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, debates and literatures within IR. Second, because the role or function of humour in relation to each site is under- (or even un-) studied in the existing critical and analytical literature. And third, because each demonstrates a different approach to what I have termed ‘parasitic politics’, namely ‘aesthetic parasitism’, ‘physical parasitism’ and ‘parodic parasitism’ respectively. This chapter will look at a series of cartoons and comics drawn in concentration camps in the south of France during the Second World War, focusing in particular on two strips drawn by
solves, on its user interface. These inscriptions make it recognisable as technology and, in so doing, they position it in a wider web of social meanings and values. None of the latter (efficiency, the future) are specific to technology, but in modern society they are integral to its meaning and to prevailing notions of what technology ‘is’. This chapter explores Feenberg’s argument that modern technology stands in need of ‘re-aestheticisation’. Aesthetic critique connects the political analysis of specific contexts of social shaping to the wider goal of
Critical opinion is much divided on the nature of Mallean aesthetics. On the one hand, scholars have underlined the problematic nature of identifying a single aesthetic strand in Malle’s cinema. For example, Richard Roud notes: ‘Malle has not obliged us by giving his films a “look” to please the customers’ (1989: 125). Similarly, Pauline Kael, doyenne of film criticism, and a Malle enthusiast, finds
. ( ibid .: 48) In the lines above, Genet invests in a logic which undermines the very foundation of Brechtian aesthetics. Where Brecht wanted to make art serve a political purpose, Genet declares that the more successful the artwork is aesthetically, the greater harm it does to revolutionary praxis. This is because it evokes what he calls ‘nostalgia’, a form of imaginative reverie through which the subject rediscovers le temps perdu of childhood. To put this otherwise, art encourages us, Genet suggests, to turn our back on the world. 5 Genet expanded on this
The interest in aesthetics in philosophy, literary and cultural studies is growing rapidly. This book contains exemplary essays by key practitioners in these fields which demonstrate the importance of this area of enquiry. New aestheticism remains a troubled term and in current parlance it already comes loaded with the baggage of the 'philistine controversy' which first emerged in an exchange that originally that took place in the New Left Review during the mid-1990s. A serious aesthetic education is necessary for resisting the advance of 'philistinism'. Contemporary aesthetic production may be decentred and belonging to the past, but that is not a reason to underestimate what great works do that nothing else can. Despite well-established feminist work in literary criticism, film theory and art history, feminist aesthetics 'is a relatively young discipline, dating from the early 1990s'. The book focuses on the critical interrogation of the historical status of mimesis in the context of a gendered and racial politics of modernity. Throughout the history of literary and art criticism the focus has fallen on the creation or reception of works and texts. The book also identifies a fragmentary Romantic residue in contemporary aesthetics. The Alexandrian aesthetic underlies the experience of the 'allegorical'. 'Cultural poetics' makes clear the expansion of 'poetics' into a domain that is no longer strictly associated with 'poetry'. The book also presents an account of a Kantian aesthetic criticism, discussing Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and Critique of Judgement.
In traditional literary histories the Gothic begins with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. 1 In this chapter I argue that insofar as it has an origin, the Gothic starts life, not as a novel, but as an aesthetic. The ‘Gothic aesthetic’, as I shall call it, was part of that general shift in taste around the mid to late eighteenth century we have come to call ‘pre-Romanticism’, although, as
John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas The new aestheticism: an introduction The very notion of the ‘aesthetic’ could be said to have fallen victim to the success of recent developments within literary theory. Undergraduates now pause before rehearsing complacent aesthetic verities concerning truth, meaning and value, verities that used to pass at one time for literary criticism. The rise of critical theory in disciplines across the humanities during the 1980s and 1990s has all but swept aesthetics from the map – and, some would argue, rightly so. Critical theory, of
6 Howard Caygill The Alexandrian aesthetic For the most central pathway in this city is more vast and more impassable than even that extensive and untrodden desert that it took Israel two generations to cross.1 Still the most unreal of the unreal cities, Alexandria remains emblematic of the modern aesthetic, with its most significant monument dispersed between the Embankment in London and Central Park, New York.2 The exile of the monumental fabric of the city to the capitals of modernity testifies to Alexandria’s condition as a figure for diaspora as well as
Aesthetic machines and their discontents In this chapter I will outline some of the key historical manifestations of the aesthetic machine, from its origins in ancient theatre where the stage and audience were clearly defined, to more recent aesthetic machines where art is embedded in the city, and where there are no clear boundaries between stage and audience. Some of these machines, such as the Futurist movement, sought to foreground the technical machine as an autonomous actant. While this might seem counterproductive in the light of my argument for a
the emotion of terror , an anticipation of Burke (3.6). Terror is here categorised as one of the ‘Enthusiastic Passions’: passions belonging to the realm of contemplation and aesthetic taste, rather than to ‘common life’. Source: Scott Elledge, ed. (1961), Eighteenth-century Critical Essays , 2 vols, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, vol. I, pp. 121–2 and 127