entering into a direct exchange with the philosopher and his thinking, both questioning him and questioning with him.

The 7th book from Nadir Lahiji for the Routledge architecture list. Adopts Alain Badiou's thesis from The Pornographic Age to argue that the dominant pedagogy within architecture is at odds with the intended purpose of architectural practice and education. Aimed at architecture students at higher graduate and post-graduate levels.

The 7th book from Nadir Lahiji for the Routledge architecture list. Adopts Alain Badiou's thesis from The Pornographic Age to argue that the dominant pedagogy within architecture is at odds with the intended purpose of architectural practice and education. Aimed at architecture students at higher graduate and post-graduate levels.

Meaning in the visual arts centers on how the physical work makes its content or presence visible. The art object is fundamental. Indeed, the different object forms of each visual medium allows our experience of space-time, and our relations to other people, to be aesthetically embodied in unique ways. Through these embodiments, visual art compensates for what is otherwise existentially lost, and becomes part of what makes life worth living. The present book shows this by discussing a range of visual art forms, namely pictorial representation, abstraction, sculpture and assemblage works, land art, architecture, photography, and varieties of digital art.

Kandinsky's theory of art has usually been treated as little more than a guide to help our understanding of his paintings. In contrast, this book attends primarily to the artist's writings on art; thus his art theory is treated on its own terms. Drawing on the diverse literature that has been written on Kandinsky's art and theory, the author demonstrates that while many different perspectives on his work have been identified, none holds the 'key' to that work. Instead, the book shows Kandinsky's method in his writings to be highly eclectic, resulting in an exciting and challenging variety of content (a description that also applies, as a postscript to the book shows, to his method in painting). Kandinsky, however, transcended this diversity and consistently sought evidence of the unity of all things: something that would be realised through his understanding of the term 'synthesis'. The book follows Kandinsky's fascinating attempts to establish synthesis (not only in art but also in other disciplines including science, mathematics, law and politics) in his key theoretical publications: On the Spiritual in Art (1911) and Point and Line to Plane (1926). The result is a new and innovative understanding of both Kandinsky's art theory and his art.

Artistic labour was exemplary for Utopian Socialist theories of 'attractive labour', and Marxist theories of 'nonalienated labour', but the rise of the anti-work movement and current theories of 'fully automated luxury communism' have seen art topple from its privileged place within the left's political imaginary as the artist has been reconceived as a prototype of the precarious 24/7 worker. Art and Postcapitalism argues that art remains essential for thinking about the intersection of labour, capitalism and postcapitalism not insofar as it merges work and pleasure but as an example of noncapitalist production. Reassessing the contemporary politics of work by revisiting debates about art, technology and in the nineteenth and twentieth century, Dave Beech challenges the aesthetics of labour in John Ruskin, William Morris and Oscar Wilde with a value theory of the supersession of capitalism that sheds light on the anti-work theory by Silvia Federici, Andre Gorz, Kathi Weeks and Maurizio Lazzarato, as well as the technological Cockayne of Srnicek and Williams and Paul Mason. Formulating a critique of contemporary postcapitalism, and developing a new understanding of art and labour within the political project of the supersession of value production, this book is essential for activists, scholars and anyone interested in the real and imagined escape routes from capitalism.

The explosion of minimalism into the worlds of visual arts, music and literature in the mid-to-late twentieth century presents one of the most radical and decisive revolutions in aesthetic history. Detested by some, embraced by others, minimalism's influence was immediate, pervasive and lasting, significantly changing the way we hear music, see art and read literature. In The Theory of Minimalism, Marc Botha offers the first general theory of minimalism, equally applicable to literature, the visual arts and music. He argues that minimalism establishes an aesthetic paradigm for rethinking realism in genuinely radical terms. In dialogue with thinkers from both the analytic and continental traditions - including Kant, Danto, Agamben, Badiou and Meillassoux - Botha develops a constellation of concepts which together encapsulate the transhistorcial and transdisciplinary reach of minimalism. Illustrated by a range of historical, canonical and contemporary minimalist works of different media, from the caves of early Christian ascetics to Samuel Beckett's late prose, Botha offers a bold and provocative argument which will equip readers with the tools to engage critically with past, present and future minimalism, and to recognize how, in a culture caught between the poles of excess and austerity, minimalism still matters.

Responding to Heidegger's stark warnings concerning the essence of technology, this book demonstrates art's capacity to emancipate the life-world from globalized technological enframing. Louise Carrie Wales presents the work of five contemporary artists - Martha Rosler, Christian Boltanski, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and collaborators Noorafshan Mirza and Brad Butler - who challenge our thinking and compel a dramatic re-positioning of social norms and hidden beliefs. The through-line is rooted in Heidegger's question posed at the conclusion of his technology essay as understood through artworks that provides a counter to enframing while using increasingly sophisticated technological methods. The themes are political in nature and continue to have profound resonance in today's geopolitical climate. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, aesthetics, philosophy, and visual culture.

