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Emblematics and the Brazilian Avant-Garde (1920-30s)
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In Antropofagia, Aarnoud Rommens shows how this Brazilian avant-garde movement (1920-30s) deconstructed early tendencies in the European vanguard. Through imaginative re-readings, the author reinterprets Antropofagia’s central texts and images as elements within an ever-changing, neo-baroque memory palace. Not only does the movement subvert established conceptions of the pre- and postcolonial; it is also a counter-colonial critique of verbal and visual literacy. To do justice to the dynamic between visibility and legibility, Rommens develops the inventive methodology of ‘emblematics’. The book’s implications are wide-ranging, prompting a revaluation of the avant-garde as a transmedial tactic for disrupting our reading and viewing habits.
A Heretical History of Architecture challenges the conventional understanding of significant developments in Western architecture as a series of alignments among dominant ideologies and artistic programs, arguing instead that the most consequential changes in the evolution of artistic and design practices across Europe between the fifth and seventeenth centuries were motivated by tensions between local religious or cultural traditions and centralized power.

This groundbreaking study richly demonstrates the processes through which heterodox beliefs that persisted within numerous diverse communities resulted in design experimentation so syncretic that it has heretofore eluded scholars employing conventional Euro-centric taxonomies of architectural styles.
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This book examines the interrelationships between trauma, time, and narrative in the novel “The Journey” (1962) by the scholar, novelist, poet, and Holocaust survivor H. G. Adler. Drawing on Paul Ricœur’s philosophy of time and studies of time in literature, Julia Menzel analyzes how Adler’s novel depicts the experience of time as a dimension of Holocaust victims’ trauma. She explores the aesthetic temporality of “The Journey” and presents a new interpretation of the literary text, which she conceives of as a modern “Zeit-Roman” (time novel).

Die Studie untersucht die Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Trauma, Zeit und Erzählung in dem Roman „Eine Reise“ (1962) des Wissenschaftlers, Schriftstellers, Dichters und Holocaust-Überlebenden H. G. Adler. Unter Bezugnahme auf Paul Ricœurs Zeitphilosophie und die literaturwissenschaftliche Zeitforschung analysiert Julia Menzel, wie Adlers Roman traumatische Zeiterfahrungen der Opfer des Holocaust zur Darstellung bringt. Sie erkundet die ästhetische Eigenzeit von „Eine Reise“ und eröffnet eine neue Lesart des literarischen Texts, den sie als modernen Zeit-Roman begreift.
Our identities are shaped by narratives, and cinema contributes to that process. While there is substantial scholarship on both narrative identity and film narrative, there is very little investigation of the intersection between them. This book provides that, with particular attention to how the interaction between film narratives and life narratives affect the meaning of life. Traditional issues like spectator activity and realism appear in a different light when viewed through this interaction. It also reveals how film can both help and hinder the meaning of our lives by sustaining oppressive narratives or promoting new narrative possibilities.
Antinomies of Self-Determination in Four Aesthetic Studies
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A strategic reconstruction of modern German thought from the standpoint of aesthetic theory, The Narrowest Path reveals the characteristically modern, revolutionary project of freedom-as-autonomy to be unresolvably antinomic. Basing himself on four seminal texts by Kleist, Hegel, Marx, and Adorno, Mehrgan develops four basic figures: the literary, the person, the republic, and the artwork. All flourished during the long period between the French Revolution and the aftermath of the Second World War in Europe. The key antagonist is the rule of capital, paradoxically enabling self-determination and thwarting it. Still present in contemporary revolutionary experiments, this daunting conflict, the book argues, shows itself best in the aesthetic — but the resolution lies elsewhere.
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A Philosophy for Education: A Study in Aesthetic Rationality supports an argument for the crucial role of the aesthetic in a humanist education. It is structured around the philosophy of Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) who saw the poetic imagination as the first language through which humankind makes sense of its place within the world with myths and symbolic ritual. This is the search for the truth of identity and, ultimately, requires a self that examines its own experiences. That examination is the work of an aesthetic rationality that responds to life’s contradictions through the use of metaphor: An historical perspective, ranging from the Renaissance, through the Romantic Movement, to Phenomenology, identifies the major characteristics of an aesthetic rationality, and concludes with recommendations for the school curriculum.