Author: Frank Lentricchia Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226472086 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 198
Book Description
Do killers, artists, and terrorists need one another? In Crimes of Art and Terror, Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe explore the disturbing adjacency of literary creativity to violence and even political terror. Lentricchia and McAuliffe begin by anchoring their penetrating discussions in the events of 9/11 and the scandal provoked by composer Karlheinz Stockhausen's reference to the destruction of the World Trade Center as a great work of art, and they go on to show how political extremism and avant-garde artistic movements have fed upon each other for at least two centuries. Crimes of Art and Terror reveals how the desire beneath many romantic literary visions is that of a terrifying awakening that would undo the West's economic and cultural order. This is also the desire, of course, of what is called terrorism. As the authority of writers and artists recedes, it is criminals and terrorists, Lentricchia and McAuliffe suggest, who inherit this romantic, destructive tradition. Moving freely between the realms of high and popular culture, and fictional and actual criminals, the authors describe a web of impulses that catches an unnerving spirit. Lentricchia and McAuliffe's unorthodox approach pairs Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment with Martin Scorsese's King of Comedy and connects the real-life Unabomber to the surrealist Joseph Cornell and to the hero of Bret Easton Ellis's bestselling novel American Psycho. They evoke a desperate culture of art through thematic dialogues among authors and filmmakers as varied as Don DeLillo, Joseph Conrad, Francis Ford Coppola, Jean Genet, Frederick Douglass, Hermann Melville, and J. M. Synge, among others. And they conclude provocatively with an imagined conversation between Heinrich von Kleist and Mohamed Atta. The result is a brilliant and unflinching reckoning with the perilous proximity of the impulse to create transgressive art and the impulse to commit violence.
Author: Vladimir L. Marchenkov Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1443862371 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 155
Book Description
This book examines the manifestations of terror in the arts. From classical tragedy to post-9/11 responses, terror – as an emotion, violent act, and state of the world – has been a preoccupation of artists in all genres. Using philosophy, art history, film studies, interdisciplinary arts, theatre studies, and musicology, the authors included here delve into this perennially contemporary theme to produce insights articulated in a variety of idioms: from traditional philosophical humanism to phenomenology to feminism. Their approaches may vary, but together they reinforce the notion that terror is a thread in the fabric of artistic expression as much as it has always been and, alas, remains a thread in the fabric of life.
Author: Alex Danchev Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 0748641386 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
This book, a collection of Alex Danchev's essays on the theme of art, war and terror, offers a sustained demonstration of the way in which works of art can help us to explore the most difficult ethical and political issues of our time: war, terror, extermination, torture and abuse.It takes seriously the idea of the artist as moral witness to this realm, considering war photography, for example, as a form of humanitarian intervention. War poetry, war films and war diaries are also considered in a broad view of art, and of war. Kafka is drawn upon to address torture and abuse in the war on terror; Homer is utilised to analyse current talk of 'barbarisation'. The paintings of Gerhard Richter are used to investigate the terrorists of the Baader-Meinhof group, while the photographs of Don McCullin and the writings of Vassily Grossman and Primo Levi allow the author to propose an ethics of small acts of altruism.This book examines the nature of war over the last century, from the Great War to a particular focus on the current 'Global War on Terror'. It investigates what it means to be human in war, the cost it exacts and the ways of coping. Several of the essays therefore have a biographical focus.
Author: Jonathan Harris Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 9780367741174 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This book assesses the key definitions, forms, contexts and impacts of terrorist activity on the arts in the modern era, using historical and contemporary perspectives. Its empirical case studies include theatre, literature, music, visual art, mass media, film and the mores of 'ordinary life.' While its immediate reflective context is Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, the book reviews a broader range of definitions and counter-definitions of 'terrorism', 'state terrorism' and 'states of terror, ' examining uses of the terms through a series of comparative analyses. Chapters focus on the intersection of these definitional questions with heuristic analysis of art forms, cultural activities and their socio-historical contexts. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, terrorism, politics and the media, and visual culture.
Author: Catherine Fletcher Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190908505 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 449
Book Description
A new account of the birth of the West through its birthplace--Renaissance Italy The period between 1492--resonant for a number of reasons--and 1571, when the Ottoman navy was defeated in the Battle of Lepanto, embraces what we know as the Renaissance, one of the most dynamic and creatively explosive epochs in world history. Here is the period that gave rise to so many great artists and figures, and which by its connection to its classical heritage enabled a redefinition, even reinvention, of human potential. It was a moment both of violent struggle and great achievement, of Michelangelo and da Vinci as well as the Borgias and Machiavelli. At the hub of this cultural and intellectual ferment was Italy. The Beauty and the Terror offers a vibrant history of Renaissance Italy and its crucial role in the emergence of the Western world. Drawing on a rich range of sources--letters, interrogation records, maps, artworks, and inventories--Catherine Fletcher explores both the explosion of artistic expression and years of bloody conflict between Spain and France, between Catholic and Protestant, between Christian and Muslim; in doing so, she presents a new way of witnessing the birth of the West.