Through a radical reading of Hegel's oeuvre, The Architecture of Freedom sets forth a theory of open borders centered on a new interpretation of the German philosopher's related conceptions of language and the aesthetic, mastery and servitude, and subjectivity and the state. The book's argument turns on Hegel's identification of "Africa" as a fluid, utopic space enabling the traversal of the East-West binary. As Hegel's figure for the non-historical, Africa emerges as the negativity that propels the movement of the dialectic in time. Mirroring the "shrouded" continent's relation to history, Kantian "architectonics" step out of the realm of logic in Hegelian thought and drive the historical unfolding of the aesthetic. In a foundational move, Hegel hypostatizes the aesthetic entanglement of built and linguistic form as the colossus of Memnon, an African warrior memorialized in ancient architecture, myth, and art. Reaching for freedom, the Memnon marks the architectonic modality through which the African slave, at the telos of history, will fulfill the spiritual promise of the human and bring about the politically mature state. The book examines the syncretic figure of the Memnon and slave across Hegel's lecture courses, the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Encyclopedia, and the Philosophy of Right. Ultimately the book calls for a reassessment of a range of Hegelian philosophemes across disciplines in the humanities. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in philosophy, postcolonial and African studies, political theory, architecture, and historiography.

The Arabesque from Kant to Comics tracks the life and afterlife of the arabesque in its surprising transformation from an iconoclastic literary theory of early German Romanticism to aesthetic experimentation in both avant-garde art and popular culture. Its explosive growth in popularity was followed by an inevitable taming as arabesques became staples in book illustration, poetry publications, and even the decoration of printed scores. The subversive potential of the arabesque was preserved in one of its most surprising offspring, the comic strip: born at the moment when the cholera pandemic first swept through Europe, the comic translated the arabesque's rank growth into unnerving lawlessness and sequences of contagious visual slapstick. Focusing roughly on the period between 1780 and 1880, this book illuminates the intersecting histories of avant-garde theories of writing, visual culture, and even the disciplinary origins of art history. In the process, it explores media history and intermediality, social networks and cultural transfer, as well as the rise of new and nontraditional art forms. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of art history, intellectual history, European art, aesthetics, book illustration, material culture, reproduction, comics, and German history.

The Aesthetics Primer is intended for anyone interested in the topic of aesthetics and how it can influence directions in education. The text is suitable for university courses that address aesthetics specifically, but also art education, values education, philosophy of education, and qualitative research methods. While examples are frequently taken from art, the primer is applicable beyond the discipline of aesthetic education. The text approaches its topic from two directions. First, there is a theoretical and philosophical section, providing a historical context for the term «aesthetics. It then provides a practical application, describing a research protocol that examines how participants respond to, record, and reflect on their aesthetic encounters. These activities result in a merging of aesthetic responses and, in the examples provided, art criticism. The implication is that the exercise could be extended to include other educational disciplinary foci as well. The research clearly indicates emerging patterns of self- and social awareness that result from subjects' participation.

This book is about the interrelationship between nature, semiosis, metarepresentation and (self-)consciousness, and the role played by metarepresentation in evolution. Representations must have emerged via self-organization from non-representational systems (found in physics, chemistry and biology). Major steps have been the evolution of molecules, macromolecules, life, and finally cultural and symbolic systems. Representations and signs are therefore parts of a huge, possibly branching «ladder of beings. Metarepresentations - images representing images, language about language and language-use, thoughts about thoughts - constitute a fascinating theme within such diverse areas of research as philosophy, literature, theology, anthropology and history, neuroscience, psychology and linguistics. The contributions to this book reflect this variety of different, but often interrelated perspectives on metarepresentation. They also exemplify the difficulties of a truly interdisciplinary discourse and show how one may start such a discourse in the field of semiotics, understood as a meta-discipline which brings together all scientific enterprises dealing with human mind and human culture.

In this book, the founder of object-oriented ontology develops his view that aesthetics is the central discipline of philosophy. Whereas science must attempt to grasp an object in terms of its observable qualities, philosophy and art cannot proceed in this way because they don't have direct access to their objects. Hence philosophy shares the same fate as art in being compelled to communicate indirectly, allusively, or elliptically, rather than in the clear propositional terms that are often taken - wrongly - to be the sole stuff of genuine philosophy. Conceiving of philosophy and art in this way allows us to reread key debates in aesthetic theory and to view art history in a different way. The formalist criticism of Greenberg and Fried is rejected for its refusal to embrace the innate theatricality and deep multiplicity of every artwork. This has consequences for art criticism, making pictorial content more important than formalism thinks but less entwined with the social sphere than anti-formalism holds. It has consequences for art history too, as the surrealists, David, and Poussin, among others, gain in importance. The close link between aesthetics and ontology also invites a new periodization of modern philosophy as a whole, and the habitual turn away from Kant's thing-in-itself towards an increase in philosophical "immanence" is shown to be a false dawn. This major work will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy, aesthetics, art history and cultural theory.

