This book rethinks the concept of community taking Jean-Luc Nancy's influential essay "La communaute desoeuvree" as its starting point, tracing subsequent scholarship on community and adding new insights on avant-garde aesthetics and politics. Extensively exploring the communitarian dimension of avant-garde aesthetics and politics (focusing on artistic groups, intellectual circles and theoretical collectives), the author aims to bring literature and art into a philosophical examination of the paradoxical and complex idea of community.

This book analyzes the relation between the flow time and poetic speech in drama and rhetoric. It begins with the classical understanding of time as flux, and its problems and paradoxes entailing from Aristotle, Augustine, Kant and Husserl. The reader will see how these problems unfold and find resolutions through dramatic speech and rhetoric which has an essential relation to the flow of time. It covers elements in poetic speech such as affect, rhythm, metaphor, and syntax. It uses examples from classical rhetorical theories by Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, dramatic speeches from Shakespeare, as well as other modern dramatic texts by Chekhov, Beckett, Jelinek and Sarah Kane. This book appeals to students and academic researchers working in the philosophical fields of aesthetics and phenomenology as well those working in theater and the performing arts.

The Continuum Aesthetics series looks at the aesthetic questions and issues raised by all major art forms. Stimulating, engaging and highly readable, the series offers food for thought not only for students of aesthetics, but also for anyone with an interest in philosophy and the arts. Aesthetics and Literature places philosophical aesthetics at the heart of thinking about literature. The book takes concrete examples from the traditional and contemporary literary arts and uses them to introduce all the central philosophical issues in literature. David Davies considers, with stimulating insight and great clarity, the nature of literature and fiction, artistic uses of language, and the nature of fictional characters. He goes on to explore our emotional responses to literature, the cognitive value and ethical values of literature and the accountability of the literary arts. The book offers a clear, non-technical analysis of each key issue, its broader significance and the principal positions that philosophers have taken on it. Davies presents the relevant philosophical background in a manner that is accessible to philosophy studentsand lay readers alike. Anyone interested in the philosophy of literature will find this book a rich source of ideas, insight and information. Combining a clear and engaging style with a sophisticated treatment of a fascinating subject, Aesthetics and Literature is a valuable contribution to contemporary aesthetics.

Being of Two Minds examines the place that early modern literature held in Modernist literary criticism. For T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and William Empson, the early modern period helps model a literary future. At stake in their engagements across time were ontological questions about literature and its ability to mediate between the one and the many, the particular and the general, life and death, the past and the present. If reading and writing literature enables the mind to be in two places at once, creative experience serves as a way to participate in an expanded field of consciousness alongside mortality. Goldberg reads the readings that these modernists performed on texts that Eliot claimed for the canon like the metaphysical poets and Jacobean dramatists, but also Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, and Margaret Cavendish. Ontological concerns are reflected in Eliot's engagement with Aristotle's theory of the soul and Empson's Buddhism. These arguments about being affect minds and bodies and call into question sexual normativity: Eliot glances at a sodomitical male-male mode of literary transmission; Woolf produces a Judith Shakespeare to model androgynous being; Empson refuses to distinguish activity from passivity to rewrite gender difference. The work of one of our leading literary and cultural critics, Being of Two Minds spans centuries to show how the most compelling and surprising ideas about mind, experience, and existence not only move between early modernity, high modernism, and our own moment, but are also constituted through that very movement between times and minds.

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.

