Aesthetics of Ugliness: A Critical Edition Critical Edition Contributor(s): Rosenkranz, Karl (Author) |
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ISBN: 1472568850 ISBN-13: 9781472568854 Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic OUR PRICE: $173.25 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: July 2015 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Philosophy | Aesthetics - Art | Criticism & Theory - Architecture |
Dewey: 111.85 |
Physical Information: 0.81" H x 6.14" W x 9.21" (1.45 lbs) 344 pages |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: In this key text in the history of art and aesthetics, Karl Rosenkranz shows ugliness to be the negation of beauty without being reducible to evil, materiality, or other negative terms used it's conventional condemnation. This insistence on the specificity of ugliness, and on its dynamic status as a process afflicting aesthetic canons, reflects Rosenkranz's interest in the metropolis - like Walter Benjamin, he wrote on Paris and Berlin - and his voracious collecting of caricature and popular prints. Rosenkranz, living and teaching, like Kant, in remote Königsberg, reflects on phenomena of modern urban life from a distance that results in critical illumination. The struggle with modernization and idealist aesthetics makes Aesthetics of Ugliness, published four years before Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, hugely relevant to modernist experiment as well as to the twenty-first century theoretical revival of beauty. Translated into English for the first time, Aesthetics of Ugliness is an indispensable work for scholars and students of modern aesthetics and modernist art, literary studies and cultural theory, which fundamentally reworks conceptual understandings of what it means for a thing to be ugly. |
Contributor Bio(s): Rosenkranz, Karl: - Karl Rosenkranz (1805 -1879) was a German philosopher. He followed Kant and Herbart as professor of philosophy in Königsberg, Germany. A lifelong defender of the philosophy of Hegel, he participated briefly in the post-1848 reform government in Berlin. |