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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.
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
chap 7 13/8/04 4:17 pm Page 156 7 A new aesthetic of food? Relational reflexivity in the ‘alternative’ food movement Jonathan Murdoch and Mara Miele Introduction In recent times, an apparent contradiction between high levels of output and improved food quality has arisen within the food sector. The development of mass food markets, alongside ‘Fordist’ methods of production and their associated economies of scale, has generated unprecedented abundance (Montanari 1994). Yet, at the same time, industrialisation processes have resulted, seemingly, in greater and
1 Postmodern critiques, Japan’s economic miracle, and the new aesthetic milieu The social revolution that erupted in 1968 led a number of avant-garde designers and architects working in the early 1970s to take decisions that radically reshaped the course of Japanese design history. Working in Tokyo, the graphic designers Ishioka Eiko and Tanaka Ikkō, the fashion designers Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo, the interior and product designers Kuramata Shirō and Uchida Shigeru, and the architects Andō Tadao and Isozaki Arata, among others, all contributed to the
England and France, and has different but related manifestations in other countries. Towards the latter half of the nineteenth century a new aesthetic, predominantly European in its earlier incarnations, reacts against Realism and produces what is now collectively termed ‘modernism’. What next? Inevitably, perhaps, modernism in turn becomes superseded. Again, it depends from which country you view these events, but in general it is thought that modernism is ‘exhausted’ by the 1930s, and that decade sees the ‘high modernism’ of works like Finnegans Wake (1939) as a
text’ (p. 176), since both see the choice of context as the decisive act in their strategy of reading – it's as if Hamlet had said ‘The context's the thing’ rather than ‘The play's the thing’. We will come back to this issue in considering new aestheticism. What to read on presentism Fernie, Ewan, ‘The last act: presentism, spirituality and the politics of Hamlet ’, pp. 186–211 in Spiritual Shakespeares , ed. Ewan Fernie (Routledge ‘Accents on Shakespeare’ series, 2005). Fernie, Ewan, ‘Shakespeare and the prospect of presentism’, in Shakespeare
’ national self. The tendency of Spanish immigration films is to represent variance on both sides of the immigrant/host divide, demonstrating that immigrant characters are equally capable of ‘Othering’ those with whom interaction produces a space of reciprocity, thereby offering ‘new’ aesthetic possibilities. Acknowledging a Continental mode of competitive industrial practices
discourses about the proper appearance of the modern, private interior and the arrangement of objects displayed therein s upported the development of a new, themed aesthetic that took history as its starting point and continued earlier forays into the revival of styles from the past. This new aesthetic presupposed a mastermind who would supervise the organization of each interior decorating ensemble within the upper- as well as the middle-class private home. Increasingly more decorated in the aftermath of the industrial and consumer revolutions, interiors were organized
gradual formation of new concepts, largely driven by people who had been connected to avant-garde movements in the 1920s. Therefore, the aesthetic turn refers to change without neglecting the importance of continuity. This chapter offers an overview of the key concepts of the new aesthetic regime of arts and provides background for my analysis of late socialist objects in the following chapters. In the overview I describe the following concepts: first, realism as a specific quality of things, not depictions of them; second, contemporaneity as a measure of the social
problem of the neo-avant-garde’ (1994: 5). This has given it the reputation for ‘pastiche’ or ‘parody’ that pales in comparison with the more radical agenda of the historical avant-garde. Rejecting Peter Bürger’s famous ‘dismissal of the postwar avant-garde as merely neo ’ ( 1994 : 11), which ‘can only turn the antiaesthetic into the artistic, the transgressive into the institutional’ ( 1994 : 13), Foster instead argues decisively that ‘the neo-avant-garde has produced new aesthetic experiences, cognitive connections, and political interventions, and that these