Author: Ewa Lajer-Burcharth Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 9780300074215 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 400
Book Description
This book examines the crucial period in the painter's career as he struggled to save his neck and recast his identity in the aftermath of the Reign of Terror. Burcharth assesses his works in the context of the larger cultural and social formations emerging in France concluding with an interpretation of the unfinished portrait of Juliette Recamier.
Author: Uroš Cvoro Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350227358 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 246
Book Description
In Images of War in Contemporary Art, Uroš Cvoro and Kit Messham-Muir mount a challenge to the dominance of theoretical tropes of trauma, affect, and emotion that have determined how we think of images of war and terror for the last 20 years. Through analyses of visual culture from contemporary "war art" to the meme wars, they argue that the art that most effectively challenges the ethics and aesthetics of war and terror today is that which disrupts this flow-art that makes alternative perceptions of wartime both visible and possible. As a theoretical work, Images of War in Contemporary Art is richly supported by visual and textual evidence and firmly embedded in current artistic practice. Significantly, though, the book breaks with both traditional and current ways of thinking about war art-offering a radical rethinking of the politics and aesthetics of art today through analyses of a diverse scope of contemporary art that includes Ben Quilty, Abdul Abdullah (Australia), Mladen Miljanovic, Nebojša Šeric Šoba (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Hiwa K, Wafaa Bilal (Iraq), Teresa Margolles (Mexico), and Arthur Jafa (United States).
Author: Christine Battersby Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134753799 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 235
Book Description
Christine Battersby is a leading thinker in the field of philosophy, gender studies and visual and literary aesthetics. In this important new work, she undertakes an exploration of the nature of the sublime, one of the most important topics in contemporary debates about modernity, politics and art. Through a compelling examination of terror, transcendence and the ‘other’ in key European philosophers and writers, Battersby articulates a radical ‘female sublime’. A central feature of The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is its engagement with recent debates around ‘9/11’, race and Islam. Battersby shows how, since the eighteenth century, the pleasures of the sublime have been described in terms of the transcendence of terror. Linked to the ‘feminine’, the sublime was closed off to flesh-and-blood women, to ‘Orientals’ and to other supposedly ‘inferior’ human types. Engaging with Kant, Burke, the German Romantics, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray and Arendt, as well as with women writers and artists, Battersby traces the history of these exclusions, while finding resources within the history of western culture for thinking human differences afresh The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is essential reading for students of continental philosophy, gender studies, aesthetics, literary theory, visual culture, and race and social theory.
Author: Iris Moon Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 0271093099 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 239
Book Description
When Louis XVI was guillotined on January 21, 1793, vast networks of production that had provided splendor and sophistication to the royal court were severed. Although the king’s royal possessions—from drapery and tableware to clocks and furniture suites—were scattered and destroyed, many of the artists who made them found ways to survive. This book explores the fabrication, circulation, and survival of French luxury after the death of the king. Spanning the final years of the ancien régime from the 1790s to the first two decades of the nineteenth century, this richly illustrated book positions luxury within the turbulent politics of dispersal, disinheritance, and dispossession. Exploring exceptional works created from silver, silk, wood, and porcelain as well as unrealized architectural projects, Iris Moon presents new perspectives on the changing meanings of luxury in the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, a time when artists were forced into hiding, exile, or emigration. Moon draws on her expertise as a curator to revise conventional accounts of the so-called Louis XVI style, arguing that it was only after the revolutionary auctions liquidated the king’s collections that their provenance accrued deeper cultural meanings as objects with both a royal imprimatur and a threatening reactionary potential. Lively and accessible, this thought-provoking study will be of interest to curators, art historians, scholars, and students of the decorative arts as well as specialists in the French Revolution.
Author: Frank Lentricchia
Author: Vladimir L. Marchenkov
Author: Alex Danchev
Author: Jonathan Harris
Author: Eleanor Mathieson
Author: Catherine Fletcher
Author: Ewa Lajer-Burcharth
Author: Uroš Cvoro
Author: Christine Battersby
Author: Iris Moon