Theory Of The Gimmick

Download Theory Of The Gimmick full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Theory Of The Gimmick ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!

Theory of the Gimmick

Author : Sianne Ngai
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674984544
Total Pages : 417 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (749 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Theory of the Gimmick by : Sianne Ngai

Download or read book Theory of the Gimmick written by Sianne Ngai and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative theory of the gimmick as an aesthetic category steeped in the anxieties of capitalism. Repulsive and yet strangely attractive, the gimmick is a form that can be found virtually everywhere in capitalism. It comes in many guises: a musical hook, a financial strategy, a striptease, a novel of ideas. Above all, acclaimed theorist Sianne Ngai argues, the gimmick strikes us both as working too little (a labor-saving trick) and as working too hard (a strained effort to get our attention). Focusing on this connection to work, Ngai draws a line from gimmicks to political economy. When we call something a gimmick, we are registering uncertainties about value bound to labor and time—misgivings that indicate broader anxieties about the measurement of wealth in capitalism. With wit and critical precision, Ngai explores the extravagantly impoverished gimmick across a range of examples: the fiction of Thomas Mann, Helen DeWitt, and Henry James; photographs by Torbjørn Rødland; the video art of Stan Douglas; the theoretical writings of Stanley Cavell and Theodor Adorno. Despite its status as cheap and compromised, the gimmick emerges as a surprisingly powerful tool in this formidable contribution to aesthetic theory.

Ugly Feelings

Author : Sianne Ngai
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674041526
Total Pages : 433 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Ugly Feelings by : Sianne Ngai

Download or read book Ugly Feelings written by Sianne Ngai and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Envy, irritation, paranoia—in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity. Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called “animatedness,” and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called “stuplimity.” She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-twentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening. Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of ugly feelings to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature—with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race—but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.

Our Aesthetic Categories

Author : Sianne Ngai
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780674088122
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (881 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Our Aesthetic Categories by : Sianne Ngai

Download or read book Our Aesthetic Categories written by Sianne Ngai and published by . This book was released on 2015-10-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture, dominating the look of its art and commodities as well as our ways of speaking about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this study Ngai offers an aesthetic theory for the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism.

Finding a Replacement for the Soul

Author : Brett Bourbon
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674028597
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Finding a Replacement for the Soul by : Brett Bourbon

Download or read book Finding a Replacement for the Soul written by Brett Bourbon and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Approaching the study of literature as a unique form of the philosophy of language and mind--as a study of how we produce nonsense and imagine it as sense--this is a book about our human ways of making and losing meaning. Brett Bourbon asserts that our complex and variable relation with language defines a domain of meaning and being that is misconstrued and missed in philosophy, in literary studies, and in our ordinary understanding of what we are and how things make sense. Accordingly, his book seeks to demonstrate how the study of literature gives us the means to understand this relationship. The book itself is framed by the literary and philosophical challenges presented by Joyce's Finnegan's Wake and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. With reference to these books and the problems of interpretation and meaning that they pose, Bourbon makes a case for the fundamental philosophical character of the study of literature, and for its dependence on theories of meaning disguised as theories of mind. Within this context, he provides original accounts of what sentences, fictions, non-fictions, and poems are; produces a new account of the logical form of fiction and of the limits of interpretation that follow from it; and delineates a new and fruitful domain of inquiry in which literature, philosophy, and science intersect. Table of Contents: Preface Note on Abbreviations Introduction: What Are We When We Are Not? Part I The Surface of Language and the Absence of Meaning 1. From Soul-Making to Person-Making 2. The Logical Form of Fiction 3. The Emptiness of Literary Interpretation 4. To Be But Not To Mean 5. How Do Oracles Mean? Part II Senses and Nonsenses: Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations 6. A Twitterlitter of Nonsense: Askesis at Finnegans Wake 7. The Analogy between Persons and Words 8. "The Human Body Is the Best Picture of the Human Soul" 9. The Senses of Time 10. Being Something and Meaning Something Bibliography Acknowledgments Index This is an adventurous and unusual book. Bourbon moves back and forth between literary and philosophical contexts with ease, showing in multifarious ways how the one can, often in unexpected ways, illuminate the other. Throughout these wide-ranging explorations Bourbon uncovers a good deal about both the nature of literary meaning and our distinctive -- if tellingly irreducible -- relations to literary texts. --Garry L. Hagberg, author of Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory and Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge

Dissent Events

Author : Sean Scalmer
Publisher : UNSW Press
ISBN 13 : 9780868406510
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (65 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Dissent Events by : Sean Scalmer

Download or read book Dissent Events written by Sean Scalmer and published by UNSW Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Dissent Events: Protest, the Media and the Political Gimmick in Australia offers a contemporary history of collective action in Australia over the last four decades, from the halting experiments of the early sixties, to more recent actions involving Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party, the quest for reconciliation, and the anti-corporate campaigners of the S11 Alliance. It tells the story of these performances, develops a set of concepts to analyse their changing form and illuminates the larger story of social and political change in recent Australian life."--BOOK JACKET.

Theory Building in Applied Disciplines

Author : Richard A. Swanson
Publisher : Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1609947339
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (99 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Theory Building in Applied Disciplines by : Richard A. Swanson

Download or read book Theory Building in Applied Disciplines written by Richard A. Swanson and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2013-08-05 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theory matters in applied disciplines—fields that apply scholarly research to professional practice, such as management, social work, health care, human resource development, education, and many others. Because these disciplines deal with human beings in the real world, a flawed theory can result in actual harm to people and institutions. When faced with a professional problem, practitioners resort to the latest fad or simply throw everything and anything at it because of the lack of sound theory. Scholars deal with problems by slicing them into small segments to study them but fail to address the practical implications. What's needed is a way to unite research and practice to create robust theory. This is exactly what Richard Swanson and Thomas Chermack offer here: a complete, five-step method for developing sound, field-tested theory in applied disciplines. Unlike many existing methods, which cover only the initial conceptualization of a theory, the authors offer a complete approach, from conceptualizing a theory to creating relevant assessment criteria, establishing a research agenda to test the theory's validity, applying the theoretical concepts in the real world, and using that experience to further refine and improve the theory. The method is not restricted to any single discipline, nor is it beholden to any research ideology. Swanson and Chermack provide a set of tools for each phase of the process, making this book accessible and applicable to a wide audience. And in addition to examples in each chapter, they offer two extended case examples of complete theory building. With flawed theories impeding the development of many applied disciplines, this book is desperately needed.

The Birth of Theory

Author : Andrew Cole
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022613556X
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (261 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Birth of Theory by : Andrew Cole

Download or read book The Birth of Theory written by Andrew Cole and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-06-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern theory needs a history lesson. Neither Marx nor Nietzsche first gave us theory—Hegel did. To support this contention, Andrew Cole’s The Birth of Theory presents a refreshingly clear and lively account of the origins and legacy of Hegel’s dialectic as theory. Cole explains how Hegel boldly broke from modern philosophy when he adopted medieval dialectical habits of thought to fashion his own dialectic. While his contemporaries rejected premodern dialectic as outdated dogma, Hegel embraced both its emphasis on language as thought and its fascination with the categories of identity and difference, creating what we now recognize as theory, distinct from systematic philosophy. Not content merely to change philosophy, Hegel also used this dialectic to expose the persistent archaism of modern life itself, Cole shows, establishing a method of social analysis that has influenced everyone from Marx and the nineteenth-century Hegelians, to Nietzsche and Bakhtin, all the way to Deleuze and Jameson. By uncovering these theoretical filiations across time, The Birth of Theory will not only change the way we read Hegel, but also the way we think about the histories of theory. With chapters that powerfully reanimate the overly familiar topics of ideology, commodity fetishism, and political economy, along with a groundbreaking reinterpretation of Hegel’s famous master/slave dialectic, The Birth of Theory places the disciplines of philosophy, literature, and history in conversation with one another in an unprecedented way. Daring to reconcile the sworn enemies of Hegelianism and Deleuzianism, this timely book will revitalize dialectics for the twenty-first century.

