This book inaugurates a new phase in kitsch studies. Kitsch, an aesthetic slur of the 19th and the 20th century, is increasingly considered a positive term and at the heart of today’s society. Eleven distinguished authors from philosophy, cultural studies and the arts discuss a wide range of topics including beauty, fashion, kitsch in the context of mourning, bio-art, visual arts, architecture and political kitsch. In addition, the editors provide a concise theoretical introduction to the volume and the subject. The (...) role of kitsch in contemporary culture and society is innovatively explored and the volume aims not to condemn but to accept and understand why kitsch has become acceptable today. (shrink)

This paper extends the fields of visual and object semiosis, style, and rhetoric by introducing the concept of critical object images. It identifies five of their rhetorical functions in literature and demonstrates the semiotic and rhetorical specificity and force of literary object images. Inter-disciplinary concepts and theories used in the study are introduced before the concept is tested and developed through analyses of object images with critical roles in the Victorian scenes of Virginia Woolf’s novels. The inductive analyses trace the (...) semiosis and stylistic affordances of the selected critical object images, with reference to three categories of kitsch inauthenticity, and their formal and cultural contexts, noting the rhetorical function they serve. Multimodal stylistics and the semiotics of visual images and of objects are used in these analyses, and the unique contribution of critical object images as rhetorical elements in literature is uncovered and explained. The analysis of Woolf’s representation of selected objects shows how the critical object images function rhetorically, through their stylistic connotations, to present unambiguous meanings that are not openly stated in the texts’ verbal discourse. (shrink)

Eliade proposed to ‘undertake to analyze the religious creativity of modern societies’ in his History of Religious Ideas but never did so. In this paper I have attempted to suggest the general direction that his analysis would have taken – the identification of the real with the actual is a religious valorization of contemporary humanity. This is not a generic shift from religion to non-religion but a belief of a religious nature which constitutes a novel departure from the traditional operations (...) of the religious mind. It is accompanied by a refusal to countenance our creative involvement in the construction of reality. This Eliade labels ‘modern’ and ‘historical’. (shrink)

As soon as 'modernity' was defined as a particular way of con ceiving of time, the questions of tempo rality came to be situated at the heart of the ongoing debate regarding the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the 'modern age'. This has, in turn, readily led to a no less passionate search for the assessment of modernity's foundations which are thought to rest in its typical sense of experiencing temporality. This polemic instance, however, involves polarized perspectives and the consequent risk, (...) always present in dichotomous approaches, of oversimplifying the concepts at stake and smoothing over the intricacies of their history and meaning. Does there really exist something like a ' time of modernity'? This is the central question that the present article examines. 1 Key Words: evolution • modemity • philosophy of history • time irreversibility. (shrink)

To sell a novel as socially relevant, the book cover, prefaces, and other paratext can help convey why readers should care and how the story should be read. But relevance can expire as society moves on. Reprints of groundbreaking classics that no longer engage contemporary concerns adapt their paratext to reach new readers, often by emphasizing the book’s historical and/or literary position. This article examines paratextual strategies across time and space for three Scandinavian novels with exceptional influence. Enlightenment-promoting Niels Klim’s (...) Underground Travels was the region’s first novel; Hunger is praised by many as the world’s first modernist novel; and The Man on the Balcony became the progenitor of Nordic Noir. Early paratext used anonymity, false veracity, or documentary elements to sell relevance. But with commercial success, and temporal and geographical distance, paratext became increasingly author focused and self-referential, at times all but ignoring the author’s intent for the story. (shrink)

This essay cross-examines both the correlation and the disjunction between art philosophy and political reason in the thinking of the French Jewish art philosopher, Kant specialist and socialist politician Victor Basch. Two interwoven lines of questioning will be in play. One considers the extent to which Basch's theory of beauty, which was primarily grounded in a psychological theory of Einfühlung, was a corollary to his political ideas and practices. The other line of inquiry raises questions about how Basch's political position, (...) namely his anti-facist defending of republican values, became influenced by his work on aesthetics. By answering both questions, this article challenges the traditional historiography of interwar aesthetics. The esaay shows how conceptual debates of aesthetics were not just sterile theoretical products, but to a large extent offered an apparatus to diagnose and orientate a rapidly changing world. Therefore this essay develops a reflection about the gaze needed to take in the complex historical situations from which aesthetic reflections grew, and which in turn they addressed. (shrink)

Why do we buy houses as opposed to renting one? This question, in its simplistic formulation captures, inter alia, some of the most fundamental emotions of temporal values that we impose on ourselv...

Kolb discusses postmodern architectural styles and theories within the context of philosophical ideas about modernism and postmodernism. He focuses on what it means to dwell in a world and within a history and to act from or against a tradition.

