Aesthetics and Modernity

Essays by Agnes Heller

Edited by John Rundell

Not available to order

Publication date:

22 December 2010

Length of book:

206 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739141335

Aesthetics and Modernity brings together Agnes Heller's most recent essays around the topics of aesthetic genres such as painting, music, literature and comedy, aesthetic reception, and embodiment. The essays draw on Heller's deep appreciation of aesthetics in all its forms from the classical to the Renaissance and the contemporary periods. Heller's recent work on aesthetics explores the complex and fraught status of artworks within the context of the history of modernity. For Heller, not only does the relation between aesthetics and modernity have to be looked at anew, but also the way in which these terms are conceptualized, and this is the two-fold task that she sets for herself in these essays. She engages this task with a critical recognition of modernity's pitfalls. This collection highlights these pitfalls in the context of continuing possibilities for aesthetics and our relationship with works of art, and throws light on Heller's theory of emotions and feelings, and her theory of modernity. Aesthetics and Modernity collects the essential essays of Agnes Heller, and is a must-read for anyone interested in Heller's major contributions to philosophy.

Chapter 1 Chapter One. Agnes Heller: Modernity, Aesthetics and the Human Condition—An Interpretative Essay
Chapter 2 Chapter Two. What Went Wrong with the Concept of the Beautiful?
Chapter 3 Chapter Three. Autonomy of Art or the Dignity of the Artwork
Chapter 4 Chapter Four. The Role of Emotions in the Reception of Artworks
Chapter 5 Chapter Five. Joke culture and transformations of the public sphere.
Chapter 6 Chapter Six. The Contemporary Historical Novel
Chapter 7 Chapter Seven. The Metaphysics of Embodiment in the Western Tradition
Chapter 8 Chapter Eight. European master-narratives about freedom.
Chapter 9 Chapter Nine. The Three Logics of Modernity and the Double Bind of the Modern Imagination
Chapter 10 Chapter Ten. The Absolute Stranger: Shakespeare and the Drama of Failed Assimilation
Chapter 11 Chapter Eleven. The Gods of Greece: Germans and Greeks
Chapter 12 Chapter Twelve. Self representation and the representation of the other.
Chapter 13 Chapter Thirteen. Where are we at Home?

Agnes Heller is peerless as a philosopher of the modern condition. Long acclaimed for her acuity and extraordinary compass, here Heller presents a vivid cross-section of her thinking, convening analyses of emotions and needs, forms of rationality and social association, and questions about the crux of value and human communion around a sustained consideration of artworks and of the beleaguered concept of the beautiful. As John Rundell expounds in his instructive introduction to the collection, Heller approaches postmodern critique as a way of sharpening the best insights of modern thought, while concurrently refusing its metaphysical biases. She resuscitates the notion of a vibrant subjectivity, takes up the ipseity of artworks, and enters into dialogue with an array of thinkers, demonstrating how the urge for sure guarantors of value may be tackled with an understanding of contingency and historical truth. And Heller writes with utter disregard for jargon or cant, confessing her concerns directly and never allowing the reader to forget that this is a discussion of our shared modernity, and of the open possibility of coming to be at home within it.