Free Download Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetics of Theater (Hopkins Studies in Modernism) by Joseph Cermatori
English | November 16, 2021 | ISBN: 1421441527, 1421441535 | True EPUB | 320 pages | 2.6 MB
A groundbreaking study on the vital role of baroque theater in shaping modernist philosophy, literature, and performance.

Free Download High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng's China By Jing Wang
1996 | 399 Pages | ISBN: 0520202953 | PDF | 17 MB
Jing Wang offers the first overview of the feverish decade of the 1980s in China, from early reexaminations of Maoism through the crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Wang's energetic, creative, and highly intelligent take on Chinese culture provides a broad portrait of the post-revolutionary era and a provocative inquiry into the nature of Chinese modernity.In seven linked essays, the author examines the cultural dynamics that have given rise to the epochal discourse. She traces the Chinese Marxists' short debate over "socialist alienation" and examines the various schools of thought-Li Zehou and the Marxist Reconstruction of Confucianism, the neo-Confucian Revivalists, and the Enlightenment School-that came into play in the Culture Fever. She also critiques the controversial mini-series Yellow River Elegy. In mapping out China's post-revolutionary aesthetics, Wang introduces the debate over "pseudo-modernism," refutes the pseudo-proposition of "Chinese postmodernism," and looks at the dawning of popular culture in the 1990s.This book delivers a ten-year intertwined history of Chinese intellectuals, writers, literary critics, and cultural critics that gives us a deeper understanding of the China of the 1980s, the 1990s, and beyond.

Free Download Political Graffiti in Critical Times: The Aesthetics of Street Politics By Ricardo Campos (editor), Yiannis Zaimakis (editor), Andrea Pavoni (editor)
2021 | 352 Pages | ISBN: 1789209412 | PDF | 5 MB
Whether aesthetically or politically inspired, graffiti is among the oldest forms of expression in human history, one that becomes especially significant during periods of social and political upheaval. With a particular focus on the demographic, ecological, and economic crises of today, this volume provides a wide-ranging exploration of urban space and visual protest. Assembling case studies that cover topics such as gentrification in Cyprus, the convulsions of post-independence East Timor, and opposition to Donald Trump in the American capital, it reveals the diverse ways in which street artists challenge existing social orders and reimagine urban landscapes.

Maria Walsh, "Therapeutic Aesthetics: Performative Encounters in Moving Image Artworks "
English | ISBN: 135018943X | 2022 | 240 pages | PDF | 3 MB
Therapeutic Aesthetics focuses on moving image artworks as expressive of social psychopathological symptoms that arise in a climate of neoliberal cognitive capitalism, such as anxiety, depression, post- traumatic stress disorder and burnout. The book is not about engaging with art as a therapy to express personal traumas and symptoms but proposes that a selective range of contemporary moving image artworks performatively mimic the psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism in a conflictual manner.

The Aesthetics of Senescence: Aging, Population, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel By Andrea Charise
2020 | 240 Pages | ISBN: 1438477457 | PDF | 4 MB
Investigates how nineteenth-century British literature grappled with a new understanding of aging as both an individual and collective experience.The Aesthetics of Senescence investigates how chronological age has come to possess far-reaching ideological, ethical, and aesthetic implications, both in the past and present. Andrea Charise argues that authors of the nineteenth century used the imaginative resources of literature to engage with an unprecedented climate of crisis associated with growing old. Marshalling a great variety of canonical authors including William Godwin, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and George Gissing, as well as less familiar writings by George Henry Lewes, Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, Agnes Strickland, and Max Nordau, Charise demonstrates why the imaginative capacity of writing became an interdisciplinary crucible for testing what it meant to grow old at a time of profound cultural upheaval. Charise's grounding in medicine, political history, literature, and genre offers a fresh, original, thoroughly interdisciplinary analysis of nineteenth-century aging and age theory, as well as new insights into the rise of the novel―a genre usually thought of as affiliated almost entirely with the young or middle-aged.

