Through an exploration of both practice and theory, this book investigates the relationship between listening and the theatrical encounter in the context of Western theatre and performance.
Rudolf Steiner understood that the history of art is a field in which the evolution of consciousness is symptomatically and transparently revealed. This informal sequence of thirteen lectures was given during the darkest hours of World War I. It was a moment when the negative consequences of what he called the age of the consciousness soul, which ......
Sassan Behnam-Bakhtiar focuses on the importance of being connected with the eternal self, particularly in our modern world where, he believes, people lose themselves more and more every day. The artist trusts that by being one with the eternal self, any individual can start to experience an evolved state of existence and become truly whole. One ......
Examining Henri Bergson's work, philosophy, and the body, this volume explores the history and philosophy of comedy, film, psychoanalysis and the comic performance of the future, creating a theoretical and practice-based framework for the field.
Paul Thom argues that opera is a set of practices framed by the concepts of work, interpretation, performance, and art. His argument is that operatic works have the potential to be art, but so do operatic productions, independently of their value as interpretations of the works they stage.
A spirited memoir by artist Aviva Rahmani, offering a relatable narrative to discuss trigger point theory and the importance of eco-art activism. Divining Chaos is an intimate personal memoir of unparalleled transparency into the moments in Rahmani's life that shaped her as an artist and activist. Detailing the history that led her to two ......
Sculptural Encounter in the Age of Aesthetic Theory
Explores tensions in aesthetics and art theory between antique figural sculpture experienced in the round and its translation into two-dimensional representations. Examines the work and thought of Goethe, Winckelmann, Hegel, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, and others.
Beyond Words argues that some works of fiction and poetry are especially, perhaps even best, suited to expanding our awareness and understanding into the nature of things otherwise unsayable and unconceived. Such literary works do philosophy, showing us something that a theoretical-scientific or philosophical-discourse cannot literally say.
Spirit Consonance in Chinese Landscape Painting and Some Kantian Echoes
This book discusses qiyun aesthetics in Chinese painting formulated by leading sixth to fourteenth-century intellectual elite. In light of Kant's account of artistic genius, it considers the role of the mind in creating a painting replete with qiyun, thereby both demystifying qiyun aesthetics and illuminating some limitations in Kant's aesthetics.
Making a radical departure from the conventional wisdom on art and beauty, this book presents the thesis that things of beauty are not only unrelated to art but often responsible for pornography.
This collection considers Lubitsch, the famous author of Weimar and classical Hollywood cinema, as a role model for our times. From this ethical position Lubitsch's cinema is regarded as a conceptual tool to unlock the serious issues of contemporary politics, culture, philosophy, philosophy of art and theatre. It is not only the socio-political or ......
What is jazz? How does it differ from other kinds of music? To what extent is it an important subject for thinking about aesthetic questions? Philosophy of Jazz is among the first book-length philosophical discussions devoted to jazz. Daniel Martin Feige explores the relationship between jazz and European art music, arguing that in jazz central ......
Volume one of Soren Kierkegaard's Either/Or explores the crisis of the modern secular void-with its attendant doubt, ennui, and alienation-from the first-person perspective of an aesthete who, lacking any epistemic or moral foundations, grows increasingly obsessed with what he calls "the interesting." In a close explication of the history of that ......
In Opera as Art: Philosophical Sketches, Paul Thom argues for opera as an art, standing alongside other artforms that employ visual and sonic media to embody the great themes of human life. Thom contends that in great operatic art, the narrative and expressive content collaborate with the work's aesthetic qualities towards achieving this aim. This ......
Bringing together Bataille with Lacan and Nietzsche, Tim Themi examines the role of aesthetics, implicit in each, and how this invokes an erotic process celebrating the real of what is usually excluded from articulation.
The lamented death of art following the rise of modern art theory and the reframing brought about by the appreciation of non-Western culture leads to the budding philosophy of everyday aesthetics. Traditional fine arts are often regarded as rarefied, something accessed by the uniquely talented and displayed in impressive museums or on lavish ......
The lamented death of art following the rise of modern art theory and the reframing brought about by the appreciation of non-Western culture leads to the budding philosophy of everyday aesthetics. Traditional fine arts are often regarded as rarefied, something accessed by the uniquely talented and displayed in impressive museums or on lavish ......
