posted Sep 3, 2010, 3:30 AM by Czase Webmaster
Wednesday, April 5th, 2006
Towards a New Aesthetics: Technology, Intensity, Heterogeneity
- eds. Martin Procházka, Brian Rosebury & Louis Armand
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- “If man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice,
he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic,
because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to Freedom” (Schiller)
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- Following Schiller´s Letters on Aesthetic Education,
aesthetics came for a time to be seen as a political instrument, and
identified as a means of improving and even perfecting society. In the
last century, its public status began to be seen more negatively, as in
its deconstruction by Paul de Man as aesthetic ideology, based
upon progressivist notions of “technology” and “systems of
formalization”. Aesthetics lost some of its confidence and authority,
and often found itself on the defensive as an academic discipline.
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- A number of recent attempts have been made, however, to reassert
its importance for the present. The claims of “aesthetic specificity”
are argued in John Joughin and Simon Malpas (eds.), The New Aestheticism
(2003). Other approaches, such as those of Vilém Flusser and Friedrich
Kittler, have focused upon the importance of the link between modern
communication technologies and artistic creation, and the impact of
contemporary media and mass culture on the transformation of
aesthetics. Such approaches proceed radically beyond such earlier
preoccupations as the aesthetics of representation, romantic notions of
irony and the fragment, and Adorno´s negative aesthetics.
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- A special issue of Litteraria Pragensia will attempt to
explore and assess aspects of the contemporary ferment in aesthetics,
and its relation to and significance for contemporary society, culture
and politics. Proposals are invited on any topic within this broadly
defined field; we particularly invite submissions on such topics as the
following.
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- 1. transformation of traditional aesthetics by mass culture (kitsch, schlock, etc.)
- 2. interaction of aesthetics and communication technologies
- 3. prevalence of the aesthetics of intensity and heterogeneity
(from the eighteenth-century notions of the picturesque to Deleuzean
machines and rhizomes).
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- Abstracts (up to 300 words) should be submitted by 31 May 2006.
Papers, of up to 7000 words, should be submitted by 30 September 2006.
Please address all correspondence to:
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- Professor Martin Procházka
- Department of English and American Studies
- Charles University
- Jana Palacha 2, 116 38 Prague 1
- Czech Republic
- martin.prochazka@ff.cuni.cz
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