Crescent Moon over the Rational

Crescent Moon over the Rational PDF

Author: Stephen Watson

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2009-09-23

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0804761256

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This work reveals an evolving theoretical constellation of interpretations and their questions that address and continually renew Klee's rich legacies.

Crescent Moon over the Rational

Crescent Moon over the Rational PDF

Author: Stephen H. Watson

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2009-09-23

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 0804772991

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Why, and in what manner, did artist Paul Klee have such a significant impact on twentieth-century thinkers? His art and his writing inspired leading philosophers to produce key texts in twentieth-century aesthetics, texts that influenced subsequent art history and criticism. Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard, Sartre, Foucault, Blanchot, Derrida, and Marion are among the philosophers who have engaged with Klee's art and writings. Their views are often thought to be distant from each other, but Watson puts them in conversation. His point is not to vindicate any final interpretation of Klee but to allow his interpreters' different accounts to interact, to shed light on their and on Klee's work, and, in turn, to delineate both a history and a theoretical problematic in their midst. Crescent Moon over the Rational reveals an evolving theoretical constellation of interpretations and their questions (theoretical, artistic, and political) that address and continually renew Klee's rich legacies.

Between Word and Image

Between Word and Image PDF

Author: Dennis J. Schmidt

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 025300618X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Engagement with the image has played a decisive role in the formulation of the very idea of philosophy since Plato. Identifying pivotal moments in the history of philosophy, Dennis J. Schmidt develops the question of philosophy's regard of the image in thinking by considering painting—where the image most clearly calls attention to itself as an image. Focusing on Heidegger and the work of Paul Klee, Schmidt pursues larger issues in the relationship between word, image, and truth. As he investigates alternative ways of thinking about truth through word and image, Schmidt shows how the form of art can indeed possess the capacity to change its viewers.

Scheherazade's Children

Scheherazade's Children PDF

Author: Philip F. Kennedy

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2013-11-08

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 1479857092

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Scheherazade’s Children gathers together leading scholars to explore the reverberations of the tales of the Arabian Nights across a startlingly wide and transnational range of cultural endeavors. The contributors, drawn from a wide array of disciplines, extend their inquiries into the book’s metamorphoses on stage and screen as well as in literature—from India to Japan, from Sanskrit mythology to British pantomime, from Baroque opera to puppet shows. Their highly original research illuminates little-known manifestations of the Nights, and provides unexpected contexts for understanding the book’s complex history. Polemical issues are thereby given unprecedented and enlightening interpretations. Organized under the rubrics of Translating, Engaging, and Staging, these essays view the Nights corpus as a uniquely accretive cultural bundle that absorbs the works upon which it has exerted influence. In this view, the Arabian Nights is a dynamic, living and breathing cross-cultural phenomenon that has left its mark on fields as disparate as the European novel and early Indian cinema. While scholarly, the writers’ approach is also lively and entertaining, and the book is richly illustrated with unusual materials to deliver a sparkling and highly original exploration of the Arabian Nights’ radiating influence on world literature, performance, and culture.

The Retrieval of the Beautiful

The Retrieval of the Beautiful PDF

Author: Galen A. Johnson

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2009-12-31

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0810125641

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In this elegant new study Galen Johnson retrieves the concept of the beautiful through the framework of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics. Although Merleau-Ponty seldom spoke directly of beauty, his philosophy is essentially about the beautiful. In Johnson’s formulation, the ontology of Flesh as element and the ontology of the Beautiful as elemental are folded together, for Desire, Love, and Beauty are part of the fabric of the world’s element, Flesh itself, the term at which Merleau-Ponty arrived to replace Substance, Matter, or Life as the name of Being. Merleau-Ponty’s Eye and Mind is at the core of the book, so Johnson engages, as Merleau-Ponty did, the writings and visual work of Paul Cézanne, Auguste Rodin, and Paul Klee, as well as Rilke’s commentary on Cézanne and Rodin. From these widely varying aesthetics emerge the fundamental themes of the retrieval of the beautiful: desire, repetition, difference, rhythm, and the sublime. The third part of Johnson’s book takes each of these up in turn, bringing Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic thinking into dialogue with classical philosophy as well as Sartre, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Deleuze. Johnson concludes his final chapter with a direct dialogue with Kant and Merleau-Ponty, and also Lyotard, on the subject of the beautiful and the sublime. As we experience with Rodin’s Balzac, beauty and the sublime blend into one another when the beautiful grows powerful, majestic, mysterious, and transcendent.

