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Author: Timothy Aubry Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674988965 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
For scholars invested in supporting or challenging dominant ideologies, the beauty of literature seemed frivolous, even complicit with social iniquities. Suspicion of aesthetics became a way to establish the rigor of one’s thought and the purity of one’s politics. Yet aesthetic pleasure never disappeared, Timothy Aubrey writes. It went underground.
Author: Timothy Aubry Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674988965 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
For scholars invested in supporting or challenging dominant ideologies, the beauty of literature seemed frivolous, even complicit with social iniquities. Suspicion of aesthetics became a way to establish the rigor of one’s thought and the purity of one’s politics. Yet aesthetic pleasure never disappeared, Timothy Aubrey writes. It went underground.
Author: Timothy Richard Aubry Publisher: ISBN: 9780674988989 Category : LITERARY CRITICISM Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
Literary studies' turn to politics in the wake of the radical social movements of the 1960s and 1970s supposedly meant the banishment of aesthetic considerations from the academy. As scholars asked what role literary works played in supporting or challenging dominant ideologies, a focus on the text's formal beauty and the pleasures it might elicit came to seem irresponsible or even complicit with the iniquities of the social order. Until quite recently, this suspicion of aesthetics was the default posture within literary scholarship, a means of establishing the rigor of one's thought and the purity of one's political commitments. And yet the widely accepted view that the discipline simply changed directions at some point in the final decades of the twentieth century cries out for further scrutiny. With many scholars advocating a renewal of attention to textual surfaces and aesthetic experiences, it is worth asking whether the break with midcentury formalism was quite as clean is it once appeared. Tracing the succession of methodologies from New Criticism to the digital humanities, Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures retells the discipline's history from a new vantage point, with the aesthetic as the complicated, morally ambiguous, and embattled, but stubbornly resilient protagonist.--
Author: Arielle Zibrak Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 1479807095 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 169
Book Description
"Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures reclaims the femme fictions dismissed as "trash" to celebrate the surprisingly cathartic pleasures of domination, privilege, and the material trappings of patriarchal culture"--
Author: Philippe Vergne Publisher: ISBN: Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
This major collection of interdisciplinary essays by several notable artists and cultural critics examines the many issues surrounding the relationship between art and entertainment. Topics range from the films of David Lynch to celebrity politics. 150 color and 75 b&w photos. Ties into traveling exhibit.
Author: Alice Guilluy Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 135016304X Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
In Guilty Pleasures, Alice Guilluy examines the reception of contemporary Hollywood romantic comedy by European audiences. She offers a new look at the romantic comedy genre through a qualitative study of its consumption by actual audiences. In doing so, she attempts to challenge traditional critiques of the genre as trite “escapism” at best, and dangerous “guilty pleasure” at worst. Despite this cultural anxiety, little work has been done on the genre's real audiences. Guilluy addresses this gap by presenting the results of a major qualitative study of the genre's reception, based on interview research with rom-com viewers in Britain, France and Germany, focusing on Sweet Home Alabama (2002, dir. Andy Tennant). Throughout the interviews, participants attempted to distance themselves from what they described as the “typical” rom-com viewer: the uneducated, gullible, overly emotional (American) woman. Guilluy calls this fantasy figure the “phantom spectatrix”. Guilluy complements this with a critical examination of the press reviews of the 20 biggest-grossing rom-coms at the worldwide box-office in order to contextualise the findings of her audience research.
Author: Sianne Ngai Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674041526 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 433
Book Description
Envy, irritation, paranoia—in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity. Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called “animatedness,” and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called “stuplimity.” She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-twentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening. Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of ugly feelings to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature—with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race—but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.
Author: William Flesch Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 9780674026315 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
With Comeuppance, William Flesch delivers the freshest, most generous thinking about the novel since Walter Benjamin wrote on the storyteller and Wayne C. Booth on the rhetoric of fiction. In clear and engaging prose, Flesch integrates evolutionary psychology into literary studies, creating a new theory of fiction in which form and content flawlessly intermesh. Fiction, Flesch contends, gives us our most powerful way of making sense of the social world. Comeuppance begins with an exploration of the appeal of gossip and ends with an account of how we can think about characters and care about them as much as about persons we know to be real. We praise a storyteller who contrives a happy or at least an appropriate ending, and fault the writer who refuses us one. Flesch uses Darwinian theory to show how fiction satisfies our desire to see the good vindicated and the wicked get their comeuppance. He conveys the danger and excitement of reading fiction with nimble intelligence and provides wide reference to stories both familiar and little known. Flesch has given us a book that is sure to claim a central place in the discussion of literature and the humanities.
