Chris Jenks (ed.): Visual Culture (1995)

In Visual Culture the ‘visual’ character of contemporary culture is explored in original and lively essays. The contributors look at advertising, film, painting and fine art journalism, photography, television and propaganda. They argue that there is only a social, not a formal relation between vision and truth. A major preoccupation of modernity and central to an understadning of the postmodern, ‘vision’ and the ‘visual’ are emergent themes across sociology, cultural studies and critical theory in the visual arts. Visual Culture will prove an indispensable guide to the field.

Publisher Routledge, 1995
ISBN 0415106230, 9780415106238
Length 269 pages

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Gayle Zachmann: Frameworks for Mallarmé: The Photo and the Graphic of an Interdisciplinary Aesthetic (2008)

Countering the conventional image of the deliberately obscure “ivory-tower poet,” Frameworks for Mallarmé presents Stéphane Mallarmé as a journalist and critic who was actively engaged with the sociocultural and technological shifts of his era. Gayle Zachmann introduces a writer whose aesthetic was profoundly shaped by contemporary innovations in print and visual culture, especially the nascent art of photography. She analyzes the preeminence of the visual in conjunction with Mallarmé’s quest for “scientific” language, and convincingly links the poet’s production to a nineteenth-century understanding of cognition that is articulated in terms of optical perception. The result is a distinctly modern recuperation of the Horatian doctrine of ut pictura poesis in Mallarmé’s poetry and his circumstantial writings.

Publisher SUNY Press, 2008
ISBN 079147593X, 9780791475935
209 pages

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Theodor W. Adorno: Aesthetic Theory (1970-) [DE, EN, PT, CZ, ES, IT]

Perhaps the most important aesthetics of the twentieth century appears here newly translated, in English that is for the first time faithful to the intricately demanding language of the original German. The culmination of a lifetime of aesthetic investigation, Aesthetic Theory is Theodor W. Adorno’s magnum opus, the clarifying lens through which the whole of his work is best viewed, providing a framework within which his other major writings cohere.

German edition
Publisher Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1970

English edition
Editors Gretel Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann
Newly translated, edited, and with a translator’s introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor
This translation published 1997 by The Athlone Press Ltd
This edition published 2002 by Continuum
ISBN 0826467571
383 pages

Wikipedia (EN)

Ästhetische Theorie (German, 1970, added on 2013-6-11, PDF)
Aesthetic Theory (English, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, 1997/2002, updated on 2013-6-11)
Teoría estética (Portuguese, trans. Artur Morão, 1993, added on 2013-6-11)
Estetická teorie (Czech, trans. Dušan Prokop, 1997, added on 2013-6-11)
Teoría estética (Spanish, trans. Jorge Navarro Pérez, 2004, added on 2013-6-11)
Teoria estetica (Italian, trans. Giovanni Matteucci, 2009, added on 2013-6-11)