[PDF] If Not Critical eBook

Author : Robert Hughes
Publisher : Knopf
Page : 624 pages
File Size : 34,26 MB
Release : 2012-02-22
Category : Art
ISBN : 0307809595

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From Holbein to Hockney, from Norman Rockwell to Pablo Picasso, from sixteenth-century Rome to 1980s SoHo, Robert Hughes looks with love, loathing, warmth, wit and authority at a wide range of art and artists, good, bad, past and present. As art critic for Time magazine, internationally acclaimed for his study of modern art, The Shock of the New, he is perhaps America’s most widely read and admired writer on art. In this book: nearly a hundred of his finest essays on the subject. For the realism of Thomas Eakins to the Soviet satirists Komar and Melamid, from Watteau to Willem de Kooning to Susan Rothenberg, here is Hughes—astute, vivid and uninhibited—on dozens of famous and not-so-famous artists. He observes that Caravaggio was “one of the hinges of art history; there was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same”; he remarks that Julian Schnabel’s “work is to painting what Stallone’s is to acting”; he calls John Constable’s Wivenhoe Park “almost the last word on Eden-as-Property”; he notes how “distorted traces of [Jackson] Pollock lie like genes in art-world careers that, one might have thought, had nothing to do with his.” He knows how Norman Rockwell made a chicken stand still long enough to be painted, and what Degas said about success (some kinds are indistinguishable from panic). Phrasemaker par excellence, Hughes is at the same time an incisive and profound critic, not only of particular artists, but also of the social context in which art exists and is traded. His fresh perceptions of such figures as Andy Warhol and the French writer Jean Baudrillard are matched in brilliance by his pungent discussions of the art market—its inflated prices and reputations, its damage to the public domain of culture. There is a superb essay on Bernard Berenson, and another on the strange, tangled case of the Mark Rothko estate. And as a finale, Hughes gives us “The SoHoiad,” the mock-epic satire that so amused and annoyed the art world in the mid-1980s. A meteor of a book that enlightens, startles, stimulates and entertains.

Author : Eric Griffiths
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 261 pages
File Size : 21,37 MB
Release : 2018
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 0198805292

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Eric Griffiths' lectures were attended by hundreds, yet the lectures were never turned into books. Published here for the first time, the ten lectures range across literary periods and European languages to address, among many other things, practical criticism, comedy, and tragedy.

Author : Mary Flanagan
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 363 pages
File Size : 24,87 MB
Release : 2013-02-08
Category : Computers
ISBN : 0262518651

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An examination of subversive games like The Sims—games designed for political, aesthetic, and social critique. For many players, games are entertainment, diversion, relaxation, fantasy. But what if certain games were something more than this, providing not only outlets for entertainment but a means for creative expression, instruments for conceptual thinking, or tools for social change? In Critical Play, artist and game designer Mary Flanagan examines alternative games—games that challenge the accepted norms embedded within the gaming industry—and argues that games designed by artists and activists are reshaping everyday game culture. Flanagan provides a lively historical context for critical play through twentieth-century art movements, connecting subversive game design to subversive art: her examples of “playing house” include Dadaist puppet shows and The Sims. She looks at artists’ alternative computer-based games and explores games for change, considering the way activist concerns—including worldwide poverty and AIDS—can be incorporated into game design. Arguing that this kind of conscious practice—which now constitutes the avant-garde of the computer game medium—can inspire new working methods for designers, Flanagan offers a model for designing that will encourage the subversion of popular gaming tropes through new styles of game making, and proposes a theory of alternate game design that focuses on the reworking of contemporary popular game practices.

Author : William Franke
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
Page : 559 pages
File Size : 12,23 MB
Release : 2020-10-31
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0268108838

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Branching out from his earlier works providing a history and a theory of apophatic thinking, William Franke's newest book pursues applications across a variety of communicative media, historical periods, geographical regions, and academic disciplines—moving from the literary humanities and cultural theory and politics to more empirical fields such as historical anthropology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science. On the Universality of What Is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking is an original philosophical reflection that shows how intransigent deadlocks debated in each of these arenas can be broken through thanks to the uncanny insights of apophatic vision. Leveraging Franke's distinctive method of philosophical, religious, and literary thinking and practice, On the Universality of What Is Not proposes a radically unsettling approach to answering (or suspending) perennial questions of philosophy and religion, as well as to dealing with some of our most pressing dilemmas at present at the university and in the socio-political sphere. In a style of exposition that is as lucid as it is poetic, deep-rooted tensions between alterity and equality in all these areas are exposed and transcended.

Author : Eric Griffiths
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 32,87 MB
Release : 2018-07-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 019257163X

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The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry starts from a simple fact: our written language does not represent the way we speak. Intonation, accent, tempo, and pitch of utterance can be inferred from a written text but they are not clearly demonstrated there. The book shows the implications of this fact for linguists and philosophers of language and offers fundamental criticisms of some recent work in these fields. It aims principally to describe the ways in which nineteenth-century English poets–Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins–responded creatively to the ambiguities involved in writing down their own voices, the melodies of their speech. Original readings of the poets' work are given, both at a minutely detailed level and with regard to major preoccupations of the period–immortality, morbidity, marriage, social divisions, and religious conversions–and in this way Eric Griffiths offers a new map of Victorian poetry.

