Anxiety Aesthetics

Places anxiety at the heart of the aesthetic experience.

Anxiety Aesthetics is the first book to consider a prehistory of contemporaneity in China through the emergent creative practices in the aftermath of the Mao era. Arguing that socialist residues underwrite contemporary Chinese art, complicating its theorization through Maoism, Jennifer Dorothy Lee traces a selection of historical events and controversies in late 1970s and early 1980s Beijing. Lee offers a fresh critical frame for doing symptomatic readings of protest ephemera and artistic interventions in the Beijing Spring social movement of 1978-80, while exploring the rhetoric of heated debates waged in institutional contexts prior to the '85 New Wave. Lee demonstrates how socialist aesthetic theories and structures continued to shape young artists' engagement with both space and selfhood and occupied the minds of figures looking to reform the nation. In magnifying this fleeting moment, Lee provides a new historical foundation for the unprecedented global exposure of contemporary Chinese art today.

Aesthetic Anxiety analyzes uncanny repetition in psychology, literature, philosophy, and film, and produces a new narrative about the centrality of aesthetics in modern subjectivity. The often horrible, but sometimes also enjoyable, experience of anxiety can be an aesthetic mode as well as a psychological state. Johnson's elucidation of that state in texts by authors from Kant to Rilke demonstrates how estrangement can produce attachment, and repositions Romanticism as an engine of modernity.

A history of Kantian and post-Kantian thought and of a foundational stage of German orientalism.

"This fascinating and well-researched book explores a little-examined side of Surrealism with rigor and style. Lyford has delved into little-known archives, finding means to put pressure on the gendered relationships within the movement and, most important, on the Surrealists' conceptions and experiences of masculinity. Surrealist Masculinities will become a classic resource for all scholars of Surrealism and the highly gendered literary and artistic subcultures of early twentieth-century Europe and North America."--Amelia Jones, Professor and Pilkington Chair, University of Manchester

In The Subject of Aesthetics Tone Roald develops a psychology of art based on people’s descriptions of their own engagement with visual art

This title examines the motivations for the critiques that have been applied to the idea of aesthetics and argues that theorists and artists now hunger for a new kind of aesthetics, one better calibrated to contemporary art and its moral and political demands. The book shows how, for decades, aesthetic critiques have often concerned art's treatment of beauty or the autonomy of art. Collectively, these critiques have generated an anti-aesthetic stance that is now prevalent in the contemporary art world.