The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch and the painter Harry Weinberger engaged in over twenty years of close friendship and intellectual discourse, centred on sustained discussion of the practice, teaching and morality of art. This book presents a reappraisal of Murdoch's novels - chiefly, three mature novels, The Sea, The Sea (1978), Nuns and Soldiers (1980) and The Good Apprentice (1985), and two enigmatic late novels, The Green Knight (1993) and Jackson's Dilemma (1995) - which are perceived through the prism of her discourse with Weinberger. It draws on a run of almost 400 letters from Murdoch to Weinberger, and on Murdoch's philosophical writings, Weinberger's private writings, the remarks of both artists in interviews, and other material relating to their views on art and art history, much of which is unpublished and has received no previous critical attention. Scrutiny of their shared values, methods and the imagistic dialogue that takes place in their art provides original perspectives on Murdoch's creativity, and new ways of understanding her experimentation with the visual arts. This book offers a new line of enquiry into Murdoch's novels, and into the relationship between literature and the visual arts.

The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime. Ngai explores how each of these aesthetic categories expresses conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, exchange, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our playfulness and our sense of desperation. The interesting is tied to the circulation of discourse and inspires interest but also boredom. The cute's involvement with consumption brings out feelings of tenderness and aggression simultaneously. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our complex relationship to performing, information, and commodities. Through readings of Adorno, Schlegel, and Nietzsche alongside cultural artifacts ranging from Bob Perelman's poetry to Ed Ruscha's photography books to the situation comedy of Lucille Ball, Ngai shows how these everyday aesthetic categories also provide traction to classic problems in aesthetic theory. The zany, cute, and interesting are not postmodernity's only meaningful aesthetic categories, Ngai argues, but the ones best suited for grasping the radical transformation of aesthetic experience and discourse under its conditions.

When we think of Iris Murdoch's relationship with art forms, the visual arts come most readily to mind. However, music and other sounds are equally important. Soundscapes - music and other types of sound - contribute to the richly textured atmosphere and moral tenor of Murdoch's novels. This book will help readers to appreciate anew the sensuous nature of Iris Murdoch's prose, and to listen for all kinds of music, sounds and silences in her novels, opening up a new sub-field in Murdoch studies in line with the emerging field of Word and Music Studies. This study is supported by close readings of selected novels exemplifying the subtle variety of ways she deploys music, sounds and silence in her fiction. It also covers Murdoch's knowledge of music and her allusions to music throughout her work, and includes a survey of musical settings of her words by various composers.

The newly expanded and revised edition of Cooper's popular anthology featuring classic writings on aesthetics, both historical and contemporary The second edition of this bestselling anthology collects essays of canonical significance in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, featuring a wide range of topics from the nature of beauty and the criteria for aesthetic judgement to the value of art and the appreciation of nature. Includes texts by classical philosophers like Plato and Kant alongside essays from art critics like Clive Bell, with new readings from Leonardo da Vinci, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Ronald W. Hepburn, and Arthur C. Danto among others Intersperses philosophical scholarship with diverse contributions from artists, poets, novelists, and critics Broadens the scope of aesthetics beyond the Western tradition, including important texts by Asian philosophers from Mo Tzu to Tanizaki Includes a fully-updated introduction to the discipline written by the editor, as well as prefaces to each text and chapter-specific lists of further reading

This book offers a bold and dynamic examination of Lars von Trier's cinema by interweaving philosophy and theology with close attention to aesthetics through style and narrative. It explores the prophetic voice of von Trier's films, juxtaposing them with Ezekiel's prophecy and Ricoeur's symbols of evil, myth, and hermeneutics of revelation. The films of Lars von Trier are categorized as extreme cinema, inducing trauma and emotional rupture rarely paralleled, while challenging audiences to respond in new ways. This volume argues that the spiritual, biblical content of the films holds a key to understanding von Trier's oeuvre of excess. Spiritual conflict is the mechanism that unpacks the films' notorious excess with explosive, centrifugal force. By confronting the spectator with spiritual conflict through evil, von Trier's films truthfully and prophetically expose the spectator's complicity in personal and structural evil, forcing self-examination through theological themes, analogous to the prophetic voice of the transgressive Hebrew prophet Ezekiel, his prophecy, and its form of delivery. Placed in context with the prophetic voices of Dante, Milton, Dostoyevsky, O'Connor, and Tarkovsky, this volume offers a theoretical framework beyond von Trier. It will be of great interest to scholars in film studies, film and philosophy, film and theology.