"The writer discusses the concept of kitsch. Having reviewed a variety of approaches to kitsch, he posits an historical conception of it, connecting it to modernity and defining it as a coping-mechanism for modernity. He thus suggests that kitsch is best understood as a tool in the struggle against the particular stresses of the modern world and that it uses materials at hand, fashioning from them some sort of stability largely through projecting images of nature, stasis, and continuity. He discusses (...) the relation of kitsch to fine art, arguing that fine art also has as its primary function a counter-movement to modernity. He suggests that the main difference between fine art and kitsch is that fine art, as well as its emotional function, also involves a reception context that allows it to assume an intellectual task. Among the writer's conclusions, he finds that positing a stark or absolute contrast between kitsch and fine art is unjustifiable as both have the same roots and objectives." [WilsonWeb]. (shrink)

Avtor predstavi dva primera, ko je bil v zgodnjem dvajsetem stoletju kombinezon preoblikovan v projekt z utopijskim potencialom. V Italiji je bil tak primer tuta, v Rusiji pa prozodezhda. V prvem primeru je šlo za enodelni kombinezon, ki je postal po prvi svetovni vojni zelo priljubljeno oblačilo. To je bil projekt, ki je asociiral na futurizem in utopizem. Pred vojno sta nekoliko podoben projekt razvila Giacomo Balla in Fortunato Depero. Manj kot desetletje po tej futuristični intervenciji v oblačenju je nastala (...) tuta. Neodvisno od italijanskega oblačila je nastal njen ruski ekvivalent, t.i. »proizvodna oblačila«. Pred tem so kombinezon nosili mehaniki in letalci. Okrog leta 1920 je kombinezon postal simbol nove postoktobrske revolucionarne družbe, v kateri naj bi človeški odnosi in »postartistična« ustvarjalnost bistveno odstopali od tradicionalnih pojmov, kot so umetnost, umetnik in umetnina. Umetnik-konstruktor, ki naj bi bil bolj inženir kot pa umetnik, naj bi zamenjal zastarelega buržoaznega umetnika in buržoazno institucijo umetnosti. V Bauhausu je slovenskega umetnika Avgusta Černigoja fasciniral kombinezon, ki ga je nosil Moholy-Nagy. Po vrnitvi v Ljubljano ga je nosil tudi sam ter vzbujal osuplost med lokalnim prebivalstvom. V osemdesetih letih dvajsetega stoletja je tej modi sledil še drug slovenski umetnik, namreč Dragan Živadinov. (shrink)

The discourse on kitsch has changed tone. The concept, which in the early 20th century referred more to pretentious pseudo-art than to cute everyday objects, was attacked between the World Wars by theorists of modernity (e.g. Greenberg on Repin). The late 20th century scholars gazed at it with critical curiosity (Eco, Kulka, Calinescu). What we now have is a profound interest in and acceptance of cute mass-produced objects. It has become marginal to use the concept to criticize pseudo-art. Scholars who (...) write about kitsch are no longer against it (Anderson, Olalquiaga). And since the 2000s, art students have been telling us that they “love kitsch”. The contemporary concept is strongly attached to certain colors (pink) and materials (porcelain). In this article I aspire to find some keys on how to view the history and contemporary state of the concept. My hypothesis is that the change in the use of the concept has at least partly to do with changes in the concept of art, which has lately, this is my hypothesis, become sufficiently decentralized from its original roots and boundaries (upper class, male, ethnically Central European). (shrink)

This essay discusses the situation of philosophy today in an era of mixed modern, postmodern, and traditional values and social patterns. It argues, with reference to postmodern architecture and to the German philosophers Hegel and Heidegger, that we should reject polarizing conceptual dualities, and that we need to seek out new kinds of less centered and less hierarchical unities that take advantage of the internal tensions and spacings within intellectual and cultural formations. It concludes with a discussion of the promises (...) and problems of dialogue between Eastern and Western philosophies in today’s world. (shrink)

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The historical period of the avant-garde art movements coincided with two phenomena which can be interpreted as the failure of the rationalism characteristic for the modern, capitalist system. One of these is Taylorism, which dehumanized and robotized the person involved in the work process, and the other is the First World War. Several movements of the avant-garde related critically to reason and conscience (expressionism, surrealism), but the most radical was Dada. The manifestos and Dadaist activities reveal that the Dada wants (...) to do away not only with the heritage of the past, but also with the linguistic and logical structures which form the texture of society. Bruitist poems, meaningless words and sentences, simultaneous poems, and the various uses of sound are all aimed at tearing apart language itself. The refusal of logic is most evident in the manifesto of Tristan Tzara, in which the series of mutually contradictory affirmations is concluded with an exceptionally clear statement: “I hate common sense.” Logic, argumentation, and dialectics are all dismissed in the name of freedom and life, which are characterized by Tzara in the following way: “the interweaving of contraries and all contradictions, freaks and irrelevancies: LIFE” (Tzara 1918). In my paper, I supplement the thesis of Peter Burger on the failure of the avant-garde (which is explained by him through its artistic success) by calling attention to the failure of its fight against reason, which is most evident in the search for meaning as an essential part of artistic reception. Thus, Dada is only interesting as long as the meaningless phenomenon is associated with some kind of meaning during the artistic reception. (shrink)