Architectures of Transversality

Architectures of Transversality PDF

Author: Shima Mohajeri

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-07-11

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1351759744

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Architectures of Transversality investigates the relationship between modernity, space, power, and culture in Iran. Focusing on Paul Klee’s Persian-inspired miniature series and Louis Kahn’s unbuilt blueprint for a democratic public space in Tehran, it traces the architectonics of the present as a way of moving beyond universalist and nationalist accounts of modernism. Transversality is a form of spatial production and practice that addresses the three important questions of the self, objects, and power. Using Deleuzian and Heideggerian theory, the book introduces the practices of Klee and Kahn as transversal spatial responses to the dialectical tension between existential and political territories and, in doing so, situates the history of the silent, unrepresented and the unbuilt – constructed from the works of Klee and Kahn – as a possible solution to the crisis of modernity and identity-based politics in Iran.

The Myth of Abstraction

The Myth of Abstraction PDF

Author: Andrea Meyertholen

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 1640141049

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

An alternative genealogy of abstract art, featuring the crucial role of 19th-century German literature in shaping it aesthetically, culturally, and socially.

The Barbarian Principle

The Barbarian Principle PDF

Author: Jason M. Wirth

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2013-09-04

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 1438448481

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Toward the end of his life, Maurice Merleau-Ponty made a striking retrieval of F. W. J. Schelling's philosophy of nature. The Barbarian Principle explores the relationship between these two thinkers on this topic, opening up a dialogue with contemporary philosophical and ecological significance that will be of special interest to philosophers working in phenomenology and German idealism.

In the Shadow of Phenomenology

In the Shadow of Phenomenology PDF

Author: Stephen H. Watson

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2011-10-27

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1441186646

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is widely known for his emphasis on embodied perceptual experience. This emphasis initially relied heavily on the positive results of Gestalt psychology in addressing issues in philosophical psychology and philosophy of mind from a phenomenological standpoint. Eventually he transformed this account in light of his investigations in linguistics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of history and institutions. Far less work has been done in addressing his evolving conception of philosophy and how this account influenced more general philosophical issues in epistemology, accounts of rationality, or its status as theoretical discourse. Merleau-Ponty's own contributions to these issues and, in particular, the theoretical status of the phenomenological account that resulted, have provoked varying responses. On the one hand, some commentators have understood his work to be a regional application of Husserl's foundational account of phenomenology. On the other hand, some commentators have questioned whether, in the final analysis, Merleau-Ponty was a phenomenologist at all. In In the Shadow of Phenomenology, Stephen H. Watson offers an in depth analysis of these responses and the complications and development of Merleau-Ponty's position.

Paul Klee

Paul Klee PDF

Author: Annie Bourneuf

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-07-20

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 022623360X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The fact that Paul Klee (1879–1940) consistently intertwined the visual and the verbal in his art has long fascinated commentators from Walter Benjamin to Michel Foucault. However, the questions it prompts have never been satisfactorily answered—until now. In Paul Klee, Annie Bourneuf offers the first full account of the interplay between the visible and the legible in Klee’s works from the 1910s and 1920s. Bourneuf argues that Klee joined these elements to invite a manner of viewing that would unfold in time, a process analogous to reading. From his elaborate titles to the small scale he favored to his metaphoric play with materials, Klee created forms that hover between the pictorial and the written. Through his unique approach, he subverted forms of modernist painting that were generally seen to threaten slow, contemplative viewing. Tracing the fraught relations among seeing, reading, and imagining in the early twentieth century, Bourneuf shows how Klee reconceptualized abstraction at a key moment in its development.