Lee Baxandall, Stefan Morawski (eds.): Marx & Engels on Literature and Art: A Selection of Writings (1973)

A concise compilation of texts divided into nine sections with a judicious introductory essay by Morawski.

Translations and selections by Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski
Introduction by Stefan Morawski
Publisher Telos Press, St. Louis/MI, 1973
ISBN 0914386026
175 pages
via Charles, in the Unlimited Edition

Review: M. L. Raina (Minnesota Review, 1975)
Marxist aesthetics on Monoskop wiki

PDF (5 MB, updated to an OCR’d version via Marcell Mars)

See also Margaret A. Rose’s Marx’s Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx and the Visual Arts, 1984.

Sianne Ngai: Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012)

“The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime.

Ngai explores how each of these aesthetic categories expresses conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, exchange, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our playfulness and our sense of desperation. The interesting is tied to the circulation of discourse and inspires interest but also boredom. The cute’s involvement with consumption brings out feelings of tenderness and aggression simultaneously. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our complex relationship to performing, information, and commodities.

Through readings of Adorno, Schlegel, and Nietzsche alongside cultural artifacts ranging from Bob Perelman’s poetry to Ed Ruscha’s photography books to the situation comedy of Lucille Ball, Ngai shows how these everyday aesthetic categories also provide traction to classic problems in aesthetic theory. The zany, cute, and interesting are not postmodernity’s only meaningful aesthetic categories, Ngai argues, but the ones best suited for grasping the radical transformation of aesthetic experience and discourse under its conditions.”

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2012
ISBN 0674046587, 9780674046580
344 pages
via batshave

Reviews: Rebecca Ariel Porte (LA Review of Books, 2012), Paul Ardoin (Reviews in Cultural Theory, 2013), Jason Gladstone (Contemporary Literature, 2014), Pansy Duncan (Cultural Studies Review, 2014), Monica Westin (The Believer, 2012), Hua Hsu (Slate, 2012), Douglas Dowland (American Studies, 2014).
Commentary: Adam Jasper (Bookforum, 2013).
Interview with the author (Adam Jasper, Cabinet, 2011)

Publisher

PDF, PDF (14 MB, no OCR, Index missing, updated on 2019-6-23)

Fredric Jameson: The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (1992)

Taking contemporary films from the United States, Russia, Taiwan, France, and the Philippines, The Geopolitical Aesthetic offers a reading of some of the most interesting films of the last decade and a general account of filmic representation in the postmodern world. Fredric Jameson poses some essential questions: How does representation function in contemporary film? How does contemporary cinema represent an ever more complex and international social reality? Jameson’s sophisticated and theoretically informed readings stress the ways in which disparate films—for example, Godard’s Passion, Pakula’s All the President’s Men, Yang’s The Terrorizer, Tahimik’s The Perfumed Nightmare, Tarkovsky’s Andrei Roublev—confront similar problems of representation. The solutions vary widely but the drive remains the same—the desire to find adequate allegories for our social existence.

The Geopolitical Aesthetic, a refinement and development of the arguments put forward in Jameson’s seminal work The Political Unconscious, is crucial reading for everyone interested in both film analysis and cultural studies.

Publisher Indiana University Press, 1992
Perspectives Series
ISBN 0253330939, 9780253330932
220 pages

publisher
google books

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