The Aesthetics of Kinship: Form and Family in the Long Eighteenth Century (New Studies in the Age of Goethe) by Heidi Schlipphacke
2023 | ISBN: 1684484545, 1684484537 | English | 354 pages | PDF | 26 MB
The Aesthetics of Kinship intervenes critically into rigidified discourses about the emergence of the nuclear family and the corresponding interior subject in the eighteenth century. By focusing on kinship constellations instead of "family Descriptions" in seminal literary works of the period, this book presents an alternative view of the eighteenth-century literary social world and its concomitant ideologies. Whereas Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy and political theory posit the nuclear family as a microcosm for the ideal modern nation-state, literature of the period offers a far more heterogeneous image of kinship structures, one that includes members of various classes and is not defined by blood. Through a radical re-reading of the multifarious kinship structures represented in literature of the long eighteenth century, The Aesthetics of Kinship questions the inevitability of the dialectic of the Enlightenment and invokes alternative futures for conceptions of social and political life.

David Cecchetto, "Listening in the Afterlife of data: Aesthetics, Pragmatics, and Incommunication "
English | ISBN: 1478015292 | 2022 | 184 pages | PDF | 2 MB
In Listening in the Afterlife of Data, David Cecchetto theorizes sound, communication, and data by analyzing them in the contexts of the practical workings of specific technologies, situations, and artworks. In a time he calls the afterlife of data-the cultural context in which data's hegemony persists even in the absence of any belief in its validity-Cecchetto shows how data is repositioned as the latest in a long line of concepts that are at once constitutive of communication and suggestive of its limits. Cecchetto points to the failures and excesses of communication by focusing on the power of listening-whether through wearable technology, internet-based artwork, or the ways in which computers process sound-to pragmatically comprehend the representational excesses that data produces. Writing at a cultural moment in which data has never been more ubiquitous or less convincing, Cecchetto elucidates the paradoxes that are constitutive of computation and communication more broadly, demonstrating that data is never quite what it seems.

Martin Demant Frederiksen, "A Sea of Transience: Poetics, Politics and Aesthetics along the Black Sea Coast"
English | ISBN: 1800737866 | 2023 | 216 pages | PDF | 4 MB
Transience is found in every meeting and form of coexistence between people and things that live and exist by, or move across or along, the Black Sea. It may come in various forms and guises, from de facto states, tourism, migration, trafficking or military troops, and it needs to be written and captured in sensuous, affective and imaginative ways. With particular attention to poetics, politics and aesthetics, this volume focuses on the scales of transient moments and histories, and enables readers to see and sense the many forms of transience that occur in a given landscape, sea or space.

Flora Liuying Wei, "Zehou Li and the Aesthetics of Educational Maturity "
English | ISBN: 1032294043 | 2022 | 198 pages | PDF | 2 MB
This book articulates a unique conception of aesthetic educational philosophy and its relation to the Chinese world, drawing on the works of the prominent contemporary Chinese philosopher Zehou Li.

Mark Titmarsh, "Expanded Painting: Ontological Aesthetics and the Essence of Colour"
English | ISBN: 1350101990 | 2019 | 238 pages | PDF | 7 MB
The relevance of painting has been questioned many times over the last century, by the arrival of photography, installation art and digital technologies. But rather than accept the death of painting, Mark Titmarsh traces a paradoxical interface between this art form and its opposing forces to define a new practice known as 'expanded painting' giving the term historical context, theoretical structure and an important place in contemporary practice. As the formal boundaries tumble, the being of painting expands to become a kind of total art incorporating all other media including sculpture, video and performance.