Is populism the unsurpassable horizon of our own time or is it a temptation that should at all costs be resisted? Who, and to what end, does the jargon of populism serve? To answer these questions, Alexander Stagnell, Gustav Strandberg, David Payne, and their contributors trace the socio-historical significance of the concept of 'The People' in western philosophy and its relationship to the trend of populist politics today. Bringing together scholars from the fields of aesthetics, critical, cultural and political theory, philosophy, and rhetoric, this volume critically explores the issues facing contemporary society today. With an international team of authors, each chapter speaks to a range of contexts recently affected by populism today, including Sweden, Brazil, Germany, Austria, France, and the UK. As political and economic establishments face a crisis of legitimacy, Populism and The People in Contemporary Critical Thought reveals the shaky foundations on which the concept of 'The People' rests. Engaging with critical theory, feminist theory, Marxism, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, this collection highlights how 'The People' comes to stand in for both belonging and exclusion, enabling us to see the uses and abuses of such terminology as pressing theoretical and political concerns.

Why do we readily dispose of some things, whereas we keep and maintain others for years, despite their obvious wear and tear? Can a greater understanding of aesthetic value lead to a more strategic and sustainable approach to product design? Aesthetic Sustainability: Product Design and Sustainable Usage offers guidelines for ways to reduce, rethink, and reform consumption. Its focus on aesthetics adds a new dimension to the creation, as well as the consumption, of sustainable products. The chapters offer innovative ways of working with expressional durability in the design process. Aesthetic Sustainability: Product Design and Sustainable Usage is related to emotional durability in the sense that the focus is on the psychological and sensuous bond between subject and object. But the subject-object connection is based on more than emotions: aesthetically sustainable objects continuously add nourishment to human life. This book explores the difference between sentimental value and aesthetic value, and it offers suggestions for operational approaches that can be implemented in the design process to increase aesthetic sustainability. This book also offers a thorough presentation of aesthetics, focusing on the correlation between the philosophical approach to the aesthetic experience and the durable design experience. The book is of interest to students and scholars working in the fields of design, arts, the humanities and social sciences; additionally, it will speak to designers and other professionals with an interest in sustainability and aesthetic value.

Emotion in Aesthetics is the first book on aesthetics to provide an extensive theory of emotion; application of the cognitive-emotive theory to aesthetics; analysis of the relationship between aesthetics, metaphor and emotion; a full theory of meaning and its application to aesthetics; discussion of the relationship between aesthetics, music and language in terms of phonetics, phonology and intonation; an analysis of humanistic aesthetics; a well-developed naturalistic theory of ethics as applied to aesthetics and emotion. Stress is placed on the views of contemporary philosophers as well as some of the main historical accounts of emotion in aesthetics. The important recent work on emotion has not hitherto been applied to aesthetics. As a result there is still much confusion in aesthetics about aesthetic emotion and related concepts, such as the expression theory of emotion. The present book has been written to show how the theory can be used to clarify the issue, resulting in a major breakthrough in aesthetics. In addition, the theory presented is valuable in relating aesthetics to ethics and humanism.

An accessible introduction to Badiou's key ideas In this short and accessible book, the French philosopher Alain Badiou provides readers with a unique introduction to his system of thought, summed up in the trilogy of Being and Event, Logics of Worlds, and The Immanence of Truths. Taking the form of an interview and two talks and keeping in mind a broad audience without any prior knowledge of his work, the book touches upon the central concepts and major preoccupations of Badiou's philosophy: fundamental ontology, mathematics, politics, poetry, and love. Well-chosen examples illuminate his thinking in regards to being and universality, worlds and singularity, and the infinite and the absolute, among other topics. A veritable tour de force of pedagogical clarity, this new student-friendly work is perhaps the single best general introduction to the work of this prolific and committed thinker. If, for Badiou, the task of philosophy consists in thinking through the truths of our time, the texts collected in this small volume could not be timelier.

