What does an artist express when creating artwork? What does a perceiver contemplate during an aesthetic experience? This book explores the object of reflection for both creator and viewer, relying on Malgorzata Cazarnocka’s conception of symbolic truth to provide answers.
Ethical Encounters
These essays on theatre ethics demonstrate how academics and artists have thought about its ethical implications. They debate relevant issues and explore what is possible within theatre, challenging you to form and develop your own opinions and resultant actions.
Just Images
This collection of essays explores the role ethics plays in the study of moving images. Scholars discuss how film engages with history, politics, trauma, and representations of the Other to reshape our thoughts on subjects like terrorism and conflict.
Kitsch
Often dismissed as facile or lowbrow, kitsch is surprisingly complex. The contributors to this collection address how and what kitsch might signify, moving well beyond the simple binaries of good/bad, high/low, or art/kitsch into far more rewarding territory.
How can aesthetic enquiry contribute to the study of visual culture? The essays in this volume show a variety of points of intersection between aesthetics and visual studies, considering the future of art, aesthetic experience, and representation versus reality.
Sensorium
This book reconfigures art and philosophy by returning to an older meaning of aesthetics: our capacity to receive sensations. Following Deleuze and Lyotard, it frames artists as experimenters with the sensible who extend our perceptual interface with the world.
Abstraction Matters
This collection of essays presents eminent sculptors of the 20th century through their “own words.” Focusing on the rich theoretical discourse of abstraction, contributors analyze the artists through the key-notions of “Sensation,” “Idea,” and “Language.”
Labor and Writing
This book highlights the act of writing—humanity’s greatest cultural investment. It is the labor we use to record our past and construct our future. The essays within explore writing’s role at the heart of all enterprise, from identifying things to inventing new realities.
Playing with Possibilities sits at the heart of all creative endeavours. This collection brings together thinkers and writers to explore the potential of play to shape who we are and the worlds we live in, asking us to celebrate fanciful approaches to living.
This book shows that Eugene O’Neill’s modern American drama is a survey on the politics of desire and the power of doom. The city is the stage where his protagonists, as desiring machines, try to evade modern closed circles of power, anticipating concepts from Gilles Deleuze.
The Art of the Real
Art of the Real registers the materialist turn in contemporary visual studies. As scholars move beyond post-structuralist theory, this is the first book to treat the new materialism for its meta-theoretical commitments, ontology, and political implications.
The performing arts remain an underexplored territory for aesthetics. This volume collects essays by international scholars who address the core philosophical topic of expression, questioning the roles of the performer, the work, and the spectator.
This book offers a unique collection of papers on inter-translatability, art, and ethics—subjects crucial for intercultural conversations today. It explores dialogue between East and West, asserting that any such conversation has to start with translation.
The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Grotesque
This book of essays explores the tension between subjectivity and objectivity from the Enlightenment to the Postmodern world. It focuses on the aesthetic theories of Winkelmann, Hume, and Kant, examining the beautiful, the sublime, and the grotesque.
Heroes, Monsters and Values
This anthology of essays on 1970s sci-fi films from Alien to Zardoz explores what it means to be human. Challenging our ideas on heroism, technology, and morality, this is an enlightening work for science fiction and film enthusiasts.
Encompassing papers from the 2014 Lisbon Conference on Philosophy and Film, this compilation discusses new aspects and approaches of how philosophy relates to film. It explores film’s nature philosophically and provides new insights for the film philosopher and the filmmaker.
Pictorialism in Cinema
Valkola extensively explores the unique phenomenon of pictorialism and its connection with other arts in film and media studies, considering a number of theoretical and practical issues of filmic narration.
This book argues that the theater of Stoppard, Hwang, Churchill, Shepard, Walcott, and Karnad induces spectators to deconstruct habitual perception and taste a void of conceptions, pointing through performance toward a trans-verbal, trans-cultural wholeness.
Nietzsche and Van Gogh
In 1888, the lives of Friedrich Nietzsche and Vincent van Gogh converged. Driven by creative ambition but haunted by madness, their creative frenzies were synchronized, culminating in psychotic breaks just days apart. This book delves into the uncanny parallels between them.
From classical tragedy to post-9/11, these essays explore terror as a perennial theme in the arts—a thread woven into the fabric of artistic expression and life itself.