Aesthetic Temporalities Today


Book Description

This volume is dedicated to the interrelation between temporality and representation. It presumes that time cannot be conceived of as an abstract chronometric order, but that it is referring to materiality, being measured, represented, expressed, recognized, experienced and evaluated, and therefore is always closely related to cultural contexts of perception and evaluation. The contributions from various disciplines are dedicated to the present and its plural conditions and meanings. They provide insights into the state of research with special emphasis on the global present as well as on art and aesthetics from the 18th century until today. The anthology includes contributions by Mieke Bal, Stefan Binder, Maximilian Bergengruen, Iris Därmann, Gabriele Genge, Boris Roman Gibhardt, Boris Groys, Maria Muhle, Johannes F. Lehmann, Nkiru Nzegwu, Francesca Raimondi, Christine Ross, Ludger Schwarte, Angela Stercken, Samuel Strehle, Timm Trausch, Patrick Stoffel, and Christina Wessely.




Modern Times


Book Description

The critique of modernist ideology from France's leading radical theorist In this book Jacques Rancière radicalises his critique of modernism and its postmodern appendix. He contrasts their unilinear and exclusive time with the interweaving of temporalities at play in modern processes of emancipation and artistic revolutions, showing how this plurality itself refers to the double dimension of time. Time is more than a line drawn from the past to the future. It is a form of life, marked by the ancient hierarchy between those who have time and those who do not. This hierarchy, continued in the Marxist notion of the vanguard and nakedly exhibited in Clement Greenberg’s modernism, still governs a present which clings to the fable of historical necessity and its experts. In opposition to this, Rancière shows how the break with the hierarchical conception of time, formulated by Emerson in his vision of the new poet, implies a completely different idea of the modern. He sees the fulfilment of this in the two arts of movement, cinema and dance, which at the beginning of the twentieth century abolished the opposition between free and mechanical people, at the price of exposing the rift between the revolution of artists and that of strategists.




On Slowness


Book Description

Speed is an obvious facet of contemporary society, whereas slowness has often been dismissed as conservative and antimodern. Challenging a long tradition of thought, Lutz Koepnick instead proposes we understand slowness as a strategy of the contemporary—a decidedly modern practice that gazes firmly at and into the present's velocity. As he engages with late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century art, photography, video, film, and literature, Koepnick explores slowness as a critical medium to intensify our temporal and spatial experiences. Slowness helps us register the multiple layers of time, history, and motion that constitute our present. It offers a timely (and untimely) mode of aesthetic perception and representation that emphasizes the openness of the future and undermines any conception of the present as a mere replay of the past. Discussing the photography and art of Janet Cardiff, Olafur Eliasson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Michael Wesely; the films of Peter Weir and Tom Tykwer; the video installations of Douglas Gordon, Willie Doherty, and Bill Viola; and the fiction of Don DeLillo, Koepnick shows how slowness can carve out spaces within processes of acceleration that allow us to reflect on alternate temporalities and durations.







Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical Theory


Book Description

This book is a critical analysis of how key philosophers in the European tradition have responded to the emergence of a modern conception of temporality. Espen Hammer suggests that it is a feature of Western modernity that time has been forcibly separated from the natural cycles and processes with which it used to be associated. In a discussion that ranges over Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Adorno, he examines the forms of dissatisfaction which result from this, together with narrative modes of configuring time, the relationship between agency and temporality, and possible challenges to the modern world's linear and homogenous experience of time. His study is a rich exploration of an enduring philosophical theme: the role of temporality in shaping and reshaping modern human affairs.




After Foucault


Book Description

Contributes to Foucauldian scholarship by contextualizing Foucault's key concepts and identifying current and emerging applications of his work.




Virginia Woolf and the Aesthetics of Vision


Book Description

The category of vision is significant for Modernist texts as well as for the unfolding discourse of Modernism itself. Within the general Modernist fascination with the artistic and experimental possibilities of vision and perception this study looks at Virginia Woolf’s novels and her critical writings and examines the relation between visuality and aesthetics. An aesthetics of vision, as this study argues, becomes a productive principle of narrative. The visual is not only pertinent to Woolf’s processes of composition, but her works create a kind of vision that is proper to the text itself – a vision that reflects on the experience of seeing and renegotiates the relation between the reader and the text. The study investigates key dimensions of aesthetic vision. It addresses vision in the context of theories of aesthetic experience and identifies a semantics of seeing. It analyses functions of symbolic materiality in the presentation of boundaries of perception, modes of temporality and poetic potentialities. In exploring the connections between vision and language, it seeks to provide new perspectives for a reassessment of what occurs in Modernism's relation to vision.




Unruly Visions


Book Description

In Unruly Visions Gayatri Gopinath brings queer studies to bear on investigations of diaspora and visuality, tracing the interrelation of affect, archive, region, and aesthetics through an examination of a wide range of contemporary queer visual culture. Spanning film, fine art, poetry, and photography, these cultural forms—which Gopinath conceptualizes as aesthetic practices of queer diaspora—reveal the intimacies of seemingly disparate histories of (post)colonial dwelling and displacement and are a product of diasporic trajectories. Countering standard formulations of diaspora that inevitably foreground the nation-state, as well as familiar formulations of queerness that ignore regional gender and sexual formations, she stages unexpected encounters between works by South Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Australian, and Latinx artists such as Tracey Moffatt, Akram Zaatari, and Allan deSouza. Gopinath shows how their art functions as regional queer archives that express alternative understandings of time, space, and relationality. The queer optics produced by these visual practices creates South-to-South, region-to-region, and diaspora-to-region cartographies that profoundly challenge disciplinary and area studies rubrics. Gopinath thereby provides new critical perspectives on settler colonialism, empire, military occupation, racialization, and diasporic dislocation as they indelibly mark both bodies and landscapes.




Yeats, Revival, and the Temporalities of Irish Modernism


Book Description

Yeats, Revivalism, and the Temporalities of Irish Modernism offers a new understanding of a writer whose revivalist commitments are often regarded in terms of nostalgic yearning and dreamy romanticism. It counters such conventions by arguing that Yeats's revivalism is an inextricable part of his modernism. Gregory Castle provides a new reading of Yeats that is informed by the latest research on the Irish Revival and guided by the phenomenological idea of worldmaking, a way of looking at literature as an aesthetic space with its own temporal and spatial norms, its own atmosphere generated by language, narrative, and literary form. The dialectical relation between the various worlds created in the work of art generate new ways of accounting for time beyond the limits of historical thinking. It is just this worldmaking power that links Yeats's revivalism to his modernism and constructs new grounds for recognizing his life and work.




Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics


Book Description

The Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics offers a comprehensive overview of Latin American aesthetic and conceptual production addressing the more-than-human environment at the intersection between art, activism, and critique. Fields include literature, performance, film, and other audiovisual media as well as their interactions with community activisms. Scholars who have helped establish environmental approaches in the field as well as emergent critical voices revisit key concepts such as ecocriticism, (post-)extractivism, and multinaturalism, while opening new avenues of dialogue with areas including critical race theory and ethnicity, energy humanities, queer-*trans studies, and infrastructure studies, among others. This volume both traces these genealogies and maps out key positions in this increasingly central field of Latin Americanism, at the same time as they relate it to the environmental humanities at large. By showing how artistic and literary productions illuminate critical zones of environmental thought, articulating urgent social and material issues with cultural archives, historical approaches and conceptual interventions, this volume offers cutting-edge critical tools for approaching literature and the arts from new angles that call into question the nature/culture boundary.