This book is an investigation of the role of creative labor and the five senses in Rainer Maria Rilke's prose works, including his "Primal Sound" essay, the Stories of God, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and his monograph on Auguste Rodin. It is about several protagonists' quest to achieve creative labor by reconnecting spirit or the unconscious to the hand. There are many difficulties in the way, however, illustrated by Rilke's essays, tales, and monographs. In the process of overcoming these impediments, the five senses are expanded and refined. Rilke's characters undergo a transformation that not only allows them to do true creative labor, but also brings them into a new relationship with themselves, the world around them and other people. Nicholas Carroll Reynolds received his PhD at the University of Oregon, USA. He has authored several articles on philosophy and literature, and has worked as an editor and translator. He is currently employed at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, USA, where he teaches in the German, Philosophy, and First Year Experience programs, as well as in Trinity's Study abroad program in Berlin, Germany.

Kierkegaard's Concepts is a comprehensive, multi-volume survey of the key concepts and categories that inform Kierkegaard's writings. Each article is a substantial, original piece of scholarship, which discusses the etymology and lexical meaning of the relevant Danish term, traces the development of the concept over the course of the authorship, and explains how it functions in the wider context of Kierkegaard's thought. Concepts have been selected on the basis of their importance for Kierkegaard's contributions to philosophy, theology, the social sciences, literature and aesthetics, thereby making this volume an ideal reference work for students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines.

This edited collection investigates the kinds of philosophical reflection we can undertake in the imaginative worlds of literature. Opening with a look into the relations between philosophical thought and literary interpretation, the volume proceeds through absorbing discussions of the ways we can see life through the lens of literature, the relations between philosophical saying and literary showing, and some ways we can see the literary past philosophically and assess its significance for the present. Taken as a whole, the volume shows how imagined contexts can be a source of knowledge, a source of conceptual clarification, and a source of insight and understanding. And because philosophical thinking is undertaken, after all, in words, a heightened sensitivity to the precise employments of our words - particularly philosophically central words such as truth, reality, perception, knowledge, selfhood, illusion, understanding, falsehood - can bring a clarity and a refreshed sense of the life that our words take on in fully-described contexts of usage. And in these imagined contexts we can also see more acutely and deeply into the meaning of words about words - metaphor and figurative tropes, verbal coherence, intelligibility, implication, sense, and indeed the word "meaning" itself. Moving from a philosophical issue into a literary world in which the central concepts of that issue are in play can thus enrich our comprehension of those concepts and, in the strongest cases, substantively change the way we see them. With a combination of conceptual acuity and literary sensitivity, this volume maps out some of the territory that philosophical reflection and literary engagement share.

Our sensory relationships with the social and biological world have altered appreciably as a result of recent developments in internet and other mobile communication technologies. We now look at a screen, we touch either the screen or a keyboard in response to what we see and, somehow, an element of our sensory presence is transmitted elsewhere. It is often claimed that this change in the way we perceive the world and each other is without precedent, and is solely the result of twenty-first-century life and technologies. This book argues otherwise. The author analyses the evolving portrayals of 'haptic' sensations - that is, sensations that are at once tactile and visual - in the theories and prose of the writer-philosophers Georges Bataille (1897-1962), Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) and Michel Serres (1930-). In exploring haptic perception in the works of Bataille, Blanchot and Serres, the author examines haptic theories postulated by Alois Riegl, Laura U. Marks, Mark Paterson and Jean-Luc Nancy.