Author : Pierre Bayard
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 129 pages
File Size : 12,95 MB
Release : 2010-08-10
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1596917148

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In this delightfully witty, provocative book, literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard argues that not having read a book need not be an impediment to having an interesting conversation about it. (In fact, he says, in certain situations reading the book is the worst thing you could do.) Using examples from such writers as Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, and Umberto Eco, he describes the varieties of "non-reading"-from books that you've never heard of to books that you've read and forgotten-and offers advice on how to turn a sticky social situation into an occasion for creative brilliance. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read-which became a favorite of readers everywhere in the hardcover edition-is in the end a love letter to books, offering a whole new perspective on how we read and absorb them.

Author : Stephen Eric Bronner
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 161 pages
File Size : 22,40 MB
Release : 2017
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0190692677

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Preface -- Introduction: what is critical theory? -- The frankfurt school -- A matter of method -- Critical theory and modernism -- Alienation and reification -- Enlightened illusions -- The utopian laboratory -- The happy consciousness -- The great refusal -- From resignation to renewal -- Unfinished tasks -- Further reading -- Index

Author : Rachel Lynn Solomon
Publisher : Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 26,59 MB
Release : 2020-06-09
Category : Young Adult Fiction
ISBN : 1481497774

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“Emotionally resonant and deeply characterized.” —School Library Journal (starred review) From the author of You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone comes a stunning contemporary novel, perfect for fans of Five Feet Apart, that examines the complicated aftermath of unrequited love between best friends. Aspiring choreographer Sophie Orenstein would do anything for Peter Rosenthal-Porter, who’s been on the kidney transplant list as long as she’s known him. Peter, a gifted pianist, is everything to Sophie: best friend, musical collaborator, secret crush. When she learns she’s a match, donating a kidney is an easy, obvious choice. She can’t help wondering if after the transplant, he’ll love her back the way she’s always wanted. But Peter’s life post-transplant isn’t what either of them expected. Though he once had feelings for Sophie, too, he’s now drawn to Chase, the guitarist in a band that happens to be looking for a keyboardist. And while neglected parts of Sophie’s world are calling to her—dance opportunities, new friends, a sister and niece she barely knows—she longs for a now-distant Peter more than ever, growing increasingly bitter he doesn’t seem to feel the same connection. Peter fears he’ll forever be indebted to her. Sophie isn’t sure who she is without him. Then one heartbreaking night twists their relationship into something neither of them recognizes, leading them to question their past, their future, and whether their friendship is even worth fighting for.

Author : George Douglas Atkins
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 222 pages
File Size : 36,73 MB
Release : 1992
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 0820314536

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In Estranging the Familiar, G. Douglas Atkins addresses the often lamented state of scholarly and critical writing as he argues for a criticism that is at once theoretically informed and personal. The revitalized critical writing he advocates may entail--but is not limited to--a return to the essay, the form critical writing once took and the form that is now enjoying a resurgence of popularity and excellence. Atkins contends that to reach a general audience, criticism must move away from the impersonality of modern criticism and contemporary theory without embracing the old-fashioned essay. "The venerable familiar essay may remain the basis," Atkins writes, "but its conventional openness, receptivity, and capaciousness must extend to theory, philosophy, and the candor that seems to mark the tail-end of the twentieth century." In noting the timeliness, if not the necessity, of a return to the essay, Atkins also considers our culture's parallel "return to the personal." When the essay combines good writing with the concerns of the personal, Atkins says, it becomes a form of criticism that is readable, vital, and potentially attractive to a large readership. Atkins hopes critics will tap into the revitalized interest the essay now enjoys without ignoring the considerable insights and advances of contemporary theory. He argues that despite claims to the contrary there is no inherent incompatibility between the essay and modern theory. As Atkins considers various experiments in critical writing from Plato to the present, notably feminist interest in the personal and autobiographical, he contends that these attempts, although undeniably important, fall short of the desired goal when they emphasize the merely expressive and neglect the artful quality good writing can bring to personal criticism. The final third of the book consists of a series of experiments in critical writing that represent the author's own attempts to bridge the gap between theory and popular criticism, between an academic and a general audience. In essays that illustrate the rhetorical power of the form, Atkins describes the reciprocal relationship between his life experience and a reading of The Odyssey, explains the role that theory has played in his personal development, and chronicles his attempts to find a voice as a writer.

Author : Clay Drinko
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 39,48 MB
Release : 2021-01-19
Category : Self-Help
ISBN : 1982169230

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Stop negative thoughts, assuage anxiety, and live in the moment with these fun, easy games from improv expert Clay Drinko. If you’ve been feeling lost lately, you’re not alone! Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, Americans were experiencing record levels of loneliness and anxiety. And in our current political turmoil, it’s safe to say that people are looking for new tools to help them feel more present, positive, and in sync with the world. So what better way to get there than play? In Play Your Way Sane, Dr. Clay Drinko offers 120 low-key, accessible activities that draw on the popular principles of improv comedy to help you tackle your everyday stress and reconnect with the people around you. Divided into twelve fun sections, including “Killing Debbie Downer” and “Thou Shalt Not Be Judgy,” the games emphasize openness, reciprocation, and active listening as the keys to a mindful and satisfying life. Whether you’re looking to improve your personal relationships, find new meaning at work, or just survive our trying times, Play Your Way Sane offers serious self-help with a side of Second City sass.