Examining the relationship between German poetry, philosophy, and visual media around 1900, Carsten Strathausen argues that the poetic works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Stephan George focused on the visible gestalt of language as a means of competing aesthetically with the increasing popularity and "reality effect" of photography and film. Poetry around 1900 self-reflectively celebrated its own words as both transparent signs and material objects, Strathausen says. In Aestheticism, this means that language harbors the potential to literally present the things it signifies. Rather than simply describing or picturing the physical experience of looking, as critics have commonly maintained, modernist poetry claims to enable a more profound kind of perception that grants intuitive insights into the very texture of the natural world.

The Look of Things: Poetry and Vision around 1900

Literature & Fiction

Strathausen, Carsten

History & Criticism

The University of North Carolina Press

Examining the relationship between German poetry, philosophy, and visual media around 1900, Carsten Strathausen argues that the poetic works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Stephan George focused on the visible gestalt of language as a means of competing aesthetically with the increasing popularity and ""reality effect"" of photography and film. Poetry around 1900 self-reflectively celebrated its own words as both transparent signs and material objects, Strathausen says. In Aestheticism, this means that language harbors the potential to literally present the things it signifies. Rather than simply describing or picturing the physical experience of looking, as critics have commonly maintained, modernist poetry claims to enable a more profound kind of perception that grants intuitive insights into the very texture of the natural world.

The Look of Things: Poetry and Vision around 1900 (University of North Carolina Studies in Germanic Languages and Literature)

In recent years, bioaesthetics has used the latest discoveries in evolutionary studies and neuroscience to provide new ways of looking at art and aesthetics. Carsten Strathausen’s remarkable exploration of this emerging field is the first comprehensive account of its ideas, as well as a timely critique of its limitations. Strathausen familiarizes readers with the basics of bioaesthetics, grounding them in its philosophical underpinnings while articulating its key components. Importantly, he delves into the longstanding problem of the “two cultures” that separate the arts and the sciences. Seeking to make bioaesthetics a more robust way of thinking, Strathausen then critiques it for failing to account for science’s historical and cultural assumptions. At its worst, he says, biologism reduces artworks to mere automatons that rubber-stamp pre-established scientific truths. Written with a sensitive understanding of science’s strengths, and willing to refute its best arguments, Bioaesthetics helps readers separate the sensible from the specious. At a time when humanities departments are shrinking—and when STEM education is on the rise—Bioaesthetics makes vital points about the limitations of science, while lodging a robust defense of the importance of the humanities.

Bioaesthetics: Making Sense of Life in Science and the Arts (Volume 43) (Posthumanities)

Arts & Photography

Univ. of Minnesota Press

Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay ''The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'' revolutionized the way we look at the social function of the work of art, and the paradigms through which we appreciate it. Using this legendary essay--and its idea of the "aura" in unique works of art--as a springboard, the essays collected in Benjamin's Blind Spot apply Benjamin's insights to a wide range of topics. Subjects range from Benjamin's use of hashish to an analysis of Woody Allen's Zelig, from Wallace Stevens to the early recordings of Elvis Presley, and from the dark epiphanies behind Jackson Pollock's work to the question of whether Benjamin's model is even relevant to contemporary issues. In the same volume, presented in the text's margins, is The Manual of Lost Ideas, a massive manuscript that arrived at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry via an anonymous bequest in 1955. Speculated to be thousands of years old, this is the first time the Manual has been published in over two centuries.

Benjamin's Blind Spot: Walter Benjamin and the Premature Death of Aura

Kuppers, Petra

Rhodes, Colin

Gross, David

Bell, Vance

Brottman, David

Gantman, Martin

Hertz, Erich

Patke, Rajeev

Smith, Marquard

Institute of Cultural Inquiry

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