In Praise of Athletic Beauty

Author : Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674021723
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (217 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis In Praise of Athletic Beauty by : Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

Download or read book In Praise of Athletic Beauty written by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks beyond the usual explanations of why sports fascinates, and also strives for a language that can frame the pleasure we take in watching athletic events. Gumbrecht argues that the fascination with watching sports is probably the most popular and potent contemporary form of aesthetic experience.

Philosophy's Artful Conversation

Author : D. N. Rodowick
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674416678
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (744 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Philosophy's Artful Conversation by : D. N. Rodowick

Download or read book Philosophy's Artful Conversation written by D. N. Rodowick and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-05 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theory—an embattled discourse for decades—faces a new challenge from those who want to model the methods of all scholarly disciplines on the sciences. What is urgently needed, says D. N. Rodowick, is a revitalized concept of theory that can assess the limits of scientific explanation and defend the unique character of humanistic understanding.

The Topological Imagination

Author : Angus Fletcher
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674968867
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (749 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Topological Imagination by : Angus Fletcher

Download or read book The Topological Imagination written by Angus Fletcher and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-04 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a bold and boundary defining work, Angus Fletcher clears a space for an intellectual encounter with the shape of human imagining. Joining literature and topology—a branch of mathematics—he maps the ways the imagination’s contours are formed by the spherical earth’s patterns and cycles, and shows how the world we inhabit also inhabits us.

Unlimited action

Author : Dominic Johnson
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1526135523
Total Pages : 383 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (261 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Unlimited action by : Dominic Johnson

Download or read book Unlimited action written by Dominic Johnson and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlimited action concerns the limits imposed upon art and life, and the means by which artists have exposed, refused, or otherwise reshaped the horizon of aesthetics and of the practice of art, by way of performance art. It examines the ‘performance of extremity’ as practices at the limits of the histories of performance and art, in performance art’s most fertile and prescient decade, the 1970s. Dominic Johnson recounts and analyses game-changing performance events by six artists: Kerry Trengove, Ulay, Genesis P-Orridge, Anne Bean, the Kipper Kids, and Stephen Cripps. Through close encounters with these six artists and their works, and a broader contextual milieu of artists and works, Johnson articulates a counter-history of actions in a new narrative of performance art in the 1970s, to rethink and rediscover the history of contemporary art and performance.

What Art Is Like, In Constant Reference to the Alice Books

Author : Miguel Tamen
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674067959
Total Pages : 128 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis What Art Is Like, In Constant Reference to the Alice Books by : Miguel Tamen

Download or read book What Art Is Like, In Constant Reference to the Alice Books written by Miguel Tamen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comic, serious inquiry into the nature of art takes its technical vocabulary from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. It is ridiculous to think of poems, paintings, or films as distinct from other things in the world, including people. Talking about art should be contiguous with talking about other relevant matters.

Aesthetic Nervousness

Author : Ato Quayson
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231511175
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Aesthetic Nervousness by : Ato Quayson

Download or read book Aesthetic Nervousness written by Ato Quayson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-29 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing primarily on the work of Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, and J. M. Coetzee, Ato Quayson launches a thoroughly cross-cultural, interdisciplinary study of the representation of physical disability. Quayson suggests that the subliminal unease and moral panic invoked by the disabled is refracted within the structures of literature and literary discourse itself, a crisis he terms "aesthetic nervousness." The disabled reminds the able-bodied that the body is provisional and temporary and that normality is wrapped up in certain social frameworks. Quayson expands his argument by turning to Greek and Yoruba writings, African American and postcolonial literature, depictions of deformed characters in early modern England and the plays of Shakespeare, and children's films, among other texts. He considers how disability affects interpersonal relationships and forces the character and the reader to take an ethical standpoint, much like representations of violence, pain, and the sacred. The disabled are also used to represent social suffering, inadvertently obscuring their true hardships.

