Best moving pictures I ever saw. Thus did one Vaudeville theater manager describe Georges Melies s A Trip to the Moon Le Voyage dans la lune], after it was screened for enthusiastic audiences in October 1902. Cinema s first true blockbuster, A Trip to the Moon still inspires such superlatives and continues to be widely viewed on DVD, on the Internet, and in countless film courses. In Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination, leading film scholars examine Melies s landmark film in detail, demonstrating its many crucial connecions to literature, popular culture, and visual culture of the time, as well as its long afterlife in more recent films, television, and music videos. Together, these essays make clear that Melies was not only a major filmmaker but also a key figure in the emergence of modern spectacle and the birth of the modern cinematic imagination, and by bringing interdisciplinary methodologies of early cinema studies to bear on A Trip to the Moon, the contributors also open up much larger questions about aesthetics, media, and modernity.
In his introduction, Matthew Solomon traces the convoluted provenance of the film s multiple versions and its key place in the historiography of cinema, and an appendix contains a useful dossier of primary-source documents that contextualize the film s production, along with translations of two major articles written by Melies himself. Included with the book is a critical edition DVD containing two versions of the film: a reconstructed version (finally presented at the speed specified in Melies s catalogs) accompanied by an original 1903 score and a recently rediscovered color-tinted version; both have optional audio commentaries by the editor.

Is music a language of the emotions? How do recorded pop songs differ from works created for live performance? Is John Cage's silent piece, 4'33", music? Stephen Davies's new book collects some of his most important papers on central topics in the philosophy of music. As well as perennial questions, Davies addresses contemporary controversies, including the impact of modern technology on the presentation and reception of both new and old musical works. These essays, two of them new and previously unpublished, are self-standing but thematically connected, and will be of great interest to philosophers, aestheticians, and to theorists of music and art.

The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art provides an extensive research resource to the burgeoning field of Asian aesthetics. Featuring leading international scholars and teachers whose work defines the field, this unique volume reflects the very best scholarship in creative, analytic, and comparative philosophy. Beginning with a philosophical reconstruction of the classical rasa aesthetics, chapters range from the nature of art-emotions, tones of thinking, and aesthetic education to issues in film-theory and problems of the past versus present. As well as discussing indigenous versus foreign in aesthetic practices, this volume covers North and South Indian performance practices and theories, alongside recent and new themes including the Gandhian aesthetics of surrender and self-control and the aesthetics of touch in the light of the politics of untouchability. With such unparalleled and authoritative coverage, The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art represents a dynamic map of comparative cross-cultural aesthetics. Bringing together original philosophical research from renowned thinkers, it makes a major contribution to both Eastern and Western contemporary aesthetics.

Man has always had a weakness for aesthetics, which secretly catch, enchant and seize the attention. Size and colour, form and rhythm affect the desire to say yes or no.
In modern society art is pure and ruthless. But a price has been paid for this freedom: art has become irrelevant.
The opposite of pure art is applied art, which not only must be aesthetically satisfying, but must also fulfil economic, political or religious considerations.

Aesthetic communication explores how organizations use aesthetics. Beginning with an exciting chapter on aesthetic art and applied art it follows with an in-depth analysis of the different fields of organizational aesthetics;
- Image, or the creation of an attractive veil;
- rhetoric, or the use of words to affect people;
- narrative, or the construction of seducing contexts;
- design, or how to impregnate ordinary things with attraction and identity;
- advertisement, or how to insert products in a heavenly world; and
- architecture or how to use buildings to tell about greatness and power.

This philosophical theory of art, addressed to anyone with a serious interest in the arts, has three main objectives: to shift the focus of aesthetics from the question "What is art?" to the question "What is art for?"; to describe the social and historical situation of art today; and to combine aesthetics with poetics and hermeneutics. A distinctive feature of the book is its argument that music exemplifies the current condition of art in a particularly revealing fashion.

Despite the recent upsurge of interest in Theodor Adorno's work, his literary writings remain generally neglected. Yet literature is a central element in his aesthetic theory. Building on the current emergent interest in modern philosophical aesthetics, this book offers a wide-ranging account of the literary components of Adorno's thinking. Bringing together original essays from a distinguished international group of contributors, it offers the reader a user-friendly path through the major areas of Adorno's work in this area. It is divided into three sections, dealing with the concept of literature, with poetry and poetics, and with modernity, drama and the novel respectively. At the same time, the book provides a clear sense of the unique qualities of Adorno's philosophy of literature by critically relating his work to a number of other influential theorists and theories including contemporary postmodernist thought and cultural studies.