Kwaito's Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa By Gavin Steingo
2016 | 320 Pages | ISBN: 022636240X | PDF | 3 MB
In mid-1990s South Africa, apartheid ended, Nelson Mandela was elected president, and the country's urban black youth developed kwaito-a form of electronic music (redolent of North American house) that came to represent the post-struggle generation. In this book, Gavin Steingo examines kwaito as it has developed alongside the democratization of South Africa over the past two decades. Tracking the fall of South African hope into the disenchantment that often characterizes the outlook of its youth today-who face high unemployment, extreme inequality, and widespread crime-Steingo looks to kwaito as a powerful tool that paradoxically engages South Africa's crucial social and political problems by, in fact, seeming to ignore them. Politicians and cultural critics have long criticized kwaito for failing to provide any meaningful contribution to a society that desperately needs direction. As Steingo shows, however, these criticisms are built on problematic assumptions about the political function of music. Interacting with kwaito artists and fans, he shows that youth aren't escaping their social condition through kwaito but rather using it to expand their sensory realities and generate new possibilities. Resisting the truism that "music is always political," Steingo elucidates a music that thrives on its radically ambiguous relationship with politics, power, and the state.

American Aesthetics: Theory and Practice By Walter B. Gulick (editor), Gary Slater (editor)
2020 | 428 Pages | ISBN: 1438478577 | PDF | 3 MB
Proposes a distinctly American approach to aesthetic judgment and practice.Although there are distinctly American artists―Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Grandma Moses, Thomas Hart Benton, and Andy Warhol, for example―very little attention has been devoted to formulating any distinctively American characteristics of aesthetic judgment and practice. This volume takes a step in this direction, presenting an introductory essay on the possibility of such a distinctly American tradition, and a collection of essays exploring particular examples from a variety of angles. Some of the essays in this collection extend pragmatist and process insights about the important place aesthetics has in molding and assessing experience. Other essays examine the place of American aesthetics in relation to such particular forms of art as painting, literature, music, and film. Three essays attend to the aesthetic aspects of a flourishing life. In each of the essays, American aesthetics is understood to arise out of deeply felt personal, historical, and cultural backgrounds. Consequently, not only are such relatively abstract notions as harmony, fit, elegance, proportion, and the like involved in aesthetic judgment, but also religious, political, and social factors become embroiled in aesthetic discernment. Thus the ongoing pattern of American aesthetics is shown to be distinguishable from such other varieties of aesthetic thought as analytic aesthetics, New Criticism, and postmodern approaches to aesthetics.

Postsensual Aesthetics: On the Logic of the Curatorial (The MIT Press) by James Voorhies
English | February 28th, 2023 | ISBN: 0262047608 | 152 pages | True EPUB | 0.24 MB
Contemporary art exhibitions appeal to cognition as well as the senses, modeling a new and expansive understanding of global aesthetics.

Eva Kit Wah Man, "Comparative Everyday Aesthetics: East-West Studies in Contemporary Living"
English | ISBN: 9463723366 | 2023 | 296 pages | PDF | 2 MB
Leading international scholars present analysis and case studies from different cultural settings, East and West, exploring aesthetic interest and experience in our daily lives at home, in workplaces, using everyday things, in our built and natural environments, and in our relationships and communities. A wide range of views and examples of everyday aesthetics are presented from western philosophical paradigms, from Confucian and Daoist aesthetics, and from the Japanese tradition. All indicate universal features of human aesthetic lives together with their cultural variations. Comparative Everyday Aesthetics is a significant contribution to a key trend in international aesthetics for thinking beyond narrow art-centered conceptions of the aesthetic. It generates global discussions about good, aesthetic, everyday living in all its various aspects. It also promotes aesthetic education for personal, social, and environmental development and presents opportunities for global collaborative projects in philosophical aesthetics.

Hanne Appelqvist, "Wittgenstein and Aesthetics "
English | ISBN: 110893112X | 2023 | pages | PDF | 838 KB