The Abuse of Beauty

The Abuse of Beauty PDF

Author: Arthur C. Danto

Publisher: Open Court Publishing

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 9780812695403

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Leading art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto here explains how the anti-beauty revolution was hatched, and how the modernist avant-garde dislodged beauty from its throne. Danto argues not only that the modernists were right to deny that beauty is vital to art, but also that beauty is essential to human life and need not always be excluded from art.

Powers of Horror

Powers of Horror PDF

Author: Julia Kristeva

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2024-03-26

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 0231561415

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In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva offers an extensive and profound consideration of the nature of abjection. Drawing on Freud and Lacan, she analyzes the nature of attitudes toward repulsive subjects and examines the function of these topics in the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and other authors. Kristeva identifies the abject with the eruption of the real and the presence of death. She explores how art and religion each offer ways of purifying the abject, arguing that amid abjection, boundaries between subject and object break down.

Amending the Abject Body

Amending the Abject Body PDF

Author: Deborah Caslav Covino

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 163

ISBN-13: 0791484335

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Feminist theorists have often argued that aesthetic surgeries and body makeovers dehumanize and disempower women patients, whose efforts at self-improvement lead to their objectification. Amending the Abject Body proposes that although objectification is an important element in this phenomenon, the explosive growth of "makeover culture" can be understood as a process of both abjection (ridding ourselves of the unwanted) and identification (joining the community of what Julia Kristeva calls "clean and proper bodies"). Drawing from the advertisement and advocacy of body makeovers on television, in aesthetic surgery trade books, and in the print and Web-based marketing of face lifts, tummy tucks, and Botox injections, Deborah Caslav Covino articulates the relationship among objectification, abjection, and identification, and offers a fuller understanding of contemporary beauty-desire.

Abject Performances

Abject Performances PDF

Author: Leticia Alvarado

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2018-05-04

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0822371936

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In Abject Performances Leticia Alvarado draws out the irreverent, disruptive aesthetic strategies used by Latino artists and cultural producers who shun standards of respectability that are typically used to conjure concrete minority identities. In place of works imbued with pride, redemption, or celebration, artists such as Ana Mendieta, Nao Bustamante, and the Chicano art collective known as Asco employ negative affects—shame, disgust, and unbelonging—to capture experiences that lie at the edge of the mainstream, inspirational Latino-centered social justice struggles. Drawing from a diverse expressive archive that ranges from performance art to performative testimonies of personal faith-based subjection, Alvarado illuminates modes of community formation and social critique defined by a refusal of identitarian coherence that nonetheless coalesce into Latino affiliation and possibility.

Room Little Darker

Room Little Darker PDF

Author: June Caldwell

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-01-11

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 1788542878

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From one of Ireland's most grindingly authentic and radically original talents, Room Little Darker explores the clandestine aspects of modern life through jagged, visceral tales of wanton sex, broken relationships and futuristic nightmares. An abusive father haunts his daughter and wife from the confines of a nursing home; a couple with an appetite for S&M discover their escapades have led them into something unimaginably bleak; a desperate addict scours the depths of degradation in a nightmare Dublin; an unborn foetus narrates her torturous experience of the Irish legal system; a paedophile acquires a robotic little boy as part of his sex therapy. At once hilarious and profoundly moving, Caldwell's stories probe sexuality and disturbing psychology, and the darkess and light that lives within us all.

Abject Visions

Abject Visions PDF

Author: Rina Arya

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9780719096280

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An impressive list of authors examine how abjection can be discussed in relation to a host of different subjects, including marginality and gender.

Abjection Incorporated

Abjection Incorporated PDF

Author: Maggie Hennefeld

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2020-01-17

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1478003413

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From the films of Larry Clark to the feminist comedy of Amy Schumer to the fall of Louis C. K., comedic, graphic, and violent moments of abjection have permeated twentieth- and twenty-first-century social and political discourse. The contributors to Abjection Incorporated move beyond simple critiques of abjection as a punitive form of social death, illustrating how it has become a contested mode of political and cultural capital—empowering for some but oppressive for others. Escaping abjection's usual confines of psychoanalysis and aesthetic modernism, core to theories of abjection by thinkers such as Kristeva and Bataille, the contributors examine a range of media, including literature, photography, film, television, talking dolls, comics, and manga. Whether analyzing how comedic abjection can help mobilize feminist politics or how expressions of abjection inflect class, race, and gender hierarchies, the contributors demonstrate the importance of competing uses of abjection to contemporary society and politics. They emphasize abjection's role in circumscribing the boundaries of the human and how the threats abjection poses to the self and other, far from simply negative, open up possibilities for radically new politics. Contributors. Meredith Bak, Eugenie Brinkema, James Leo Cahill, Michelle Cho, Maggie Hennefeld, Rob King, Thomas Lamarre, Sylvère Lotringer, Rijuta Mehta, Mark Mulroney, Nicholas Sammond, Yiman Wang, Rebecca Wanzo

Abjection and Representation

Abjection and Representation PDF

Author: R. Arya

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-09-11

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 0230389341

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Abjection and Representation is a theoretical investigation of the concept of abjection as expounded by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror (1982) and its application in various fields including the visual arts, film and literature. It examines the complexity of the concept and its significance as a cultural category.

Abject visions

Abject visions PDF

Author: Rina Arya

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2016-05-03

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1784997722

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An impressive list of authors examine how abjection can be discussed in relation to a host of different subjects, including marginality and gender.