Piercing the fog of mysticism and sentimentality that engulfs art, the essays in The Romantic Manifesto explain why, since time immemorial, man has created and consumed works of art.Ayn Rand argues that objective standards in art are possible because art is not a subjective luxury, but rather a critical need of human life—not a material need, but a need of man’s rational mind, the faculty on which his material survival depends.Ayn Rand explains the indispensable function of art in man’s life (ch. 1), the objective source of man’s deeply personal, emotional response to art (ch. 2), and how an artist’s fundamental, often unstated view of man and of the world shapes his creations (ch. 3).Turning to her own field of artistic creation, Rand elaborates (ch. 5) on her distinctive theory of literature and identifies principles by which to judge an artwork objectively. “What is Romanticism?” (ch. 6) sheds new light on the nature and philosophy of the school of literature under which Rand classified her own work. Later essays explain how contemporary art reveals the debased intellectual state of our culture (ch. 7, 8 and 9).In the final essay Rand articulates the goal of her own fiction writing as “the projection of an ideal man, as an end in itself”—and explains that she originated her philosophy as a means to this end.Table of ContentsIntroductionThe Psycho-Epistemology of ArtPhilosophy and Sense of LifeArt and Sense of LifeArt and CognitionBasic Principles of LiteratureWhat Is Romanticism?The Esthetic Vacuum of Our AgeBootleg RomanticismArt and Moral TreasonIntroduction to Ninety-ThreeThe Goal of My WritingThe Simplest Thing in the WorldIndex

    In this unparalleled book, Marshall Berman takes account of the social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world and the impact of modernism on art, literature and architecture. This new edition contains an updated preface addressing the critical role the onset of modernism played in popular democratic upheavals in the late 1920s.

    Covering the period 2004 - 2016, the collection will include some of the best writings from his seminal blog k-punk; a selection of his brilliantly insightful film, television and music reviews; his key writings on politics, activism, precarity, hauntology, mental health and popular modernism for numerous websites and magazines; his final unfinished introduction to his planned work on "Acid Communism"; and a number of important interviews from the last decade. Edited by Darren Ambrose and with a foreword by Simon Reynolds.

    It's an essential ingredient in pop music and high art. Why do we choose accusations of elitism over open-mindedness? What do our anxieties about "pretending" say about us?Co-editor of frieze, Europe's foremost magazine of contemporary art and culture, Dan Fox has authored over two hundred essays, interviews, and reviews and contributed to numerous catalogues and publications produced by major international art galleries and institutions.

    "It was Wittgenstein's habit to record his thoughts in sequences of more or less closely related 'remarks' which he kept in notebooks throughout his life. The editor of this collection has gone through these notebooks in order to select those 'remarks' which deal with Wittgenstein's views about the less technical issues in his philosophy. So here we have Wittgenstein's thoughts about religion, music, architecture, the nature of philosophy, the spirit of our times, genius, being Jewish & so on. The work is a masterpiece by a mastermind."—Leonard Linsky

    The answers take us from Lima to Angkor, to Paris and Munich, to China and the stars. At the center of the story is the figure of Fredric Jameson, theorist supreme of postmodernism. What happens to art, time, politics, in the age of the spectacle? What has ended, and what has begun?

    In this brilliant study (his best-known and most controversial), he opposes the Marxist concept of dialectical materialism and its view that change takes place through "the struggle of opposites." Instead, he relates the rise of a capitalist economy to the Puritan determination to work out anxiety over salvation or damnation by performing good deeds — an effort that ultimately discouraged belief in predestination and encouraged capitalism. Weber's classic study has long been required reading in college and advanced high school social studies classrooms.

    The essay focuses on political language, which, according to Orwell, "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Orwell believed that the language used was necessarily vague or meaningless because it was intended to hide the truth rather than express it.

