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The Aesthetics of Self-invention

The Aesthetics of Self-invention PDF Author: Shelton Waldrep
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780816634170
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Book Description
By printing the title "Professor of Aesthetics" on his visiting cards, Oscar Wilde announced yet another transformation-and perhaps the most significant of his career, proclaiming his belief that he could redesign not just his image but his very self. Shelton Waldrep explores the cultural influences at play in Wilde's life and work and his influence on the writing and performance of the twentieth century, particularly on the lives and careers of some of its most aestheticized performers: Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and David Bowie. As Waldrep reveals, Wilde's fusing of art with commerce foresaw the coming century's cultural producers who would blend works of both "high art" and mass-market appeal. Whether as a gay man or as a postmodern performance artist ahead of his time, Wilde ultimately emerges here as the embodiment of the twentieth-century media-savvy artist who is both subject and object of the aesthetic and economic systems in which he is enmeshed. Shelton Waldrep is associate professor of English at the University of Southern Maine. He is the coauthor of Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World (1995) and editor of The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture (2000).

The Aesthetics of Self-invention

The Aesthetics of Self-invention PDF Author: Shelton Waldrep
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780816634170
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Book Description
By printing the title "Professor of Aesthetics" on his visiting cards, Oscar Wilde announced yet another transformation-and perhaps the most significant of his career, proclaiming his belief that he could redesign not just his image but his very self. Shelton Waldrep explores the cultural influences at play in Wilde's life and work and his influence on the writing and performance of the twentieth century, particularly on the lives and careers of some of its most aestheticized performers: Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and David Bowie. As Waldrep reveals, Wilde's fusing of art with commerce foresaw the coming century's cultural producers who would blend works of both "high art" and mass-market appeal. Whether as a gay man or as a postmodern performance artist ahead of his time, Wilde ultimately emerges here as the embodiment of the twentieth-century media-savvy artist who is both subject and object of the aesthetic and economic systems in which he is enmeshed. Shelton Waldrep is associate professor of English at the University of Southern Maine. He is the coauthor of Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World (1995) and editor of The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture (2000).

The Art of Self Invention

The Art of Self Invention PDF Author: Joanne Finkelstein
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857710605
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Book Description
Both an exploration of the ways in which we fashion our public identity and a manual of modern sociability, this lively and readable book explores the techniques we use to present ourselves to the world: body language, tone of voice, manners, demeanour, 'personality' and personal style. Drawing on historical commentators from Castiglione to Machiavelli, and from Marcel Mauss to Roland Barthes, Joanne Finkelstein looks to popular visual culture, including Hollywood film and makeover TV, to show how it provides blueprints for the successful construction of 'persona'. She also discusses the role of fashion and of status symbols and how advertising sells these to us in our never ending quest for social mobility. Finkelstein's interest here is not in the veracity of the self - recently dissected by critical theory - but rather in the ways in which we style this 'self', in the enduring appeal of the 'new you' and in our fascination with deception, fraudulent personalities and impostors.

An Erotics of Opportunities

An Erotics of Opportunities PDF Author: Shelton Waldrep
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 590

Book Description


The Invention of the Self

The Invention of the Self PDF Author: Andrew Spira
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350091049
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Book Description
This book is an examination of personal identity, exploring both who we think we are, and how we construct the sense of ourselves through art. It proposes that the notion of personal identity is a psycho-social construction that has evolved over many centuries. While this idea has been widely discussed in recent years, Andrew Spira approaches it from a completely new point of view. Rather than relying on the thinking subject's attempts to identify itself consciously and verbally, it focuses on the traces that the self-sense has unconsciously left in the fabric of its environment in the form of non-verbal cultural conventions. Covering a millennium of western European cultural history, it amounts to an 'anthropology of personal identity in the West'. Following a broadly chronological path, Spira traces the self-sense from its emergence from the collectivity of the medieval Church to its consummation in the individualistic concept of artistic genius in the nineteenth century. In doing so, it aims to bridge a gap that exists between cultural history and philosophy. Regarding cultural history (especially art history), it elicits significances from its material that have been thoroughly overlooked. Regarding philosophy, it highlights the crucial role that material culture plays in the formation of philosophical ideas. It argues that the sense of personal self is as much revealed by cultural conventions - and as a cultural convention - as it is observable to the mind as an object of philosophical enquiry.

The Invention of Northern Aesthetics in 18th-Century English Literature

The Invention of Northern Aesthetics in 18th-Century English Literature PDF Author: Yvonne Bezrucka
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527512886
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Book Description
Free, romantic, and individualistic, Britain’s self-image in the eighteenth century constructs itself in opposition to the dominant power of a southern European aesthetics. Offering a fresh understanding of how the British intelligentsia created a ‘Northern’ aesthetics to challenge the European yoke, this book explores the roots of British Romanticism and a newly created past. Literature, the arts, architecture, and gardening all contributed to the creation of this national, ‘enlightened’, Northern cultural environment, with its emphasis on a home-grown legal tradition, on a heroic Celtic past, and on the imagined democracy of King Arthur and his Roundtable of Knights as a prophetic precursor of Constitutional Monarchy. Set against the European Grand Tour, the British turned to the Domestic, Picturesque Anti-Grand-Tour, and alongside a classical literary heritage championed British authors and British empiricism, against continental religion that sanctioned an authoritarian politics that the Gothic Novel mocks. However, if empiricism and common law were vital to this emerging tradition, so too was the other driving force of Britain’s medieval inheritance, the fantasy world of mythic heroes and a celebration of what would come to be known as the ‘fairy way of writing’.