This collection of philosophical essays addresses important issues in the arts, encompassing painting, sculpture, photography, film and architecture. The author's point of departure is the conviction that art in all its manifestations is an extremely significant cultural practice because it embodies a creative, reflective appropriation of social, political, economic, religious, historical and ecological developments, and as such merits close philosophical scrutiny, reflection and interpretation. The question of whether painting is still a viable artistic practice in our technocratic society is considered here, and it is no accident that both this issue and that of artificial intelligence are approached from the perspective of the phenomenological thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among other thinkers. Equally important is the consideration of the relationship between art and the ethical, as highlighted by significant recent artistic events, as well as discussion of the transformational influence of ecological art and the culturally symptomatic meaning of kitsch. Other themes discussed include play and artistic tradition, formulating a suitable model for art 'beyond' Kierkegaard's aesthetic and ethical models, the meaning of 9/11 for architecture, and Lyotard's claim that today only an aesthetic of the sublime, instead of the beautiful, can help us make sense of art.

This book shows how and why debates in the philosophy of film can be advanced through the study of the role of images in Plato's dialogues, and, conversely, why Plato studies stands to benefit from a consideration of recent debates in the philosophy of film. Contributions range from a reading of Phaedo as a ghost story to thinking about climate change documentaries through Plato's account of pleonexia. They suggest how philosophical aesthetics can be reoriented by attending anew to Plato's deployment of images, particularly images that move. They also show how Plato's deployment of images is integral to his practice as a literary artist. Contributors are Shai Biderman, David Calhoun, Michael Forest, Jorge Tomas Garcia, Abraham Jacob Greenstine, Paul A. Kottman, Danielle A. Layne, David McNeill, Erik W. Schmidt, Timothy Secret, Adrian Switzer, and Michael Weinman.

The book was awarded The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Book Prize in 2010. Art continues to bemuse and confuse many people today. Yet, its critical analyses are saturated with daunting analyses of contemporary art's exhaustion, its predictability or its absorption into global commercial culture. In this book, the author seeks to clarify this apprehensive perception of art. He argues it is a consequence not only of confounding art-works, but also of the paradoxical impetus of a culture of modernity. By positively reassessing the perplexing or apprehensive features of cultural modernity as well as of aesthetic inquiry, this book redefines the ambitions of art in the wake of this legacy. In the process, it challenges many familiar approaches to art inquiry in order to offer a new understanding of the aesthetic, social and cultural aspirations of art in our time.

What is computer art? Do the concepts we usually employ to talk about art, such as 'meaning', 'form' or 'expression' apply to computer art?

A Philosophy of Computer Art is the first book to explore these questions. Dominic Lopes argues that computer art challenges some of the basic tenets of traditional ways of thinking about and making art and that to understand computer art we need to place particular emphasis on terms such as 'interactivity' and 'user'.

Drawing on a wealth of examples he also explains how the roles of the computer artist and computer art user distinguishes them from makers and spectators of traditional art forms and argues that computer art allows us to understand better the role of technology as an art medium.

Mapping Paradigms in Modern and Contemporary Art defines a new cartographic aesthetic, or what Simonetta Moro calls carto-aesthetics, as a key to interpreting specific phenomena in modern and contemporary art, through the concept of poetic cartography. The problem of mapping, although indebted to the "spatial turn" of poststructuralist philosophy, is reconstructed as hermeneutics, while exposing the nexus between topology, space-time, and memory. The book posits that the emergence of "mapping" as a ubiquitous theme in contemporary art can be attributed to the power of the cartographic model to constitute multiple worldviews that can be seen as paradigmatic of the post-modern and contemporary condition. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in art history, art theory, aesthetics, and cartography.

Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945) is the most important Japanese philosopher of the last century. His constant aim in philosophy was to try to articulate Zen in terms drawn from Western philosophical sources, yet in the end he found that he could not do so, and his thought illustrates a conceptual incommensurability at the deepest level between the main line of the Western tradition and one of the main lines in Eastern thought. This book is a work of comparative philosophy. Attention is given to the consequences of Nishida's metaphysics in the areas of ethics, aesthetics, the philosophy of religion and notably the implications of Nishida's example for the question of pluralism. This study of Nishida brings into sharp focus the question of whether, faced with a conceptual incommensurability at as deep a level as that manifested by Zen, the choice between it and its Western alternative can be wholly rational.