    The stock market is certainly rational; one can understand it, study it, capitalists know how to use it, and yet it is completely delirious, it is mad. That's why we say: the rational always is the rationality of an irrational. Marx is fascinated by capitalist mechanisms precisely because the system is demented, yet works very well at the same time. Down below, there are investments of desire that cannot be confused with the investments of interest: all kinds of libidinous-unconscious flows that make up the delirium of this society. The true history is the history of desire."This collection of essays and interviews edited by Sylvere Lotringer and published in 1995, focuses on the French anti-psychiatrist and theorist's work as director of the experimental La Borde clinic ("A Clinic Unlike Any Other") and longtime collaborator with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze."Chaosophy" is a groundbreaking introduction to Guattari's theories on "schizo-analysis" a process meant to replace Freudian interpretation with a more pragmatic, experimental, and collective approach rooted in reality. Unlike Freud, Guattari believes that schizophrenia is an extreme mental state induced by the capitalist system itself, which keeps enforcing neurosis as a way of maintaining normality. Guattari's post-Marxist vision of capitalism provides a new definition not only of mental illness, but also of the micropolitical means of its subversion.This collection contains key essays, such as, "Balance-Sheet Program for Desiring-Machines" and "Capitalism and Schizophrenia," co-signed by Deleuze (with whom he co-authored "Anti-Oedipus" and "A Thousand Plateaus"), and the perennially provocative "Everybody Wants To Be a Fascist.

    It is a strident critique of logocentrism and phallogocentrism, having much in common with Jacques Derrida's earlier thought. The essay also calls for an acknowledgment of universal bisexuality or polymorphous perversity, a precursor of queer theory's later emphases, and swiftly rejects many kinds of essentialism which were still common in Anglo-American feminism at the time. The essay also exemplifies Cixous's style of writing in that it is richly intertextual, making a wide range of literary allusions.(From Wikipedia)

    Best and Kellner provide:* An introduction and critique of the work of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Laclau and Mouffe, and Jameson, which assess the varying contributions and limitations of postmodern theory* A discussion of postmodern feminist theory and the politics of identity* A systematic study of the origin of the discourse of the postmodern in historical, sociological, cultural, and philosophical studies.The authors claim that while postmodern theory provides insights into contemporary developments, it lacks adequate methodological and political perspectives to provide a critical social theory and radical politics for the present age.

    In addition to its importance to the history of ideas, this 1795 essay remains relevant to our own time.Beginning with a political analysis of contemporary society — in particular, the French Revolution and its failure to implement universal freedom — Schiller observes that people cannot transcend their circumstances without education. He conceives of art as the vehicle of education, one that can liberate individuals from the constraints and excesses of either pure nature or pure mind. Through aesthetic experience, he asserts, people can reconcile the inner antagonism between sense and intellect, nature and reason.Schiller’s proposal of art as fundamental to the development of society and the individual is an enduringly influential concept, and this volume offers his philosophy’s clearest, most vital expression.

    The Dialogic Imagination presents, in superb English translation, four selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Problems of literature and esthetics), published in Moscow in 1975. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction to Bakhtin and his thought and a glossary of terminology.Bakhtin uses the category "novel" in a highly idiosyncratic way, claiming for it vastly larger territory than has been traditionally accepted. For him, the novel is not so much a genre as it is a force, "novelness," which he discusses in "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse." Two essays, "Epic and Novel" and "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," deal with literary history in Bakhtin's own unorthodox way. In the final essay, he discusses literature and language in general, which he sees as stratified, constantly changing systems of subgenres, dialects, and fragmented "languages" in battle with one another.

    Essential reading for students and anyone interested in the great philosophers, this book opens up appreciation of Heidegger beyond the study of philosophy to the reaches of poetry and our fundamental relationship to the world. Featuring "The Origin of the Work of Art," a milestone in Heidegger's canon, this enduring volume provides potent, accessible entry to one of the most brilliant thinkers of modern times.

    The Language of African Literature2. The Language of African Theatre3. The Language of African Fiction4. The Quest for RelevanceIndex