Editions Rodopi
Aesthetics.
Though written many years earlier, Lithuanian philosopher Sesemann's (1884-1963) introduction to aesthetics was published only in 1970, in Lithuanian. Donskis offers an introduction that puts it in the context of Lithuanian and Eastern European philosophy, and explains his methods of analysis. Among the topics are the beauty of time, the problem of artistic creativity, a historical survey of aesthetic theories, and the classification of types of art. Only names are indexed. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Avant-garde and criticism.
Meant for scholars, students, and teachers of literature, art, film, and architecture, this volume examines art criticism in relation to the European avant-garde during the inter-bellum period. Fifteen essays consider the power of critics such as André Lhote, Theo van Doesburg, and Mayakovsky, and contributors also investigate architecture, film, theater, and literary criticism, how critics who were also artists used their position, how they were influenced by the opinions of other critics, and their reactions to Dadaism and Marcel Proust. No index is provided. The book is also available for download from the Ingenta website. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Interpretation and transformation; explorations in art and the self.
Krausz (philosophy, Bryn Mawr College) considers the concepts of interpretation and transformation in the visual arts, in connection with the emotions and the self. His discussion includes three features of interpretive activity: reference to something separate from itself, judgments about objects, and elucidation; and he examines works such as Da Vinci's Last Supper, Van Gogh's The Potato Eaters, Christo and Jean-Claude's Gates, Rembrandt's Self-Portraits, and others, in light of these features. Some of the information in chapters has been previously published elsewhere. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The mourning after; attending the wake of postmodernism.
Postmodernism has become not only mainstream but in many disciplines dominant, thereby reducing some of its attraction, and making the cultural, literary and theoretical assumptions it despised fashionable again. But is postmodernism dead? The 13 articles in this collection take a stand somewhere between the death and life of postmodernism, noting the epistemological shift in production but also the postmodern inheritance in the ways we understand and change contemporary culture and society. They cover postmodernism in a fundamentalist arena and in the age of distracting discourses, suffering as it relates to the "wake" for postmodernism, Foucault's vision of the self, aesthetics and ambient emergence, Rushdie and other urban toxins, Danielewski's impossibilities, Franzen's turncoat refusals, mathematics and mysticism, Derrida and the ethics of mourning, the crisis of belief in neo-realism v. the real, and the theology of the accusation that God is weak. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Neo-avant-garde.
Perhaps through attrition, perhaps through sheer tenacity, the avant-garde of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s is deemed ripe for a re-reading. Fortunately these 20 articles take an interdisciplinary approach and has the advantage of enough time passing to insert a modicum of distance, although certainly not reverence. Topics include the fine arts, with contributions on Duchamp and Morris and their takes on death and irony, work across art forms, such as neo-dada performance art and concrete poetry as well as film, work at the periphery, such as that in Brazil's self-styled position as vanguard of the 1950s, the attempt to produce avant-garde radio, the trouble with gender and the avant-garde, the new political situationalist avant-garde, and theoretical reflections ranging from nature and ecology to the uses of structure and repetition. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Queer sexualities; in French and Francophone literature and film.
Drawn from papers presented at the March/April 2006 French Literature Conference in Columbia, South Carolina, these 14 papers examine queer theory and its application to works of expression, whether on film, in print or in performance. Topics include the binary opposition of medieval exegetical discourse, the genealogy the fable of Iphis and Ianthe and its reflection of the development of heteronormality, the role of comfort and discomfort in non-conformity, Rousseau's take on sexual difference, Gautier's questions on sexual identity, Sand's questions on sexual convergence, odes on Socrates made to order for a lesbian audience, the coexistence of male and female in Proust, the symbolic sexual identity of Tiresias, the homoeroticism of Genet, the groundbreaking homosexual French films of the 1970s, the new spaces of Barthes and Ozon in the French southwest, Houellebecq's disillusion, and the various fates of the modern gay novel in France. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
