Extreme Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Death

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James Swearingen, Joanne Cutting-Gray
A&C Black, Jan 1, 2003 - Philosophy - 272 pages
What do we mean when we speak of "beauty"? What do we experience? Beauty is no longer the human experience of the harmonious object; today an aesthetics of difference has revolutionised our ways of seeing the beautiful. Now, we live in a time of "extreme beauty." Extreme Beauty explores art, literature, politics, and philosophy in order to illuminate how the concept and experience of beauty has changed. The essays range from Hegel and Modernism to Marcel Duchamp and the Avant-Garde, postmodern poetics, boredom and Proust, the romance of Arendt and Heidegger, fascism and the consumption of the flesh, postcolonialism and imagination to Derrida and the glory and gift of death.
 

Contents

Art and the Turn to the Postmodern
13
The Impossible Place of Literature
51
The Rhetoric of the Political
89
The Political Imaginary
137
Extreme Beauty Death Glory
175
Abbreviations
223
Notes
225
Bibliography
245
Index
255
Contributors
258
Editors
260
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About the author (2003)

James Swearingen was Professor and Chair of several English Departments, including the University of South Alabama and Marquette University. Now retired, he and Dr. Joanne Cutting-Gray live in Savannah, Georgia.

Dr. Joanne Cutting-Gray lives in Savannah, Georgia.

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