The Modernist Cult Of Ugliness

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The Modernist Cult of Ugliness

Author : L. Higgins
Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2002-08-19
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0312240376

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The Modernist Cult of Ugliness by L. Higgins Pdf

'Cult of Ugliness', Ezra Pound's phrase, powerfully summarizes the ways in which modernists such as Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and T.E. Hulme - the self styled 'Men of 1914' - responded to the 'horrid or sordid or disgusting' conditions of modernity by radically changing aesthetic theory and literary practices. Only the representation of 'ugliness', they protested, would produce the new, truly 'beautiful' work of art. Claiming membership in a cult, however playfully, was a crucial means of group and self-representation and promotion, a defense against personal, socio-economic, and artistic marginalization. Strategically, they dissociated the Beautiful from its traditional, troubling embodiment in female beauty, and from its more recent association with Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. In effect, the deliberate cultivation of ugliness provided the means to displace the misogyny and homophobia which governed individual and artistic responses and utterances. This feminist argument takes in texts such as John Ruskin's foundational art criticism, Eliot's uncollected literary journalism, Lewis's pro-fascism pamphlets of the 1930s, and the city poetry of Pound, Conrad Aiken, and Langston Hughes. Analyses of Whistler's paintings and the poetry of W.B. Yeats demonstrate that even those who claimed to be the most vigorous champions of Beauty were committed to aesthetic practices that disempowered female figures in order to articulate new truths of male artistic mastery.

Ugliness and Judgment

Author : Timothy Hyde
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 233 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2019-04-09
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9780691192642

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Ugliness and Judgment by Timothy Hyde Pdf

A novel interpretation of architecture, ugliness, and the social consequences of aesthetic judgment When buildings are deemed ugly, what are the consequences? In Ugliness and Judgment, Timothy Hyde considers the role of aesthetic judgment—and its concern for ugliness—in architectural debates and their resulting social effects across three centuries of British architectural history. From eighteenth-century ideas about Stonehenge to Prince Charles’s opinions about the National Gallery, Hyde uncovers a new story of aesthetic judgment, where arguments about architectural ugliness do not pertain solely to buildings or assessments of style, but intrude into other spheres of civil society. Hyde explores how accidental and willful conditions of ugliness—including the gothic revival Houses of Parliament, the brutalist concrete of the South Bank, and the historicist novelty of Number One Poultry—have been debated in parliamentary committees, courtrooms, and public inquiries. He recounts how architects such as Christopher Wren, John Soane, James Stirling, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe have been summoned by tribunals of aesthetic judgment. With his novel scrutiny of lawsuits for libel, changing paradigms of nuisance law, and conventions of monarchical privilege, he shows how aesthetic judgments have become entangled in wider assessments of art, science, religion, political economy, and the state. Moving beyond superficialities of taste in order to see how architectural improprieties enable architecture to participate in social transformations, Ugliness and Judgment sheds new light on the role of aesthetic measurement in our world.

On the Politics of Ugliness

Author : Sara Rodrigues,Ela Przybylo
Publisher : Springer
Page : 433 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2018-08-29
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9783319767833

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On the Politics of Ugliness by Sara Rodrigues,Ela Przybylo Pdf

Ugliness or unsightliness is much more than a quality or property of an individual’s appearance—it has long functioned as a social category that demarcates access to social, cultural, and political spaces and capital. The editors of and authors in this collection harness intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches in order to examine ugliness as a political category that is deployed to uphold established notions of worth and entitlement. On the Politics of Ugliness identifies and challenges the harmful effects that labels and feelings of ugliness have on individuals and the socio-political order. It explores ugliness in relation to the intersectional processes of racialization, colonization and settler colonialism, gender-making, ableism, heteronormativity, and fatphobia. On the Politics of Ugliness asks that we fight against visual injustice and imagine new ways of seeing.

