Pictorial Nominalism

Pictorial Nominalism
Author: Thierry De Duve
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2005-10-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 081664859X

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Reveals the invention of the readymade as a critical point in contemporary art.

The Pictorial Turn

The Pictorial Turn
Author: Neal Curtis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2013-09-13
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1317989007

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In 1992 W. J. T. Mitchell argued for a "pictorial turn" in the humanities, registering a renewed interest in and prevalence of pictures and images in what had been understood as an age of simulation, or an increasingly extensive and diverse visual culture. However, in what is often characterized as a society of the "spectacle" we still do not know exactly what pictures or images are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers and the world, how their history is to be understood, and what is to be done with or about them. In this seminal collection of essays, the first to be devoted to the "pictorial turn", theorists from across the humanities and social sciences, representing the disciplines of art history, philosophy, geography, media studies, visual studies and anthropology, are brought together with a paleontologist and practising artists to consider amongst other things the relation between pictures and images, the power of landscape, the nature of political images, the status of images in the natural sciences, the "life" of images, and the pictorial uncanny. With these topics in mind, picture theory and iconology exceed in scope the objects of visual culture conventionally understood. This book was published as a special issue of Culture, Theory and Critique.

Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance

Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance
Author: Herbert Molderings
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2010-05-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231519745

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Marcel Duchamp is often viewed as an "artist-engineer-scientist," a kind of rationalist who relied heavily on the ideas of the French mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré. Yet a complete portrait of Duchamp and his multiple influences draws a different picture. In his 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-1914), a work that uses chance as an artistic medium, we see how far Duchamp subverted scientism in favor of a radical individualistic aesthetic and experimental vision. Unlike the Dadaists, Duchamp did more than dismiss or negate the authority of science. He pushed scientific rationalism to the point where its claims broke down and alternative truths were allowed to emerge. With humor and irony, Duchamp undertook a method of artistic research, reflection, and visual thought that focused less on beauty than on the notion of the "possible." He became a passionate advocate of the power of invention and thinking things that had never been thought before. The 3 Standard Stoppages is the ultimate realization of the play between chance and dimension, visibility and invisibility, high and low art, and art and anti-art. Situating Duchamp firmly within the literature and philosophy of his time, Herbert Molderings recaptures the spirit of a frequently misread artist-and his thrilling aesthetic of chance.

Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?

Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?
Author: James Elkins
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2004-11-23
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1135963576

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With bracing clarity, James Elkins explores why images are taken to be more intricate and hard to describe in the twentieth century than they had been in any previous century. Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? uses three models to understand the kinds of complex meaning that pictures are thought to possess: the affinity between the meanings of paintings and jigsaw-puzzles; the contemporary interest in ambiguity and 'levels of meaning'; and the penchant many have to interpret pictures by finding images hidden within them. Elkins explores a wide variety of examples, from the figures hidden in Renaissance paintings to Salvador Dali's paranoiac meditations on Millet's Angelus, from Persian miniature paintings to jigsaw-puzzles. He also examines some of the most vexed works in history, including Watteau's "meaningless" paintings, Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling, and Leonardo's Last Supper.

Perspectives on Contemporary Literature

Perspectives on Contemporary Literature
Author: David Hershberg
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2021-10-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813186161

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Today's music, painting, and film share with literature in the development of a new aesthetic, even as these other arts influence (and are influenced by) literary themes and structures. And at the same time the music and art of the past continue to re-echo in twentieth-century letters. The thirteen essays gathered here open a fine and varied view of the ways in which contemporary literature interacts with the other arts. Surrealism in French painting and literature, collage theory and the cutups of William Burroughs, texts of Butor as shaped by works of Duchamp—this volume offers a rich harvest of perceptive studies on these and other aspects of a fascinating topic.

Differentials

Differentials
Author: Marjorie Perloff
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2004-09-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0817351280

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Introduction: differential reading -- Crisis in the humanities? Reconfiguring literary study for the Twenty First Century -- Cunning passages and contrived corridors: rereading Eliot's "Gerontion" -- The search for "prime words": Pound, Duchamp, and the nominalist ethos -- "But isn't the same at least the same?" Wittgenstein on translation -- "Logocinema of the frontiersman" Eugene Jolas's multilingual poetics and its legacies -- "The silence that is not silence": acoustic art in Samuel Beckett's radio plays -- Language poetry and the lyric subject: Ron Silliman's Albany, Susan Howe's Buffalo -- After language poetry: innovation and its theoretical discontents -- The invention of "concrete prose": Haroldo de Campos's Galaxias and after -- Songs of the Earth: Ronald Johnson's Verbicovisuals -- THe Oulipo factor: The procedural poetics of Christian Bok and Caroline Bergvall -- Filling the space with trace: Tom Raworth's "Letters from Yaddo" -- Teaching the "new" poetries: the case of Rae Armantrout -- Writing poetry/writing about poetry: some problems of affiliation.