Jina B. Kim, "Sex, Identity, Aesthetics: The Work of Tobin Siebers and Disability Studies"
English | ISBN: 0472038494 | 2021 | 192 pages | PDF | 1223 KB
The late Tobin Siebers was a pioneer of, and one of the most prominent thinkers in, the field of disability studies. His scholarship on sexual and intimate affiliations, the connections between structural location and coalitional politics, and the creative arts has shaped disability studies and continues to be widely cited. Sex, Identity, Aesthetics: The Work of Tobin Siebers and Disability Studies uses Siebers' work as a launchpad for thinking about contemporary disability studies. The editors provide an overview of Siebers' research to show how it has contributed to humanistic understandings of ability and disability along three key axes: sex, identity, and aesthetics. The first section of the book explores how disability provides a way for scholars to theorize a wider range of intimacies and relationalities, arguing that disabled people seek sexual access and revolution in ways that transgress heteronormative dictates on sexual propriety. The second part of the book works outward from Siebers' work to looks at how disability broadens our concepts of social location and political affiliations. The final section examines how disability challenges traditional notions of artistic beauty and agency. Rather than being a strictly commemorative collection meant to mark the end of a major scholar's career, this collection shows how Siebers' foundational work in disability studies remains central to and continues to inspire scholars in the field today.

Patricia Suzanne Sullivan, "Experimental Writing in Composition: Aesthetics and Pedagogies "
English | ISBN: 082296208X | 2012 | 200 pages | PDF | 1046 KB
From the outset, experimental writing has been viewed as a means to afford a more creative space for students to express individuality, underrepresented social realities, and criticisms of dominant socio-political discourses and their institutions. Yet, the recent trend toward multimedia texts has left many composition instructors with little basis from which to assess these new forms and to formulate pedagogies. In this original study, Patricia Suzanne Sullivan provides a critical history of experimental writing theory and its aesthetic foundations and demonstrates their application to current multimodal writing.

The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood: Asymmetries of Innocence and the Cultural Politics of Child Development By Hannah Dyer
2020 | 170 Pages | ISBN: 1978803990 | PDF | 3 MB
2020Choice​ Outstanding Academic Title In The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood, Hannah Dyer offers a study of how children's art and art about childhood can forecast new models of social life that redistribute care, belonging, and political value. Dyer suggests that childhood's cultural expressions offer insight into the persisting residues of colonial history, nation building, homophobia, and related violence. Drawing from queer and feminist theory, psychoanalysis, settler-colonial studies, and cultural studies, this book helps to explain how some theories of childhood can hurt children. Dyer's analysis moves between diverse sites and scales, including photographs and an art installation, children's drawings after experiencing war in Gaza, a novel about gay love and childhood trauma, and debates in sex-education. In the cultural formations of art, she finds new theories of childhood that attend to the knowledge, trauma, fortitude and experience that children might possess. In addressing aggressions against children, ambivalences towards child protection, and the vital contributions children make to transnational politics, she seeks new and queer theories of childhood.

Medieval Romance: The Aesthetics of Possibility By James F. Knapp, Peggy A. Knapp
2017 | 264 Pages | ISBN: 1487501919 | PDF | 2 MB
Widely heard and read throughout the middle ages, romance literature has persisted for centuries and has lately re-emerged in the form of speculative fiction, inviting readers to step out of the actual world and experience the intriguing pleasure of possibility. "Medieval Romance" is the first study to focus on the deep philosophical underpinnings of the genre's fictional worlds. James F. Knapp and Peggy A. Knapp uniquely utilize Leibniz's "possible worlds" theory, Kant's aesthetic reflections, and Gadamer's writings on the apprehension of language over time, to bring the romance genre into critical dialogue with fundamental questions of philosophical aesthetics, modal logic, and the hermeneutics of literary transmission. The authors' compelling and illuminating analysis of six instances of medieval secular writing, including that of Marie de France, the Gawain-poet, and Chaucer demonstrates how the extravagantly imagined worlds of romance invite reflection about the nature of the real. These stories, which have delighted readers for hundreds of years, do so because the impossible fictions of one era prefigure desired realities for later generations.

Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume II By G. W. F. Hegel
1998 | 696 Pages | ISBN: 0198238177 | PDF | 42 MB
This is the second of two volumes of the only English edition of Hegel's Aesthetics, the work in which he gives full expression to his seminal theory of art. The substantial Introduction is his best exposition of his general philosophy of art. In Part I he considers the general nature of artas a spiritual experience, distinguishes the beauty of art and the beauty of nature, and examines artistic genius and originality. Part II surveys the history of art from the ancient world through to the end of the eighteenth century, probing the meaning and significance of major works. Part III(in the second volume) deals individually with architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature; a rich array of examples makes vivid his exposition of his theory.