Ugliness

Author : Gretchen E. Henderson
Publisher : Reaktion Books
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2015-11-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9781780235608

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Ugliness by Gretchen E. Henderson Pdf

Ugly as sin, the ugly duckling—or maybe you fell out of the ugly tree? Let’s face it, we’ve all used the word “ugly” to describe someone we’ve seen—hopefully just in our private thoughts—but have we ever considered how slippery the term can be, indicating anything from the slightly unsightly to the downright revolting? What really lurks behind this most favored insult? In this actually beautiful book, Gretchen E. Henderson casts an unfazed gaze at ugliness, tracing its long-standing grasp on our cultural imagination and highlighting all the peculiar ways it has attracted us to its repulsion. Henderson explores the ways we have perceived ugliness throughout history, from ancient Roman feasts to medieval grotesque gargoyles, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the Nazi Exhibition of Degenerate Art. Covering literature, art, music, and even the cutest possible incarnation of the term—Uglydolls—she reveals how ugliness has long posed a challenge to aesthetics and taste. She moves beyond the traditional philosophic argument that simply places ugliness in opposition to beauty in order to dismantle just what we mean when we say “ugly.” Following ugly things wherever they have trod, she traverses continents and centuries to delineate the changing map of ugliness and the profound effects it has had on the public imagination, littering her path with one fascinating tidbit after another. Lovingly illustrated with the foulest images from art, history, and culture, Ugliness offers an oddly refreshing perspective, going past the surface to ask what “ugly” truly is, even as its meaning continues to shift.

The Masculine Century

Author : Michael Antony
Publisher : iUniverse
Page : 364 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2008-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9780595456444

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The Masculine Century by Michael Antony Pdf

Now that the Twentieth Century is behind us . what made it what it was? 200 million human beings killed by war, totalitarianism, and extermination programs. What made the twentieth century the most murderous age in human history, as well as the age that made the greatest advances ever in science and technology, while art and serious music declined into abstraction, non-communication, and grotesque hoaxes-blank canvases, old urinals, cans of excrement, and concertos consisting of four minutes of silence? This book argues that the century was marked by an over-masculinization of the Western mind, leading to autism and psychopathic aggression, and the eclipse of the feminine, expressive, emotional, empathetic side of human nature. Hence the unprecedented culture of total war and genocide, and the totalitarian projects to raze the human past and start again-which Modernism carried out in the arts. Hence also the masculinization of sexual behavior (as romance gave way to pornography, and marriage to promiscuity), the adoption by women of a male work role, the decline of motherhood and family, and the collapse of Western birthrates. This is all traced back to the rise of two aggressive, ultra-masculine ideologies in the nineteenth century, Darwinism and Marxism (which gave birth to Fascism and Feminism.) These ideologies put violence, conflict and aggression at the heart of life, and changed human mentalities. This book examines these developments through the literature and art of the past hundred and fifty years, and discusses their implications for the future of Western Civilization.

Dandyism

Author : Len Gutkin
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 362 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2020-02-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780813943916

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Dandyism by Len Gutkin Pdf

The "dandy," a nineteenth-century character and concept exemplified in such works as Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, reverberates in surprising corners of twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. Establishing this character as a kind of shorthand for a diverse range of traits and tendencies, including gentlemanliness, rebelliousness, androgyny, aristocratic pretension, theatricality, and extravagance, Len Gutkin traces Victorian aesthetic precedents in the work of the modernist avant-garde, the noir novel, Beatnik experimentalism, and the postmodern thriller. As defined in the period between the fin de siècle and modernism, dandyism was inextricable from representations of queerness. But, rinsed of its suspect associations with the effeminate, dandyism would exert influence over such macho authors as Hemingway and Chandler, who harnessed its decadent energy. Dandyism, Gutkin argues, is a species of gendered charisma. The performative masquerade of Wilde’s decadent dandy is an ancestor to both the gender performance at work in American cowboy lore and the precious self-presentation of twenty-first-century hipsters. We cannot understand modernism and postmodernism’s negotiation of gender, aesthetic abstraction, or the culture of celebrity without the dandy. Analyzing the characteristic focus on costume, consumption, and the well-turned phrase in readings of figures ranging from Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes, and William Burroughs to Patricia Highsmith, Bret Easton Ellis, and Ben Lerner, Dandyism reveals the Victorian dandy’s legacy across the twentieth century, providing a revisionist history of the relationship between Victorian aesthetics and twentieth-century literature.

Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing

Author : Jennifer Cooke
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2020-04-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781108808194

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Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing by Jennifer Cooke Pdf

Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing is the first volume to identify and analyse the 'new audacity' of recent feminist writings from life. Characterised by boldness in both style and content, willingness to explore difficult and disturbing experiences, the refusal of victimhood, and a lack of respect for traditional genre boundaries, new audacity writing takes risks with its author's and others' reputations, and even, on occasion, with the law. This book offers an examination and critical assessment of new audacity in works by Katherine Angel, Alison Bechdel, Marie Calloway, Virginie Despentes, Tracey Emin, Sheila Heti, Juliet Jacques, Chris Krauss, Jana Leo, Maggie Nelson, Vanessa Place, Paul Preciado, and Kate Zambreno. It analyses how they write about women's self-authorship, trans experiences, struggles with mental illness, sexual violence and rape, and the desire for sexual submission. It engages with recent feminist and gender scholarship, providing discussions of vulnerability, victimhood, authenticity, trauma, and affect.

Modernism and the Aesthetics of Violence

Author : Paul Sheehan
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 243 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2013-06-24
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781107355620

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Modernism and the Aesthetics of Violence by Paul Sheehan Pdf

The notion that violence can give rise to art - and that art can serve as an agent of violence - is a dominant feature of modernist literature. In this study Paul Sheehan traces the modernist fascination with violence to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when certain French and English writers sought to celebrate dissident sexualities and stylized criminality. Sheehan presents a panoramic view of how the aesthetics of transgression gradually mutates into an infatuation with destruction and upheaval, identifying the First World War as the event through which the modernist aesthetic of violence crystallizes. By engaging with exemplary modernists such as Joyce, Conrad, Eliot and Pound, as well as lesser-known writers including Gautier, Sacher-Masoch, Wyndham Lewis and others, Sheehan shows how artworks, so often associated with creative well-being and communicative self-expression, can be reoriented toward violent and bellicose ends.

Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements

Author : Aleš Erjavec
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2015-05-08
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780822375661

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Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements by Aleš Erjavec Pdf

This collection examines key aesthetic avant-garde art movements of the twentieth century and their relationships with revolutionary politics. The contributors distinguish aesthetic avant-gardes —whose artists aim to transform society and the ways of sensing the world through political means—from the artistic avant-gardes, which focus on transforming representation. Following the work of philosophers such as Friedrich Schiller and Jacques Rancière, the contributors argue that the aesthetic is inherently political and that aesthetic avant-garde art is essential for political revolution. In addition to analyzing Russian constructivsm, surrealism, and Situationist International, the contributors examine Italian futurism's model of integrating art with politics and life, the murals of revolutionary Mexico and Nicaragua, 1960s American art, and the Slovenian art collective NSK's construction of a fictional political state in the 1990s. Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements traces the common foundations and goals shared by these disparate arts communities and shows how their art worked towards effecting political and social change. Contributors. John E. Bowlt, Sascha Bru, David Craven, Aleš Erjavec, Tyrus Miller, Raymond Spiteri, Miško Šuvakovic

The History of Futurism

Author : Geert Buelens,Harald Hendrix,Monica Jansen
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 445 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2012-08-31
Category : History
ISBN : 9780739173879

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The History of Futurism by Geert Buelens,Harald Hendrix,Monica Jansen Pdf

Futurism began as an artistic and social movement in early twentieth-century Italy. Until now, much of the scholarship available in English has focused only on a single individual or art form. This volume seeks to present a more complete picture of the movement by exploring the history of the movement, the events leading up to the movement, and the lasting impact it has had as well as the individuals involved in it. The History of Futurism: The Precursors, Protagonists, and Legacies addresses the history and legacy of what is generally seen as the founding avante-garde movement of the twentieth century. Geert Buelens, Harald Hendrix, and Monica Jansen have brought together scholarship from an international team of specialists to explore the Futurism movement as a multidisciplinary movement mixing aesthetics, politics, and science with a particular focus on the literature of the movement.

