Proposing a new interpretation of literature and mass culture in nineteenth-century Europe, this work focuses on works by Marx, Balzac, Dickens, Adorno, and Benjamin to explore in them a complex -mimetic- disposition toward commodification in the realm of culture. The aim of the book is twofold: to explicate in the work of Balzac and Dickens subtle and profoundly ambivalent attitudes toward the rapidly expanding mass culture of the 1830's in France and England, and to identify through this reading of the novelists a common mimetic element that has eluded a certain dialectical approach to...
Proposing a new interpretation of literature and mass culture in nineteenth-century Europe, this work focuses on works by Marx, Balzac, Dickens, Adorn...
"The Paper Age" is the phrase coined by Thomas Carlyle in 1837 to describe the monetary and literary inflation of the French Revolution an age of mass-produced "Bank-paper" and "Book-paper." Carlyle's phrase is suggestive because it points to the particular substance paper that provides the basis for reflection on the mass media in much popular fiction appearing around the time of his historical essay. Rather than becoming a metaphor, however, paper in some of this fiction seems to display the more complex and elusive character of what Walter Benjamin evocatively calls "the decline of the...
"The Paper Age" is the phrase coined by Thomas Carlyle in 1837 to describe the monetary and literary inflation of the French Revolution an age of m...
Roger Kimball’ s incisive essays examine the art world from a fresh, skeptical perspective.From Gauguin and the Pre-Raphaelites to the latest exercises in artistic absurdity, Kimball’ skeen eye and lucid prose makes for bracing, entertaining reading. He sets himself dead against theshallow rhetoric and celebrity/money culture of the contemporary art world, breathing new excitementinto debates over what we value in art and why. "Art’ s Prospect is savage and hilarious indebunking chalatanism, but at the same time informed and insightful in revealing the best ofcontemporary...
Roger Kimball’ s incisive essays examine the art world from a fresh, skeptical perspective.From Gauguin and the Pre-Raphaelites to the latest exe...
In 1900, art historians Andre Jolles and Aby Warburg constructed an experimental dialogue in which Jolles supposed he had fallen in love with the figure of a young woman in a painting: A fantastic figure shall I call her a servant girl, or rather a classical nymph? what is the meaning of it all? Who is the nymph? Where does she come from? Warburg s response: in essence she is an elemental spirit, a pagan goddess in exile, serves as the touchstone for this wide-ranging and theoretical exploration of female representation in iconography. In Nymphs, the newest translation of Italian...
In 1900, art historians Andre Jolles and Aby Warburg constructed an experimental dialogue in which Jolles supposed he had fallen in love with the figu...
This book argues that the theory of force elaborated in Immanuel Kant's aesthetics (and in particular, his theorization of the dynamic sublime) is of decisive importance to poetry in the nineteenth century and to the connection between poetry and philosophy over the last two centuries. Inspired by his deep engagement with the critical theory of Walter Benjamin, who especially developed this Kantian strain of thinking, Kevin McLaughlin uses this theory of force to illuminate the work of three of the most influential nineteenth-century writers in their respective national traditions: Friedrich...
This book argues that the theory of force elaborated in Immanuel Kant's aesthetics (and in particular, his theorization of the dynamic sublime) is of ...