Unbound

Author : Heather Boushey
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 0674919319
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (749 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Unbound by : Heather Boushey

Download or read book Unbound written by Heather Boushey and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many fear that efforts to address inequality will undermine the economy as a whole. But the opposite is true: rising inequality has become a drag on growth and an impediment to market competition. Heather Boushey breaks down the problem and argues that we can preserve our nation's economic traditions while promoting shared economic growth.

The Seventh Function of Language

Author : Laurent Binet
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 0374715084
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (747 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Seventh Function of Language by : Laurent Binet

Download or read book The Seventh Function of Language written by Laurent Binet and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the prizewinning author of HHhH, “the most insolent novel of the year” (L’Express) Paris, 1980. The literary critic Roland Barthes dies—struck by a laundry van—after lunch with the presidential candidate François Mitterand. The world of letters mourns a tragic accident. But what if it wasn’t an accident at all? What if Barthes was . . . murdered? In The Seventh Function of Language, Laurent Binet spins a madcap secret history of the French intelligentsia, starring such luminaries as Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Julia Kristeva—as well as the hapless police detective Jacques Bayard, whose new case will plunge him into the depths of literary theory (starting with the French version of Roland Barthes for Dummies). Soon Bayard finds himself in search of a lost manuscript by the linguist Roman Jakobson on the mysterious “seventh function of language.” A brilliantly erudite comedy that recalls Flaubert’s Parrot and The Name of the Rose—with more than a dash of TheDa Vinci Code—The Seventh Function of Language takes us from the cafés of Saint-Germain to the corridors of Cornell University, and into the duels and orgies of the Logos Club, a secret philosophical society that dates to the Roman Empire. Binet has written both a send-up and a wildly exuberant celebration of the French intellectual tradition.

Celebrity and Entertainment Obsession

Author : Michael S. Levy
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1442243139
Total Pages : 251 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (422 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Celebrity and Entertainment Obsession by : Michael S. Levy

Download or read book Celebrity and Entertainment Obsession written by Michael S. Levy and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-08-06 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrity culture surrounds us. We are inundated with information about actors and actresses, athletes, musicians, and others who have become famous or infamous. Although we never will likely meet or get to know them, our interest in them seems boundless. We are literally obsessed with being entertained as well as with the people who entertain us. Who our celebrities are has also shifted; in the past, celebrity status was bestowed on men and women of great accomplishment, those who had given the world something to be proud of and to celebrate. Conversely, today’s celebrities are generally people involved in entertainment—from TV newscasters to people who appear on reality television programs, as well as some who are simply famous for being famous. What remains an enigma is why we, as a society, are so infatuated with being entertained, as well as with those who entertain us and appear in the media. This book makes sense of this spectacle by explaining the reasons for this obsession from a psychological, social, and historical perspective. It suggests that we have become addicted in much the same way that a person becomes addicted to drugs or alcohol. Finally, the author offers his observations on how to free our minds from this captivation. Anyone interested in understanding more about our need to live vicariously through the rich and famous will find answers in this book.

Network Aesthetics

Author : Patrick Jagoda
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022634665X
Total Pages : 329 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (263 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Network Aesthetics by : Patrick Jagoda

Download or read book Network Aesthetics written by Patrick Jagoda and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term “network” is now applied to everything from the Internet to terrorist-cell systems. But the word’s ubiquity has also made it a cliché, a concept at once recognizable yet hard to explain. Network Aesthetics, in exploring how popular culture mediates our experience with interconnected life, reveals the network’s role as a way for people to construct and manage their world—and their view of themselves. Each chapter considers how popular media and artistic forms make sense of decentralized network metaphors and infrastructures. Patrick Jagoda first examines narratives from the 1990s and 2000s, including the novel Underworld, the film Syriana, and the television series The Wire, all of which play with network forms to promote reflection on domestic crisis and imperial decline in contemporary America. Jagoda then looks at digital media that are interactive, nonlinear, and dependent on connected audiences to show how recent approaches, such as those in the videogame Journey, open up space for participatory and improvisational thought. Contributing to fields as diverse as literary criticism, digital studies, media theory, and American studies, Network Aesthetics brilliantly demonstrates that, in today’s world, networks are something that can not only be known, but also felt, inhabited, and, crucially, transformed.