Dead Artists, Live Theories, and Other Cultural Problems

ISBN-13: 9780415907385 / Angielski / Miękka / 1993 / 336 str.

Stanley Aronowitz

Opis

In these essays, Stanley Aronovitz examines some of the crucial cultural shifts associated with the crisis of modernity. Against the predominant view that Great Art possesses intrinsic aesthetic value, the author contends that aesthetics has itself been surpassed. In the introductory essay, Aronowitz argues aesthetics, like mathematics education, is a powerful sorting machine which preserves the hierarchical system of cultural and economic privilege. In his essays of Bakhtin and Williams, he stresses that their work shows literary and other artistic works as forms of social knowledge; even bad literature may illuminate everyday life and the structure of feeling far better than ethnographic, historical and sociological studies. Yet he insists that art does not represent the lifeworld, but can be understood as constitutive of it. We read novels, watch TV and videos for pleasure, but art produces experiences as much as it registers it. The essays all take on the crisis in modernity: whether in educational controversies, Murray Bookchin's social ecology, Roland Barthes as a star, the anti-aesthetics of postmodernism, or recent transgressions in the philosophy of science.

Spis treści

Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION: THE DEATH OF “ART”; Part 1 I AGAINST MODERNIST CULTURAL THEORY; Chapter 2 SO WHAT'S NEW? THE POSTMODERN PARADOX; Chapter 3 CRITIC AS STAR; Chapter 4 OPPOSITES DETRACT: SONTAG VERSUS BARTHES FOR BARTHES'S SAKE; Chapter 5 THE TENSIONS OF CRITICAL THEORY: IS NEGATIVE DIALECTICS ALL THERE IS?; Part 2 II LITERATURE AS SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE; Chapter 6 LITERATURE AS SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE: MIKHAIL BAKHTIN AND THE REEMERGENCE OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES; Chapter 7 BETWEEN CRITICISM AND ETHNOGRAPHY: RAYMOND WILLIAMS AND THE INTERVENTION OF CULTURAL STUDIES; Part 3 III CULTURAL POLITICS; Chapter 8 REFLECTIONS ON IDENTITY; Chapter 9 BIRTHRIGHTS; Chapter 10 PAULO FREIRE's RADICAL DEMOCRATIC HUMANISM; Chapter 11 THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING: JüRGEN HABERMAS IN AMERICA; Part 4 IV POLITICAL CULTURE; Chapter 12 THE DECLINE OF AMERICAN LIBERALISM; Chapter 13 PAST PERFECT; Chapter 14 SEEING GREEN; Chapter 15 IS DEMOCRACY POSSIBLE? THE DECLINE OF THE PUBLIC IN THE AMERICAN DEBATE Index;

O autorze

Stanley Aronowitz