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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.
This article examines cuttings from a now-lost manuscript decorated by the little-known Florentine illuminator Littifredi Corbizzi (1465–c.1515) at the turn of the sixteenth century. This manuscript, a choirbook produced for the monks at San Benedetto in Gubbio in 1499–1503, was dismembered in the nineteenth century. Until now, all but one of its cuttings were believed to be lost. Through the emergence of several key pieces of evidence, most notably the identification of tracings of the manuscript made by the German artist Johann Anton Ramboux in the mid-1830s before its dismemberment, I have been able to link definitively three initials to this largely unresearched commission. Two of these are in a previously unstudied manuscript album at the John Rylands Library, recently digitised. Considering the cuttings stylistically and, critically, interrogating their provenance, I propose that a further ten cuttings can also be linked to Littifredi’s work for the monastery, and argue that Ramboux played a significant role in their initial collection.
, decoloniality questions what we mourn. With humanitarianism itself being redefined, decolonial perspectives can contribute to an understanding of the relevance of the good intentions of humanitarians to the aspirations of their intended ‘beneficiaries’. They can provide an antidote to the ‘colonial amnesia’ of liberal humanitarians and, therefore, provide a basis for the critical interrogation of, and contribution to, humanitarian endeavours in the service of life and dignity and not merely of survival. They can challenge not only the ideological character
modernity (in the West, at least, though Bauman rarely enters this caveat) should be referred to as liquid modernity. Bauman’s choice of and explication of the ‘liquid’ metaphor cannot be considered immune to critical interrogation simply because it may in part be regarded as a ‘literary’ decision. The choice is a literary-cum-sociological-empirical one, and various questions may legitimately be put to probe its appropriateness, RATTANSI 9781526105875 PRINT.indd 203 24/05/2017 13:19 204 The perils of liquid life plausibility and possible limitations. It may as well
Inequality is a coin that cannot be understood by studying only one of its faces. In the preface to this volume, besides critically interrogating poverty, Williams asks what qualitative questions should we be asking about the rich?
addition, we use the term ‘postcolonial present’ to suggest that a preventative policy agenda implies new forms of violence associated with colonial legacies and attitudes. Contrary to the immediate rupture suggested by dominant crisis narratives, our counter-archive thus reveals a longer temporal horizon to lived experiences of precarity (see also Conclusion). This chapter critically interrogates assumptions about the EU as a desirable place based on shared values and principles, specifically from the perspective of those seeking a place of peace and
aspirational in the Belfast agreement about the society that we could become’. 119 Cunningham (2001: 163) concludes his three-decades-long survey of UK Government policy on Northern Ireland by denying that the agreement would herald a ‘post-national’ politics in which ideas of ‘nation, state and identity’ were critically interrogated. An adviser to Trimble, Steven King, concurred that the agreement made
The book presents a never-before-written case study of the UK-based organisation Secret Cinema – widely considered the leading provider of large-scale immersive experiences in the UK. They are used as a lens through which to understand the wider experiential economy. The book provides a comprehensive and encyclopaedic history of the organisation and its productions. It defines and examines the Secret Cinema format. It critically interrogates the work and operations of Secret Cinema as an organisation and analyses the many layers of audience experience. It combines rigorous academic study with practical industry insight that has been informed by more than fifty in-depth interviews with Secret Cinema practitioners and sector professionals who have worked on immersive productions in areas including performance direction, acting, video design, sound design and composition, lighting design, special effects, stage management, operations and merchandising. Framed within the context of the UK in late-2019, at which point the immersive sector had grown significantly, both through its increasing contribution to UK GDP and its widespread and global recognition as a legitimate cultural offering, we have captured an organisation and a sector that is in transition from marginal and sub-cultural roots to a commodifiable and commercial form, now with recognisable professional roles and practices, which has contributed to the establishment of an immersive experience industry of national importance and global reach. This book will appeal to scholars, students, film fans, immersive experience professionals and their audiences. It is written in an accessible style with rich case study materials and illustrative examples.
The ‘globalisation’ concept has become ubiquitous in British politics, as it has in many countries of the world. This book examines discourse on foreign economic policy to determine the impact of globalisation across the ideological landscape of British politics. It critically interrogates the assumption that the idea of globalisation is derivative solely of neo-liberal ideology by profiling the discourse on globalisation of five political groups involved in making and contesting British foreign economic policy between 1997 and 2009: New Labour, International Financial Services London, the Liberal Democrats, Oxfam and the Socialist Workers Party. In addition to the relationship between neo-liberalism and globalisation, the book also explores the core meaning of the idea of globalisation, the implications for the principle of free trade, the impact on notions of the state, nation-state and global governance, and whether globalisation means different things across the ideological spectrum. Topically, it examines how the responses to the global financial crisis have been shaped by globalisation discourse and the value of ideology as an analytical concept able to mitigate debates on the primacy of material and ideational explanations in political economy.
Recent years have seen the proliferation of discourses surrounding extremism and related terms. Encountering Extremism offers readers the opportunity to interrogate extremism through a plethora of theoretical perspectives, and to explore counter-extremism as it has materialised in plural local contexts. Through offering a critical interrogation along these two planes – the theoretical and the local – Encountering Extremism presents a unique, in-depth and critical analysis of a profoundly important subject. This book seeks to understand, and expose the implications of, a fundamental problematic: how should scholars and strategists alike understand the contemporary shift from counter-terrorism to counter-extremism?
Starting with a genealogical reflection on the discourse and practices of extremism, the book brings together authors examining the topic of extremism, countering extremism and preventing extremism from different theoretical perspectives, such as critical terrorism studies, postcolonialism and gender studies. It then turns to analyses of the specific consequences of this new discourse in international and local contexts such as the United Nations, Nigeria, Tunisia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Spain.