It is commonplace to regard many great works of literature--poems, dramas, works of fiction--as in some sense philosophical. Yet ever since Plato, there has been a tension between the kind of abstract theorizing that goes on in philosophy and the focus on concrete particulars that occurs in poetry and fiction. Beyond Words: Philosophy, Fiction, ......
Embodying Wittgenstein's own aphorism of "you'd be surprised," this collection of original essays by both artists and academics explores the significance of Wittgenstein's writings across a diverse field of performance practices, including poetics and choreography, theatre, and psychotherapy, as well as reflections on political thought and ......
Providing a solid media-philosophical groundwork, Beyond Mimesis contributes to the theory of mimesis and alterity in performance philosophy while serving to stimulate and inspire future inquiries where studies in media and art intersect with philosophy. It collects a wide range of philosophical and artistic thinkers' work to develop an exacting ......
What is aesthetics? How is it related to other disciplines? The chapters of this book examine the history, theoretical conditions and connection points between aesthetics and other disciplines. At the same time we are also interested in practical clashes of methodology and agenda - especially when it is not merely about the securing of the ......
Argues that aesthetic pleasure plays a key role in both racial practices and struggles against racist domination For Pleasure proposes that experimental aesthetics shaped race in the twentieth-century United States by creating transformative scenes of pleasure. Rachel Jane Carroll explains how aesthetic pleasure is fundamental to the ......
Argues that aesthetic pleasure plays a key role in both racial practices and struggles against racist domination For Pleasure proposes that experimental aesthetics shaped race in the twentieth-century United States by creating transformative scenes of pleasure. Rachel Jane Carroll explains how aesthetic pleasure is fundamental to the ......
Traditional aesthetics has tried to locate the reasons for aesthetic value in the transcendental subject while neglecting the importance of culture, even though it is obvious that artistic styles vary from culture to culture in both a geographical and historical sense. However, after recognizing importance of a cultural approach, one is faced with ......
This book presents a novel account of the aesthetics of animals. The author argues that the appreciation of animal beauty carries profound ethical consequences for our relations to our fellow creatures.
This book examines the paradox of digital enhancement: we simultaneously desire to be governed by the logic of perfection and to be self-governed. Through genealogical and aesthetic critique, Sarah Bianchi questions the costs of our digital present and conceptualizes how to critically construct an enlightened agency.
Television series seem to be made of images and sounds just like films, but Luca Bandirali and Enrico Terrone suggest an alternate framework for understanding television series: as concepts whereby narratives made of images and sounds can be constructed.
Proximate Difference in Aesthetics explores the interconnections of the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and the artistic practices comprising Institutional Critique as a means of both providing a framework for this heterodox approach to art and examining Derrida's contributions to contemporary aesthetics.
How Speaker Systems Influence, Manipulate and Torture
Sound Pressure reveals how speaker systems mounted in public, employment, military and entertainment environments have played a pivotal role in the way that humans have been physiologically and psychologically organised and disciplined throughout the past century.
Pneumatological Reflections on Contemporary Cinema
The Spirit and the Screen explores pertinent pneumatological issues that arise in film and asks how Christian convictions and experiences of the Spirit might shape the way one thinks about films and film-making.
This musical-philosophical study interweaves music improvisation, composition, and analysis with Deleuze's philosophy of time, plus includes reformulations of Deleuze's concepts. The author draws on his own work alongside examples from the history of music practice in improvised and experimental musics, developing a new concept: Rhythmicity.
This book puts into writing how alterity not only can be treated theoretically but also can be made accessible through writing as well as rendered relatable through reading. That is why it deals with exemplary interpersonal encounters in the world, in the arts, and in the media.
Visual Arts and Their Critique in Contemporary French Thought
The concept of the "work of art" is paradoxically both widely used and often unexamined. This book re-evaluates the scope of "work," "art," and "the aesthetic" from the viewpoint of deconstructionist philosophy and suggests that Derrida's analyses resolve some central questions in the discourses of contemporary visual arts.
Putting the New Materialist figure of diffraction to use in a set of readings - in which cultural texts are materially read against their contents and their themes, against their readers or against other texts - this volume proposes a critical intervention into the practice of reading itself.