Picture Theory

Picture Theory
Author: W. J. T. Mitchell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 466
Release: 1995-09
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780226532325

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What precisely, W. J. T. Mitchell asks, are pictures (and theories of pictures) doing now, in the late twentieth century, when the power of the visual is said to be greater than ever before, and the "pictorial turn" supplants the "linguistic turn" in the study of culture? This book by one of America's leading theorists of visual representation offers a rich account of the interplay between the visible and the readable across culture, from literature to visual art to the mass media.

The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages

The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages
Author: Andrew Cole
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2010-02-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0822392542

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This collection of essays argues that any valid theory of the modern should—indeed must—reckon with the medieval. Offering a much-needed correction to theorists such as Hans Blumenberg, who in his Legitimacy of the Modern Age describes the "modern age" as a complete departure from the Middle Ages, these essays forcefully show that thinkers from Adorno to Žižek have repeatedly drawn from medieval sources to theorize modernity. To forget the medieval, or to discount its continued effect on contemporary thought, is to neglect the responsibilities of periodization. In The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages, modernists and medievalists, as well as scholars specializing in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century comparative literature, offer a new history of theory and philosophy through essays on secularization and periodization, Marx’s (medieval) theory of commodity fetishism, Heidegger’s scholasticism, and Adorno’s nominalist aesthetics. One essay illustrates the workings of medieval mysticism in the writing of Freud’s most famous patient, Daniel Paul Schreber, author of Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903). Another looks at Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, a theoretical synthesis whose conscientious medievalism was the subject of much polemic in the post-9/11 era, a time in which premodernity itself was perceived as a threat to western values. The collection concludes with an afterword by Fredric Jameson, a theorist of postmodernism who has engaged with the medieval throughout his career. Contributors: Charles D. Blanton, Andrew Cole, Kathleen Davis, Michael Hardt, Bruce Holsinger, Fredric Jameson, Ethan Knapp, Erin Labbie, Jed Rasula, D. Vance Smith, Michael Uebel

Modernism and Theory

Modernism and Theory
Author: Stephen Ross
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2009-05-07
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1135267006

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Modernism and Theory boldly asks what role theory has to play in the new modernist studies. The three sections comprise expositions and debates on modernist topics by leading contributors, and the book concludes with an afterword from Fredric Jameson.

A Wounded Innocence

A Wounded Innocence
Author: Alejandro R. Garcia-Rivera
Publisher: Liturgical Press
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2015-03-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0814683894

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What is the theological significance of art? Why has the Church always encouraged the arts? What is so profoundly human about the arts? In A Wounded Innocence Alejandro R. Garcia-Rivera answers these questions in a series of sketches" that are mixed spiritual and theological reflections on various works of art written in a poetic style. These reflections explore the relationship between the multi-dimensional spiritual and the arts. The first *sketch, - *The Beginning of Art, - introduces the rest that go on to explore further the human, artistic, and theological implications of a wounded innocence. Each *sketch - reflects on a particular human work of art. Some are conventional works of art. Others may never find their way into a museum but, then, that is one of the implications coming out of this book. A museum does not define what a work of art is, its human depth does. In these deeply studied yet spiritually written reflections on each work of art, it is hoped that the reader will find his and her own creative depth described, perhaps even revealed. A Wounded Innocence is both inspiring and informative. Readers will learn about art, spirituality, and theology, and will find themselves inspired to look at works of art, and even to produce a work of art. It sets a new way of doing theology that is at the same time spiritual. More importantly, Garcia-Rivera describes a theology of art. Chapters are *The Beginning of Art, - *The End of Art, - *Human Freedom and Artistic Creativity, - *Heaven-with-Us, - *The Human Aspect of Atonement, - *The Tyger and the Lamb, - and *A Wounded Innocence. - Includes black and white art. Alejandro R. Garcia-Rivera, PhD, is associate professor of systematic theology at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley. The author of numerous articles, he also wrote a Catholic Press Association award-winning book on theology and aesthetics titled The Community of the Beautiful (The Liturgical Press). "