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In the early 19th century, a new social collective emerged out of impoverished artisans, urban rabble, wandering rural lower classes, bankrupt aristocrats and precarious intellectuals, one that would soon be called the proletariat. But this did not yet exist as a unified, homogeneous class with affiliated political parties. The motley appearance, the dreams and longings of these figures, torn from all economic certainties, found new forms of narration in romantic novellas, reportages, social-statistical studies, and monthly bulletins. But soon enough, these disorderly, violent, nostalgic, errant, and utopian figures were denigrated as reactionary and anarchic by the heads of the labour movement, since they did not fit into their grand linear vision of progress. In this book, Patrick Eiden-Offe tells their story, tracing the making of the proletariat in Vörmarz Germany (1815–1848) through the writings of figures like Ludwig Tieck, Moses Hess, Wilhelm Weitling, Georg Weerth, Friedrich Engels, Louise Otto-Peters, Ernst Willkomm, and Georg Büchner, and in so doing, revealing a striking similarity to the disorderly classes of today.
Thinking Bodies - Shaping Hands focuses on the critical as well as historical dimension of the handling of the brush and of the resulting appearance of colour on the painted surface in art and art theory from the middle of the 17th (above all from 1660) to the dawn of the 18th century in the Netherlands. More specifically, it deals with Rembrandt’s last pupils such as Arent de Gelder. „Handeling” describes an active, embodied process that is connected to the motion of the hand with the brush or with any other kind of tool. This term, up to now not sufficiently appreciated in scholarly literature, seems to be fruitful in this context. It is not so much connected with the term „style...
A fresh interpretation of Jeremy Bentham, finding that his “radical foolery” embodied a social ethics that was revolutionary for its time. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) is best remembered today as the founder of utilitarianism (a philosophy infamously abused by the Victorians) and the conceiver of the Panopticon, the circular prison house in which all prisoners could be seen by an unseen observer—later seized upon by Michel Foucault as the apotheosis of the neoliberal control society. In this volume in the Untimely Meditation series, Christian Welzbacher offers a new interpretation of Bentham, arguing that his “radical foolery” (paraphrasing Goethe's characterization of Bentham) act...
From epidemics in the 17th century and the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 to Guernica in World War II, the essays in this volume trace the development of the catastrophic imagination, relying heavily on pictorial media and different forms of staging. Catastrophe in its modern sense seems to be inextricably linked to its spectacular representation, be it on the stage, on screen or in popular amusement parks. But the modern relationship between catastrophe and spectacle is also increasingly confronting us with the unimaginable side of catastrophe, particularly with regard to the Holocaust and in more recent times to the daily experience of refugees. The essays in this volume elucidate images of the catastrophes that have inspired them by providing a textual commentary that makes it possible to reconsider how the spectacular and the catastrophic are interrelated. Thus, the essays not only deal with the emergence of the modern spectacular imagination of catastrophe in terms of the history of both discourse and media, they also present themselves as a critique of catastrophe, one based on close readings of the scenes and images in question.
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This collection of essays explores hybridity in early modern art through two primary lenses: hybrid media and hybrid time. The varied approaches in the volume to theories of hybridity reflect the increased presence in art historical scholarship of interdisciplinary frameworks that extend art historical inquiry beyond the single time or material. The essays engage with what happens when an object is considered beyond the point of origin or as a legend of information, the implications of the juxtaposition of disparate media, how the meaning of an object alters over time, and what the conspicuous use of out-of-date styles means for the patron, artist, and/or viewer. Essays examine both canonical and lesser-known works produced by European artists in Italy, northern Europe, and colonial Peru, ca. 1400–1600. The book will be of interest to art historians, visual culture historians, and early modern historians.
In this book, Shay Welch expands on the contemporary cognitive thinking-in-movement framework, which has its roots in the work of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone but extends and develops within contemporary embodied cognition theory. Welch believes that dance can be used to ask questions, and this book offers a method of how critical inquiry can be embodied. First, she presents the theoretical underpinnings of what this process is and how it can work; second, she introduces the empirical method as a tool that can be used by movers for the purpose of doing embodied inquiry. Exploring the role of embodied cognition and embodied metaphors in mining the body for questions, Welch demonstrates how to utilize movement to explore embodied practices of knowing. She argues that our creative embodied movements facilitate our ability to bodily engage in critical analysis about the world.
The present volume explores for the first time the concept of synagonism (from “σύν”, “together” and “ἀγών”, "struggle”) for an analysis of the productive exchanges between early modern painting, sculpture, architecture, and other art forms in theory and practice. In doing so, it builds on current insights regarding the so-called paragone debate, seeing this, however, as only one, too narrow perspective on early modern artistic production. Synagonism, rather, implies a breaking up of the schematic connections between art forms and individual senses, drawing attention to the multimediality and intersensoriality of art, as well as the relationship between image and body.
This collection of essays offers a series of rigorously focused art-historical, historical, and philosophical studies that examine ways in which materiality has posed and still poses a religious and cultural problem. The volume examines the material agency of objects, artifacts, and environments: art, ritual, pilgrimage, food, and philosophy. It studies the variable "senses” of materiality, the place of materiality in the formation of modern Western religion, and its role in Christianity’s dialogue with non-Western religions. The essays present new interpretations of religious rites and outlooks through the focus on their material components. They also suggest how material engagement theory - a new movement in cultural anthropology and archeology - may shed light on the cultural history of Christianity in medieval and early modern Europe and the Americas. It thus fills an important lacuna in the study of western religion by highlighting the longue durée, from the Middles Ages to the Modern Period, of a current dilemma, namely the divide between materialistic and what might broadly be called hermeneutical or cultural-critical approaches to religion and human subjectivity.