In "Eighteenth Century British Aesthetics", editor Dabney Townsend has brought together the work of such well-known writers as John Dryden, Joshua Reynolds, David Hume, and Samuel Johnson with the more obscure works of aestheticians such as Uvedale Price, Daniel Webb, John Baillie, and James Harris, whose work is difficult to find, but is nonetheless important, informative, and interesting. These twenty-two selections, accompanied by Dabney Townsend's historical essay on the development of eighteenth century aesthetics, make the history of aesthetics accessible to both students and specialists alike.

This text offers a series of critical commentaries on, and forced encounters between, different thinkers. At stake in this philosophical and psychoanalytical enquiry is the drawing of a series of diagrams of the finite/infinite relation, and the mapping out of the contours for a speculative and pragmatic production of subjectivity.

This volume examines the image-based methods of interpretation that pictorial and literary landscapists employed between 1500 and 1700. The seventeen essays ask how landscape, construed as the description of place in image and/or text, more than merely inviting close viewing, was often seen to call for interpretation or, better, for the application of a method or principle of interpretation. Contributors: Boudewijn Bakker, William M. Barton, Stijn Bussels, Reindert Falkenburg, Margaret Goehring, Andrew Hui, Sarah McPhee, Luke Morgan, Shelley Perlove, Kathleen P. Long, Lukas Reddemann, Denis Ribouillault, Paul J. Smith, Troy Tower, and Michel Weemans.

This book provides a unique, philosophical interpretation of a significant twentieth-century painter - Wassily Kandinsky. Michel Henry was one of the leading French philosophers of the twentieth century. His numerous works of philosophy are all organized around the theme of life. In contrast to the scientific understanding of life as a biological process, Henry's philosophy develops a conception of life as an immediate feeling of one's own living."Seeing the Invisible" marks Henry's most sustained engagement in the field of aesthetics. Through an analysis of the life and works of Wassily Kandinsky, Henry uncovers the philosophical significance of Kandinsky's revolution in painting: that abstract art reveals the invisible essence of life. Henry shows that Kandinsky separates colour and line from the constraints of visible form and, in so doing, conveys the invisible intensity of life - a force rooted in the corporeity and pathos of all living beings. More than just a study of art history, this book presents Kandinsky as an artist who is engaged in the project of painting the invisible and thus offers invaluable methodological clues for Henry's own phenomenology of the invisible.

Noise is so often a 'stench in the ear' - an unpleasant disturbance or an unwelcome distraction. But there is much more to noise than what greets the ear as unwanted sound. Beyond Unwanted Sound is about noise and how we talk about it. Weaving together affect theory with cybernetics, media histories, acoustic ecology, geo-politics, sonic art practices and a range of noises, Marie Thompson critiques both the conservative politics of silence and transgressive poetics of noise music, each of which position noise as a negative phenomenon. Beyond Unwanted Sound instead aims to account for a broader spectrum of noise, ranging from the exceptional to the banal; the overwhelming to the inaudible; and the destructive to the generative. What connects these various and variable manifestations of noise is not negativity but affectivity. Building on the Spinozist assertion that to exist is to be affected, Beyond Unwanted Sound asserts that to exist is to be affected by noise.

This is a fresh, bold study of the emerging field of Sound Art, informed by the ideas of Adorno, Merleau Ponty and others. "Listening to Noise and Silence" engages with the emerging practice of sound art and the concurrent development of a discourse and theory of sound. In this original and challenging work, Salome Voegelin immerses the reader in concepts of listening to sound artwork and the everyday acoustic environment, establishing an aesthetics and philosophy of sound and promoting the notion of a sonic sensibility. A multitude of sound works are discussed, by lesser known contemporary artists and composers (for example Curgenven, Gasson and Federer), historical figures in the field (Artaud, Feldman and Cage), and that of contemporary canonic artists such as Janet Cardiff, Bill Fontana, Bernard Parmegiani, and Merzbow. Informed by the ideas of Adorno, Merleau-Ponty and others, the book aims to come to a critique of sound art from its soundings rather than in relation to abstracted themes and pre-existing categories. "Listening to Noise and Silence" broadens the discussion surrounding sound art and opens up the field for others to follow.

This is the first English translation of Ranciere's study of the 19th century French poet and critic Stephane Mallarme. In this concise and illuminating study, Jacques Ranciere, one of the world's most popular and influential living philosophers, examines the life and work of the celebrated nineteenth-century French poet and critic, Stephane Mallarme. Ranciere presents Mallarme as neither an aesthete in need of rare essences and unheard-of words, nor the silent and nocturnal thinker of some poem too pure to be written. Mallarme is the contemporary of a republic that is seeking out forms of civic worship to replace the pomp of religions and kings. If his writing is difficult, it is because it complies with a demanding and delicate poetics that is itself responding to an exceptional awareness of the complexity of an historical moment as well as the role that poetry ought to play in it.

