Search results for "esthetics"
showing 10 items of 761 documents
Schlock horror and pillow punches
2019
As an introduction to this special themed journal issue on violent clowns, this paper provides an overview of the 14 contributions that examine the comic appeal of violence in culture. It also ties...
Aesthetics and Bildung
2012
The article approaches the educational potential of aesthetics and the arts by reviving the notion of Bildung and suggesting an interpretation that emphasizes both its social character and the role of artworks and other aesthetic expressions. Bildung is a dialogic process where human relationships are crucial both for the exchange and the birth of insights. Artworks are described as images (Bilde), which act as intermediaries and points of reference in expressing, communicating and negotiating cultural values. In developing the argument, Immanuel Kant's analysis of aesthetic judgment is read together with his ideas on enlightenment, highlighting the social and political character of judgmen…
Becoming a Gamer: Performative Construction of Gendered Gamer Identities
2021
This article examines how women construct their gameplay identities in relation to the hegemonic “gamer” discourse. The article is based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with women who occupy central roles in the Finnish gaming industry. We deploy Judith Butler’s theorization of performative identity construction to examine how the women negotiate their identity in relation to the hegemonic gamer discourse, focusing on how they both embrace and resist the hegemonic, masculine constructions of gameplay. The study shows the dynamics surrounding the gamer identity. While women submit to the hegemonic gamer discourse, reproducing the masculine gamer notions to gain recognition as a viabl…
The “corporealization” of the nation: notions of the unclean and viscosity in the nationalist discourse of Spanish fascism
2017
ABSTRACTThe present article focuses on the particular case of the nationalist discourse of Spanish fascism during the Spanish Civil War and the immediate postwar period (1936–1941), in order to explore one specific aspect of it: the characterization of the enemy Republican nation that was to be fought against as unclean and viscous or sticky. The aim here is to analyse what meanings these references possessed and what they can tell us about the general processes of construction of discourses of identity. For this purpose, use is made of certain propositions developed by sociology and anthropology, as a basis upon which to develop the hypothesis that the use of the aforementioned references …
Kashubian Lake Calling
2020
This study leads the reader to some remote Kashubian villages, located on the shores of Lake Słupino, Poland. The residents of these villages have witnessed uncanny transformations of their once familiar lake in recent years. Through changes in color, odor and matter, Słupino has obtruded itself to call out the problem of pollution. How does the lake express itself? How does it affect the everyday life of the inhabitants? To approach the specific interaction between the lake and the inhabitants (thus non-human and human), the author conducted sensory ethnography and conversed with residents affected by the problem. The categories call, care and Stimmung are used to analyze the gathered empi…
Reframing belonging : affective localism and the early fiction of Reino Rinne
2017
ABSTRACTThe early fiction of a novelist and journalist born in the north of Finland, Reino Rinne (1913–2002), is illustrative of the post-war interest in a redefinition of cultural belonging. The aim of this article is to offer a reading of Rinne’s works that throws light on the way they exemplify a post-war articulation of affective localism. What is especially characteristic of the affective localism produced in Rinne’s early fiction is the deployment of certain narrative elements, realism as an aesthetic regime, tropes of spatial belonging and historical myths that are endowed with affective charge. A comparison between Rinne's first novel Tunturit hymyilevat. Kuvaus Lapista 1900-luvun a…
On Thinking the Tragic with Adorno
2016
This article seeks to provide a template for understanding the tragic dimension of Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophy through a reading of his early collaborative work with Max Horkheimer, the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). While Adorno’s view has often been considered to be tragic, little has been done to reconstruct the tragic dimension of his thought. I argue that the view of the human condition, presented in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, is founded on metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical convictions that have structural similarities with the positions held by theorists and philosophers of tragedy and the tragic. Since traces of these tragic elements can be found throughout Adorn…
Figuras de la ausencia. Narrativas y estéticas de la desaparición forzada en Chile
2022
En este trabajo se describen algunas de las operaciones de representación a través de las cuales se han generado, a lo largo del tiempo, narrativas y estéticas en torno al impacto de la desaparición forzada en Chile. A partir del análisis de textos poéticos, el artículo describe un paisaje social caracterizado por la presencia de nombres sin cuerpo y de cuerpos sin nombre. Analiza en relación con ello tres tendencias mayores en los intentos de dar forma al impacto de la desaparición, a través de la puesta en relación de imágenes fotográficas, textos literarios, propuestas artísticas y narraciones audiovisuales. En primer lugar, se acerca a aquellas estéticas que hacen de la ausencia del cue…
Biblical Echoes and Communal Home in Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones
2020
Jesmyn Ward’s second novel, Salvage the Bones (2011), offers a literary account of an African American family in dire poverty struggling to weather the horrors of Hurricane Katrina on the outskirts of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. This article focuses on the novel’s ‘ideology of form’, which is premised on biblical models of narration —grounded on a literary transposition of The Book of Deuteronomy— that serves to portray the victimization of African Americans in mythical tones to evoke the country’s failed covenant between God and his chosen people. It also brings into focus the affective bonds of unity and communal healing relying on the idiosyncratic tenet of home understood as national spa…
Localising African popular music transnationally: ‘Highlife-Travellers’ in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s
2008
The paper argues that a critical toehold for understanding the formation, modernization, and popularity of Highlife in the 1950s is its transnational dimension. To corroborate this claim, the paper puts emphasis on Highlife musicians in the UK, especially London, during this time, their musical activities and productions there, and the effects of their journeys on popular music. The growing evidence that cultural practices and processes in different locales, across national and continental boundaries, were interrelated in the making of Highlife, asks for a multi-sited study of Highlife especially with regard to the musical creativity and productivity of 1950s and 1960s. It requires further …