Putting the New Materialist figure of diffraction to use in a set of readings - in which cultural texts are materially read against their contents and their themes, against their readers or against other texts - this volume proposes a critical intervention into the practice of reading itself. In this book, reading and reading methodology are probed for their materiality and re-considered as being inevitably suspended between, or diffracted with, both matter and discourse. The history of literary and cultural reading, including poststructuralism and critical theory, is revisited in a new light and opened-up for a future in which the world and reading are no longer regarded as conveniently separate spheres, but recognized as deeply entangled and intertwined. Diffractive Reading ultimately represents a new reading of reading itself: firstly by critiquing the distanced perspective of critical paradigms such as translation and intertextuality, in which texts encountered, processed or otherwise subdued; secondly, showing how all literary and cultural readings represent different 'agential cuts' in the world-text-reader constellation, which is always both discursive and material; and thirdly, the volume materializes, dynamizes and politicizes the activity of reading by drawing attention to reading's intervention in, and (co)creation of, the world in which we live.

This book develops and demonstrates an interdisciplinary method that reads literary works as a way of thinking about the city. Literary works do not only provide reflections of the city – depictions of the city as an aesthetically compelling setting – but the literary reflection of the city also offers a critical reflection on the city. How can spatial difference be conceived in cities that are changing beyond the form of the classical modern metropolis of the early 20th century? How can one think of the relation between individual urban subjects and their urban environment, when neither spaces nor discourses of the city provide them with an answer to the question where they might "belong"? How does the human body interact with its urban surroundings, and how should technological mediations be thought of? This book approaches these questions through analysing literary texts, focusing on concepts like heterotopia, non-place and the posthuman. This book will be of interest to interdisciplinary scholars and students of the city, particularly in the fields of Urban Studies, Literary Studies, Geography, and Architecture.

This book deals with the philosophy of Daya Krishna, an Indian philosopher of the twentieth century. It discusses the central issues in Daya Krishna's early philosophy as a synthesis of the Indian and Western philosophical methods. It presents problems of the past and the present in a holistic frame of creative philosophizing. It provides a glimpse into the issues human beings face in all vital areas of human civilization. It discusses the nature of philosophy and the philosophical method in Daya Krishna's syncretic philosophy. Issues such as self and freedom and ethics and religion are explored in the chapters. It is of interest to those who are engaged with Indian philosophy and Indian philosophers of the twentieth century and especially to those whose interest lies in understanding the cultural East and its philosophical responses to the cultural West.

Richard Linklater's celebrated Before trilogy chronicles the love of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) who first meet up in Before Sunrise, later reconnect in Before Sunset and finally experience a fall-out in Before Midnight. Not only do these films present storylines and dilemmas that invite philosophical discussion, but philosophical discussion itself is at the very heart of the trilogy. This book, containing specially commissioned chapters by a roster of international contributors, explores the many philosophical themes that feature so vividly in the interactions between Celine and Jesse, including: the nature of love, romanticism and marriage the passage and experience of time the meaning of life the art of conversation the narrative self gender death Including an interview with Julie Delpy in which she discusses her involvement in the films and the importance of studying philosophy, Before Sunrise. Before Sunset. Before Midnight: A Philosophical Exploration is essential reading for anyone interested in philosophy, aesthetics, gender studies, and film studies.

This book addresses a prominent group of virtues and vices as portrayed in popular films to further our understanding of these moral character traits. The discussions emphasize the interplay between the philosophical conception of the virtues and vices and the cinematic representations of character. Joseph H. Kupfer explores how fictional characters possessing certain moral strengths and weaknesses concretize our abstract understanding of them. Because the actions that flow from these traits occur in cinematic contexts mirroring real world conditions, the narrative portrayals of these moral characteristics can further our appreciation of their import. Humility, integrity, and perseverance, for example, are depicted in Chariots of Fire, The Fabulous Baker Boys, and Billy Elliot, while the vices of envy, arrogance and vanity are captured in Amadeus, Whiplash, and Young Adult. This interdisciplinary work in philosophy and film criticism will be of great interest to scholars and students of film studies, philosophy of film, ethics, aesthetics, and popular culture.