Aesthetic subjects / Pamela R. Matthews and David McWhirter, editors.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Matthews, Pamela R.

McWhirter, David Bruce.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Aesthetics--Congresses.

Aesthetics.

Genre:

Conference papers and proceedings.

Physical Description:

xxviii, 499 pages : illustrations ; 26 cm

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2003]

Summary:

Recent calls for a return to aesthetics occur precisely at a moment when it is increasingly evident that nothing concerning aesthetics is self-evident anymore. Determined to recover the value of aesthetic experience for artistic, cultural, and social analysis, the contributors to this volume--prominent scholars in literature, philosophy, art history, architecture, history, and anthropology--begin from a shared recognition that ideological readings of the aesthetic have provided invaluable insights, in particular, that analyses of aesthetics within historical and social contexts tell us a great deal about the experience of aesthetic encounters. From multiple and complementary perspectives, the contributors address topics as varied as Nabokov and Dickens, Caravaggio and Shelley Winters, gender and sexuality, advertising and AIDS. Taken together, their essays constitute a sustained and multifarious effort to resituate aesthetic pleasure in the mixed, impure conditions characteristic of every social practice and experience, however privileged or marginalized, and to ask what happens to the aesthetic if we consider it apart from--or at least in tension with--its historically dominant discursive formulations. As such, this volume establishes a renewed sense of aesthetic discourse and its usefulness as a tool for understanding culture.

Contents:

Drifting into dangerous waters: the separation of aesthetic experience from the work of art / Martin Jay

Armed assault / Alphonso Lingis

Reinventing the wall: looking into Zaha Hadid / Kay Bea Jones

Pleasures incarnate: aesthetic sentiment in the nineteenth-century work of art / Judith Stoddart

Caravaggio's secrets / Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit

The moral content of Nabokov's Lolita / Susan Bordo

The aesthetics of Jewishness: Shelley Winters / Joseph Litvak

Theorizing popular practice in eighteenth-century aesthetics: Lord Kames and Alexander Gerard / Maureen Harkin

The labor theory of beauty: aesthetic subjects, blind justice / Douglas Mao

Sinthom-osexuality / Lee Edelman

The combinatorial aesthetics of neurobiology / Barbara Maria Stafford

Cloth wounds: queer aesthetics of debasement / Kathryn Bond Stockton

Embodying culture: Dorian's wish / Audrey Jaffe

Bad taste, the root evil: I.A. Richards and the postnational subject / Howard Horwitz

The gift: reflections on the Eames House / Beatriz Colomina

What is construction, what's the aesthetic, what was Adorno doing? / Robert Kaufman

The secret life of things: Virginia Woolf and the matter of modernism / Bill Brown

Arresting images / Kathleen Stewart

The adult's imagination of the child's imagination / Michael Taussig.

Notes:

Based on a conference held in spring 1998 at Texas A&M University.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0816639922

0816639930

OCLC:

51210651