Histories of the Normal and the Abnormal

Author : Waltraud Ernst
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2006-09-27
Category : History
ISBN : 9781134205493

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Histories of the Normal and the Abnormal by Waltraud Ernst Pdf

This fascinating volume tackles the history of the terms 'normal' and 'abnormal'. Originally meaning 'as occurring in nature', normality has taken on significant cultural gravitas and this book recognizes and explores that fact. The essays engage with the concepts of the normal and the abnormal from the perspectives of a variety of academic disciplines – ranging from art history to social history of medicine, literature, and science studies to sociology and cultural anthropology. The contributors use as their conceptual anchors the works of moral and political philosophers such as Canguilhem, Foucault and Hacking, as well as the ideas put forward by sociologists including Durkheim and Illich. With contributions from a range of scholars across differing disciplines, this book will have a broad appeal to students in many areas of history.

Fateful Beauty

Author : Douglas Mao
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2010-05-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781400832804

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Fateful Beauty by Douglas Mao Pdf

When Oscar Wilde said he had "seen wallpaper which must lead a boy brought up under its influence to a life of crime," his joke played on an idea that has often been taken quite seriously--both in Wilde's day and in our own. In Fateful Beauty, Douglas Mao recovers the lost intellectual, social, and literary history of the belief that the beauty--or ugliness--of the environment in which one is raised influences or even determines one's fate. Weaving together readings in literature, psychology, biology, philosophy, education, child-rearing advice, and interior design, he shows how this idea abetted a dramatic rise in attention to environment in many discourses and in many practices affecting the lives of the young between the late nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth. Through original and detailed analyses of Wilde, Walter Pater, James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, Rebecca West, and W. H. Auden, Mao shows that English-language writing of the period was informed in crucial but previously unrecognized ways by the possibility that beautiful environments might produce better people. He also reveals how these writers shared concerns about environment, evolution, determinism, freedom, and beauty with scientists and social theorists such as Herbert Spencer, Hermann von Helmholtz, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, and W.H.R. Rivers. In so doing, Mao challenges conventional views of the roles of beauty and the aesthetic in art and life during this time. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

Romance Fiction and American Culture

Author : William A. Gleason,Eric Murphy Selinger
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 708 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2017-05-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781134806287

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Romance Fiction and American Culture by William A. Gleason,Eric Murphy Selinger Pdf

Since the 1970s, romance novels have surpassed all other genres in terms of popularity in the United States, accounting for half of all mass market paperbacks sold and driving the digital publishing revolution. Romance Fiction and American Culture brings together scholars from the humanities, social sciences, and publishing to explore American romance fiction from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century. Essays on interracial, inspirational, and LGBTQ romance attend to the diversity of the genre, while new areas of inquiry are suggested in contextual and interdisciplinary examinations of romance authorship, readership, and publishing history, of pleasure and respectability in African American romance fiction, and of the dynamic tension between the genre and second wave feminism. As it situates romance fiction among other instances of American love culture, from Civil War diaries to Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Romance Fiction and American Culture confirms the complexity and enduring importance of this most contested of genres.

Modernism

Author : Michael H. Whitworth
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2008-04-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780470779897

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Modernism by Michael H. Whitworth Pdf

This guide helps readers to engage with the major critical debates surrounding literary modernism. A judicious selection of key critical works on literary modernism Presents a critical history from the earliest reviews to the most recent theoretical assessments Shows how modernist writers understood and constructed modernism. Shows how succeeding generations have developed those constructions and brought new interpretations to bear on the subject Discusses how modernism relates to modernity and odernization, and to other literary and cultural movements Texts have been selected for their relevance to the questions surrounding modernism, and for their accessibility to readers with a limited knowledge of the modernist canon Includes a glossary and an annotated bibliography.

Restless Secularism

Author : Matthew Mutter
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 335 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2017-06-27
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780300227963

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Restless Secularism by Matthew Mutter Pdf

A scholarly and deeply sensitive study that explores how religion and secularism are tightly interwoven in the major works of modernist literature Matthew Mutter provides a broad survey of modernist literature, examining key works against a background of philosophy, theology, intellectual and social history, while tracing the relationship of modernism’s secular imagination to the religious cultures that both preceded and shaped it. Mutter’s provocative study demonstrates how, despite their explicit desire to purify secular life of its religious residues, Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, and other literary modernists consistently found themselves entangled in the religious legacies they disavowed.