Author : Donald Kuspit
Publisher : Allworth Press
Page : 136 pages
File Size : 36,70 MB
Release : 2000-04
Category : Art
ISBN :
Kuspit demonstrates that the "decadent" pursuits of artists like Sandro Chia and Georg Baselitz are rooted in the avant-garde unconscious. He demonstrates how modern art's internal battle with decadence is in fact a battle with itself, its own cause for existence.".
Author : Ross Douthat
Publisher : Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 47,50 MB
Release : 2021-03-16
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1476785252
From the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bad Religion, a “clever and stimulating” (The New York Times Book Review) portrait of how our turbulent age is defined by dark forces seemingly beyond our control. The era of the coronavirus has tested America, and our leaders and institutions have conspicuously failed. That failure shouldn’t be surprising: Beneath social-media frenzy and reality-television politics, our era’s deep truths are elite incompetence, cultural exhaustion, and the flight from reality into fantasy. Casting a cold eye on these trends, The Decadent Society explains what happens when a powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemate, and demographic decline creates a unique civilizational crisis. Ranging from the futility of our ideological debates to the repetitions of our pop culture, from the decline of sex and childbearing to the escapism of drug use, Ross Douthat argues that our age is defined by disappointment—by the feeling that all the frontiers are closed, that the paths forward lead only to the grave. Correcting both optimism and despair, Douthat provides an enlightening explanation of how we got here, how long our frustrations might last, and how, in renaissance or catastrophe, our decadence might ultimately end.
Author : Michael J. Puri
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 28,82 MB
Release : 2012-01-23
Category : Music
ISBN : 0199876010
The music of Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), beloved by musicians and audiences since its debut, has been a difficult topic for scholars. The traditional stylistic categories of impressionism, symbolism, and neoclassicism, while relevant, have offered too little purchase on this fascinating but enigmatic work. In Ravel the Decadent, author Michael Puri provides an innovative and productive solution by locating the aesthetic origins of this music in the French Decadence and demonstrating the extension of this influence across the length of his oeuvre. From an array of Decadent topics Puri selects three--memory, sublimation, and desire--and uses them to delineate the content of this music, pinpoint its overlap with contemporary cultural discourse, and link it to its biographical context, as well as to create new methods altogether for the analysis and interpretation of music. Ravel the Decadent opens by defining the main concepts, giving particular attention to memory and decadence. It then stakes out contrasting modes of memory in this music: a nostalgic mode that views the past as forever lost, and a more optimistic one that imagines its resurrection and reanimation. Acknowledging Ravel's lifelong identity as a dandy--a figure that embodies the Decadence and its aspiration toward the sublime--Puri identifies possible moments of musical self-portraiture before stepping back to theorize dandyism in European musical modernism at large. He then addresses the dialectic between desire and its sublimation in the pairing of two genres--the bacchanal and the idyl--and leverages the central trio of concepts to offer provocative readings of Ravel's two waltz sets, the Valses nobles et sentimentales and La valse. Puri concludes by invoking the same terms to identify a topic of "faun music" that promises to create new common ground between Ravel and Debussy. Rife with close readings that will satisfy the musicologist, Ravel the Decadent also suits a more general reader through its broadly humanistic key concepts, immersion in contemporary art and literature, and clarity of language.
Author : Arthur F. Marotti
Publisher : Wayne State University Press
Page : 404 pages
File Size : 21,12 MB
Release : 1993
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780814324936
"Reading with a Difference is a collection of eighteen essays that examines how issues of gender, race, and cultural identity inform texts from the seventeenth century to the present. Together the contributions document recent significant shifts occurring in the theoretical approach to the texts they study and illustrate how shifts in each of these categories affect how the others are viewed." "The first section of this anthology explores the notion that identity - particularly gender identity - is a cultural construct. The essays in the second section consider ways in which race and gender intersect with cultural identity and how encounters between different cultures challenge any identity constructed in isolation." "First published in the journal Criticism, these essays offer no blueprint for reading. Instead they encourage a rereading of canonical texts and a questioning of how these texts face matters of gender, race, and cultural identity; how they respond to the differences and the incongruities within the cultures from which they arise; and to which they speak."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author : Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 37,65 MB
Release : 1973
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780810105966
"We need a philosophy of both history and spirit to deal with the problems we touch upon here. Yet we would be unduly rigorous if we were to wait for perfectly elaborated principles before speaking philosophically of politics." Thus Merleau-Ponty introduces Adventures of the Dialectic, his study of Marxist philosophy and thought. In this study, containing chapters on Weber, Lukacs, Lenin, Sartre, and Marx himself, Merleau-Ponty investigates and attempts to go beyond the dialectic.
Author : Ellis Hanson
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 426 pages
File Size : 36,39 MB
Release : 1997
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780674194441
Romantic writers had found in Christianity a poetic cult of the imagination, an assertion of the spiritual quality of beauty in an age of vulgar materialism. The decadents, a diverse movement of writers, were the climax and exhaustion of this romantic tradition. In their art, they enacted the romance of faith as a protest against the dreariness of modern life. Ellis Hanson teases out two strands--eroticism and aestheticism--that rendered the decadent interest in Catholicism extraordinary. More than any other literary movement, the decadents explored the powerful historical relationship between homoeroticism and Roman Catholicism. Why, throughout history, have so many homosexuals been attracted to Catholic institutions that vociferously condemn homosexuality? This perplexing question is pursued in this elegant and innovative book. Late-nineteenth-century aesthetes found in the Church a peculiar language that gave them a means of artistic and sexual expression. The brilliant cast of characters that parades through this book includes Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, J.-K. Huysmans, Walter Pater, and Paul Verlaine. Art for these writers was a mystical and erotic experience. In decadent Catholicism we can glimpse the beginnings of a postmodern valorization of perversity and performativity. Catholicism offered both the hysterical symptom and the last hope for paganism amid the dullness of Victorian puritanism and bourgeois materialism.
Author : George E. McCarthy
Publisher :
Page : 414 pages
File Size : 19,85 MB
Release : 1994
Category : Civilization, Ancient
ISBN :
Examines the influences of Greek philosophy and literature on the development of 19th-century German social thought, particularly that of Marx and Nietzsche. The work explores the ways in which their similar ideals of classical Greece led to their similar reactions to the rise of modernity.
Author : Stephen Downes
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 387 pages
File Size : 29,76 MB
Release : 2010-06-03
Category : Music
ISBN : 0521767571
Downes presents a detailed examination of the significance of decadence in Central and Eastern European modernist music.
Author : Jane Desmarais
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 745 pages
File Size : 33,62 MB
Release : 2022
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0190066954
Edited by Jane Desmarais and David Weir.
Author : Paul Fox
Publisher : ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press
Page : 431 pages
File Size : 19,21 MB
Release : 2014-05-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 3838266234
This revised and expanded volume examines the intersections of aesthetics and morality and asks what Decadence means to art and society at various moments in British literature. As time passes, the definition of what it takes to be D/decadent changes. The decline from a higher standard, social malaise, aesthetic ennui – all these ideas presume certain facts about the past, the present, and the linear nature of time itself. To reject the past as a given, and to relish the subtleties of present nuance, is the beginning of Decadence. The conflict underlying the contributions to this collection is that of society's moral contempt vis-a-vis the focus on the fleeting present on part of the purportedly decadent artists; who in turn thought the truly decadent to be the stranglehold society maintained on individual interpretation and the interpretation of oneself.