The Aesthetic Imperative

The Aesthetic Imperative PDF Author: Peter Sloterdijk
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074569988X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
In this wide-ranging book, renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk examines art in all its rich and varied forms: from music to architecture, light to movement, and design to typography. Moving between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, his analyses span the centuries, from ancient civilizations to contemporary Hollywood. With great verve and insight he considers the key issues that have faced thinkers from Aristotle to Adorno, looking at art in its relation to ethics, metaphysics, society, politics, anthropology and the subject. Sloterdijk explores a variety of topics, from the Greco-Roman invention of postcards to the rise of the capitalist art market, from the black boxes and white cubes of modernism to the growth of museums and memorial culture. In doing so, he extends his characteristic method of defamiliarization to transform the way we look at works of art and artistic movements. His bold and original approach leads us away from the well-trodden paths of conventional art history to develop a theory of aesthetics which rejects strict categorization, emphasizing instead the crucial importance of individual subjectivity as a counter to the latent dangers of collective culture. This sustained reflection, at once playful, serious and provocative, goes to the very heart of Sloterdijk’s enduring philosophical preoccupation with the aesthetic. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and aesthetics and will appeal to anyone interested in culture and the arts more generally.

Fictions in Autobiography

Fictions in Autobiography PDF Author: Paul John Eakin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400854792
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Book Description
Investigating autobiographical writing of Mary McCarthy, Henry James, Jean-Paul Sartre, Saul Friedlander, and Maxine Hong Kingston, this book argues that autobiographical truth is not a fixed but an evolving content in a process of self-creation. Further, Paul John Eakin contends, the self at the center of all autobiography is necessarily fictive. Professor Eakin shows that the autobiographical impulse is simply a special form of reflexive consciousness: from a developmental viewpoint, the autobiographical act is a mode of self-invention always practiced first in living and only eventually, and occasionally, in writing. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Invention of Creativity

The Invention of Creativity PDF Author: Andreas Reckwitz
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745697070
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Book Description
Contemporary society has seen an unprecedented rise in both the demand and the desire to be creative, to bring something new into the world. Once the reserve of artistic subcultures, creativity has now become a universal model for culture and an imperative in many parts of society. In this new book, cultural sociologist Andreas Reckwitz investigates how the ideal of creativity has grown into a major social force, from the art of the avant-garde and postmodernism to the ‘creative industries’ and the innovation economy, the psychology of creativity and self-growth, the media representation of creative stars, and the urban design of ‘creative cities’. Where creativity is often assumed to be a force for good, Reckwitz looks critically at how this imperative has developed from the 1970s to the present day. Though we may well perceive creativity as the realization of some natural and innate potential within us, it has rather to be understood within the structures of a very specific culture of the new in late modern society. The Invention of Creativity is a bold and refreshing counter to conventional wisdom that shows how our age is defined by radical and restrictive processes of social aestheticization. It will be of great interest to those working in a variety of disciplines, from cultural and social theory to art history and aesthetics.

The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment

The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment PDF Author: Stefanie Buchenau
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107311179
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
When, in 1735, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten added a new discipline to the philosophical system, he not only founded modern aesthetics but also contributed to shaping the modern concept of art or 'fine art'. In The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment, Stefanie Buchenau offers a rich analysis and reconstruction of the origins of this new discipline in its wider context of German Enlightenment philosophy. Present-day scholars commonly regard Baumgarten's views as an imperfect prefiguration of Kantian and post-Kantian aesthetics, but Buchenau argues that Baumgarten defended a consistent and original project which must be viewed in the context of the modern debate on the art of invention. Her book offers new perspectives on Kantian aesthetics and beauty in art and science.

(Extra)Ordinary?

(Extra)Ordinary? PDF Author: Jade Alexander
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004366954
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Book Description
Questioning what “makes” a celebrity and how celebrity is controlled, dispersed and received are aspects branching out of (Extra)Ordinary’s debate over celebrities as ordinary/extraordinary. Jade Alexander and Katarzyna Bronk, together with the authors whose chapters make up this inter-disciplinary discussion, not only utilise the existing research on celebrity and fandom, but they also go beyond the often-quoted theorists to engage in multidirectional analyses of what it means to be a celebrity, and what influence they have on the consuming public. The present book provides an avenue for exploring not just what celebrity is as a discursive construction, but also how this involves a complex interplay between celebrities, the media and the audience.