Surely you've experienced it before: you're listening to a piece of music and all of a sudden you find a lump in your throat, a tear in your eye, or a chill down your spine.

Whether it's Beethoven's Choral Symphony or The Verve's 'Bittersweet Symphony', a bit of blues or a bit of baroque, music has the power to move us. It's a language which we all speak. But why does it have this effect on us? What is going on, emotionally, physically and cognitively when listeners have strong emotional responses to music? What, if anything, do such responses mean? Can they tell us anything about ourselves?

Jeanette Bicknell uses research in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology to address these questions, ultimately showing us that the reason why some music tends to arouse powerful experiences in listeners is inseparable from the reason why any music matters at all. Musical experience is a social one, and that is fundamental to its attractions and power over us.

This is the first collection in English devoted exclusively to pragmatist aesthetics. Its main aim is to employ the resources of that rich and exciting tradition in studying artistic phenomena such as film, sculpture, bio-art, poetry, the novel, cuisine, and various body arts. But it also attempts to provide a wider background for such studies by sketching the history of pragmatist reflection on the aesthetic and by discussing some of the main positions that this history has produced: the aesthetic conceptions of C.S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Joseph Margolis, Richard Shusterman (somaesthetics in particular), and others.

The scattered research history of the Old Frisian runic inscriptions dating to the early Medieval period (ca. AD 400-1000) calls for a comprehensive and systematic reprocessing of these objects within their socio-cultural context and against the backdrop of the Old English Runic tradition. This book presents an annotated edition of 24 inscriptions found in the modern-day Netherlands, England and Germany. It provides the reader with an introduction to runological methodology, a linguistic commentary on the features attested in the inscriptions, and a detailed catalogue which outlines the find history of each object and summarizes previous and new interpretations supplemented by pictures and drawings. This book additionally explores the question of Frisian identity and an independent Frisian runic writing tradition and its relation to the contemporary Anglo-Saxon runic culture. In its entirety, this work provides a rich basis for future research in the field of runic writing around the North Sea and may therefore be of interest to scholars of historical linguistics and early Medieval history and archaeology.

The Culture of Boredom is a collection of essays by well-known specialists reflecting from philosophical, literary, and artistic perspectives, in which the reader will learn how different disciplines can throw light on such an appealing, challenging, yet still not fully understood, phenomenon. The goal is to clarify the background of boredom, and to explore its representation through forgotten cross-cutting narratives beyond the typical approaches, i.e. those of psychology or psychiatry. For the first time this experienced group of scholars gathers to promote a cross-border dialogue from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Peg Rawes examines a "minor tradition" of aesthetic geometries in ontological philosophy. Developed through Kant's aesthetic subject she explores a trajectory of geometric thinking and geometric figurations--reflective subjects, folds, passages, plenums, envelopes and horizons--in ancient Greek, post-Cartesian and twentieth-century Continental philosophies, through which productive understandings of space and embodies subjectivities are constructed.
Six chapters, explore the construction of these aesthetic geometric methods and figures in a series of "geometric" texts by Kant, Plato, Proclus, Spinoza, Leibniz, Bergson, Husserl and Deleuze. In each text, geometry is expressed as a uniquely embodies "aesthetic" activity because each respective geometric method and figure is imbued with aesthetic "sensibility" and geometric "sense" (rather than as disembodies scientific methods). An ontology of aesthetic geometric methods and figures is therefore traced from Kant's Critical writings, back to Plato and Proclus Greek philosophy, Spinoza and Leibniz's post-Cartesian philosophies, and forwards to Bergson's "duration" and Husserl's "horizons" towards Deleuze's philosophy of sense.

New arts created in the context of new social realities are impacting our traditional ideas about aesthetics. Art, art markets and aesthetics now interact in ways that demand new forms of thought and revision of old. Cosmopolitan Aesthetics presents the first thorough account of the challenges facing aesthetics today in the light of globalization, introducing the history that underpins them. This is an ideal starting point for anyone looking to better understand 21st century art and aesthetics. Beginning with globalization and the nature of global art markets today, Daniel Herwitz offers new insight into postcolonial aesthetics, colonial legacies, cultural property, the problems of global communication and aesthetic diversity, and the uneasy connection between aesthetics and politics, before providing a crucial grounding in 18th and 19th century aesthetics, with discussion of the three great modern aestheticians David Hume, Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel.