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Aesthetics of contingency provides an important reconsideration of seventeenth-century literature in light of new understandings of the English past. Emphasising the contingency of the political in revolutionary England and its extended aftermath, Matthew Augustine challenges prevailing literary histories plotted according to structural conflicts and teleological narrative. In their place, he offers an innovative account of imaginative and polemical writing, in an effort to view later seventeenth-century literature on its own terms: without certainty about the future, or indeed the recent past. In hewing to this premise, the familiar outline of the period – with red lines drawn at 1642, 1660, or 1688 – becomes suggestively blurred. For all of Milton’s prophetic gestures, for all of Dryden’s presumption to speak for, to epitomise his Age, writing from the later decades of the seventeenth century remained supremely responsive to uncertainty, to the tremors of civil conflict and to the enduring crises and contradictions of Stuart governance.
A study of major writings from the Personal Rule to the Glorious Revolution and beyond, this book also re-examines the material conditions of literature in this age. By carefully deciphering the multi-layered forces at work in acts of writing and reception, and with due consideration for the forms in which texts were cast, this book explores the complex nature of making meaning in and making meaning out of later Stuart England.
• 3 • Film form and aesthetics This chapter offers an introduction to film analysis. Although this work emphasises the importance of film as a cultural and historical object, it is crucial to recognise the textual specificity of film. As the work is partly aimed at those who may not have studied film before, this chapter will outline how to explore visual style and will draw attention to how this is constructed through lighting, staging, performance, camerawork, costumes and music. The focus here is film and, while the examples are predominantly drawn from
13 Joanna Hodge Aesthetics and politics: between Adorno and Heidegger Antinomies of reason The alignments of T. W. Adorno to the protracted, difficult process of coming to terms with a broken Marxist inheritance and of Martin Heidegger to the Nazi politics of rethinking the human might seem to leave them at opposite non-communicating poles of political difference.1 Their views on aesthetics seem similarly starkly opposed, in terms both of judgements and of the place of aesthetics within the philosophical pantheon. Aesthetic theory for Adorno marks out a domain of
caring for and observing the care for Antoine. It is an enquiry into the possible shape of an aesthetics of care , drawn from the collision of professional practice, personal politics and domestic circumstances that inevitably occurred when a Congolese drama worker, with whom I had conducted theatre workshops in the DRC, ended up sharing my house. The political, ethical and ultimately intimate challenge this made forced me to rethink the boundaries of my practice. There is no claim in this writing that the experience was in any way easy, heroic or exemplary. It was in
In this chapter, I develop some of the thinking introduced in an article I wrote in 2015 around what I described as an ‘aesthetic of care’ (see Chapter 2 of this edited collection). To speak of care as a mode of aesthetics is to make two related claims. First, that reciprocal acts of caring, whether formal, informal, interpersonal or collective, have a sensory, crafted quality that could be called an aesthetic. Caring, thus, I suggest, has an artistry and there are inspirational carers who exhibit a virtuosity in the way they care for and with others. As
‘The Gothic Aesthetics of Eminem’ examines key videos, lyrics, and performances of the white hip-hop celebrity, noting the reoccurrence of such Gothic tropes and narrational strategies as self-replication, the spectacle of monstrous proliferation, the spread of fakery and the counterfeit, as well as the abjection of women. The authors compare Stoker‘s Dracula to Eminem, whose cultural menace similarly functions to proselytise white young men into clones, refracting the racial and sexual anxieties of Stoker‘s novel. The article moves from a consideration of the rapper‘s songs and videos ‘My Name Is’, ‘The Real Slim Shady,’ and ‘Stan’ to the film, 8 Mile.
9 The unsustainable aesthetics of sustainability: the sense of an ending in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods Adeline Johns-Putra Jeanette Winterson’s 2007 novel, The Stone Gods, is a critique of progress, both in the general sense of movement, journeying, or going forward, and in the specialised sense of human development, particularly the privileging of economic and scientific improvement that is often called the myth or narrative of progress. In the spirit of so many of Winterson’s novels, The Stone Gods places its several protagonists on journeys, most
fugitive aesthetics might look like in the face of everyday violence and how it redefines activism and resistance in differing contexts. It translates into a performance of agency – conscious or unconscious political agency – and the finding of joy in a world that criminalises you. It is a form of underground rebellion because it is about refusing to play the role that the state expects of you. Sometimes fugitive aesthetics translate into rage that finds space and visibility in the streets; at other times, it is
PART I What is evaluative aesthetics? What is evaluative aesthetics? 17 1.1 The origin and definition of aesthetics The concept of the ‘aesthetic’ is best considered as a cluster of interrelated meanings, and Part I will attempt to elaborate its multifaceted nature. Its Greek origin is aisthesis, meaning perception by sense, or feeling; more precisely it derives ‘from the Greek nominal aisthetikos, sensitive or sentient, derived in turn from the verb aisthanesthai, meaning to perceive, feel, or sense’ (Costelloe 2013: 1). Aesthetki is ‘the science of how
2 Technical aesthetics against the disorder of things In March 1964 Dekorativnoe Iskusstvo SSSR published an overview of modern modular furniture. It opened with a description of modern objects’ rapid intervention in the home: The TV set required rearrangement. Turning its back to the light, it oriented the recreation zone around itself. This attracted soft chairs, a collapsible sofa, a coffee table and decorative objects, whereas a dining table, which used to occupy an honourable central place in the room, had to move closer to the wall. Doing so, it did not