Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism

Erscheinungsjahr 2012
ISBN: 978-0-231-16149-7
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 288 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 400 g

Reihe: Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts

Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek's political and aesthetic investigations concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women's literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism's experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the appreciation of art's emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Feminismus, Feministische Theorie
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Feministische Perspektiven in den Wissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literatursoziologie, Gender Studies

Inhaltsverzeichnis

AcknowledgmentsAbbreviationsIntroduction: On Loss1 Revolutionary Praxis and Its Melancholic Impasses1. On Suffrage Militancy and Modernism: Femininity and Revolt2. Melancholia3. Woolf's Aesthetics of Potentiality2 Female BodiesIntroduction: Rethinking the Form/Matter Divide in Feminist Politics and Aesthetics4. Abstract Commodity Form and Bare Life5. Damaged Materialities in Political Struggles and Aesthetic Innovations3 Toward a Feminine Aesthetics of Renaissance6. The Enigma of Nella Larsen: LettersNotesIndex

Leseproben

Read the introduction, "On Loss, Invention, and the Dilemmas of Feminist Aesthetics" (to view in full screen, click on icon in bottom right-hand corner)

Über Autor(innen)

Ewa Ziarek is Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York, Buffalo. She is the author of An Ethics of Dissensus: Feminism, Postmodernity, and the Politics of Radical Democracy and coeditor of Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva's Polis and Intermedialities: Philosophy, Art, Politics.