Preface -- Contents -- List of Plates -- Introduction. Experience and Mechanical Reproduction -- PART ONE -- 1. From Différance to Embodiment: Subjectivity and Symbolic Formations -- 2. Merleau-Ponty: Perception into Art -- 3. Beyond Formalism: Kant's Theory of Art -- 4. The Producer as Artist -- 5. Violence in Painting -- PART TWO -- 6. The Existential Sublime: From Burke's Aesthetics to the Socio-Political -- 7. Moral Insight and Aesthetic Experience: Kant's Theory of the Sublime -- 8. The Kantian Sublime, the Postmodern, and the Avant-Garde.
9. Sublimity and Postmodern Culture: Lyotard's Les Immatériaux -- PART THREE -- 10. Postmodernism in the Visual Arts: A Question of Ends -- 11. Creativity, Contemporary Art, and Critical Aesthetics -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W.
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In recent times considerable controversy has raged around the question of postmodern culture and its products. Paul Crowther attempts to overcome some of the antagonistic viewpoints involved by expounding and developing key themes from the work of Kant and Merleau-Ponty in the context of contemporary culture. His work analyses topics such as the relation between art and politics, the problematics of poststructuralist and feminist approaches to art, the re-emergence and relevance of theories of the sublime, and the continuing possibilities of artistic creativity. The central theme of the book is that there are constants in human experience around which art and philosophy constellate. At the same time, however, due account must be given of the ways in which such constants are historically mediated. By articulating various aspects of this relation, Crowther shows that the postmodern sensibility can be more than that of an alienated consumerism. Understood in the proper theoretical context, it is grounded on experience and artefacts which humanize.
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