Author: Forrest Glen Robinson Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 9780674445284 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 276
Book Description
Something is not right in the world of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The unease is less evident to Tom, the manipulator, than to the socially marginal Huck. The trouble is most dramatically revealed when Huck, whose "sivilized" Christian conscience is developing, faces the choice between betraying his black friend Jim--which he believes is his moral duty--and letting him escape, as his heart tells him to do. "Bad faith" is Forrest Robinson's name for the dissonance between what we profess to believe, how we act, and how we interpret our own behavior. There is bad faith in the small hypocrisies of daily living, but Robinson has a much graver issue in mind--namely slavery, which persisted for nearly a century in a Christian republic founded on ideals of freedom, equality, and justice. Huck, living on the fringes of small-town society, recognizes Jim's humanity and understands the desperateness of his plight. Yet Huck is white, a member of the dominant class; he is at once influenced and bewildered by the contradictions of bad faith in the minds of his fully acculturated contemporaries. Robinson stresses that "bad faith" is more than a theme with Mark Twain; his bleak view of man's social nature (however humorously expressed), his nostalgia, his ambivalence about the South, his complex relationship to his audience, can all be traced back to an awareness of the deceits at the core of his culture--and he is not himself immune. This deeply perceptive book will be of interest to students of American literature and history and to anyone concerned with moral issues.
Author: Beth Blum Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231551088 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 507
Book Description
Samuel Beckett as a guru for business executives? James Joyce as a guide to living a good life? The notion of notoriously experimental authors sharing a shelf with self-help books might seem far-fetched, yet a hidden history of rivalry, influence, and imitation links these two worlds. In The Self-Help Compulsion, Beth Blum reveals the profound entanglement of modern literature and commercial advice from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Blum explores popular reading practices in which people turn to literature in search of practical advice alongside modern writers’ rebukes of such instrumental purposes. As literary authors positioned themselves in opposition to people like Samuel Smiles and Dale Carnegie, readers turned to self-help for the promises of mobility, agency, and practical use that serious literature was reluctant to supply. Blum unearths a series of unlikely cases of the love-hate relationship between serious fiction and commercial advice, from Gustave Flaubert’s mockery of early DIY culture to Dear Abby’s cutting diagnoses of Nathanael West and from Virginia Woolf’s ambivalent polemics against self-improvement to the ways that contemporary global authors such as Mohsin Hamid and Tash Aw explicitly draw on the self-help genre. She also traces the self-help industry’s tendency to popularize, quote, and adapt literary wisdom and considers what it might have to teach today’s university. Offering a new history of self-help’s origins, appeal, and cultural and literary import around the world, this book reveals that self-help’s most valuable secrets are not about getting rich or winning friends but about how and why people read.
Author: Evan Kindley Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674981634 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 175
Book Description
The period between 1920 and 1950 saw an epochal shift in the American cultural economy. The shocks of the 1929 market crash and the Second World War decimated much of the support for high modernist literature, and writers who had relied on wealthy benefactors were forced to find new protectors from the depredations of the free market. Private foundations, universities, and government organizations began to fund the arts, and in this environment writers were increasingly obliged to become critics, elucidating and justifying their work to an audience of elite administrators. In Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture, Evan Kindley recognizes the major role modernist poet-critics played in the transition from aristocratic patronage to technocratic cultural administration. Poet-critics developed extensive ties to a network of bureaucratic institutions and established dual artistic and intellectual identities to appeal to the kind of audiences and entities that might support their work. Kindley focuses on Anglo-American poet-critics including T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, Sterling A. Brown, and R. P. Blackmur. These artists grappled with the task of being “village explainers” (as Gertrude Stein described Ezra Pound) and legitimizing literature for public funding and consumption. Modernism, Kindley shows, created a different form of labor for writers to perform and gave them an unprecedented say over the administration of contemporary culture. The consequences for our understanding of poetry and its place in our culture are still felt widely today.
Author: Timothy Aubry
Author: Timothy Aubry
Author: Timothy Richard Aubry
Author: Arielle Zibrak
Author: Philippe Vergne
Author: Alice Guilluy
Author: Sianne Ngai
Author: William Flesch
Author: Forrest Glen Robinson
Author: Beth Blum
Author: Evan Kindley