This book investigates the issue of conceptual originality in art criticism of the seventeenth century, a period in which China dynamically reinvented itself. In art criticism, the term which was called upon to indicate conceptual originality more than any other was "qi" 奇, literally, "different"; but secondarily, "odd," like a number and by extension, "the novel," and "extraor...(展开全部)

"The art historian after Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich is not only participating in an activity of great intellectual excitement; he is raising and exploring issues which lie very much at the centre of psychology, of the sciences and of history itself. Svetlana Alpers's study of 17th-century Dutch painting is a splendid example of this excitement and of the centrality of ar...(展开全部)

Wellek essays (some never-before published); footnotes throughout text; bibliography (of Wellek's works); 2 indices (names; topics + terms); author biography w/b+w photograph; "throughout, the documentation is massive, the breadth of intelligence masterful. Indeed, several of these articles have already become central documents, established points of reference + recourse, for t...(展开全部)

Understood one way, the branch of contemporary philosophical ethics that goes by the label "metaethics" concerns certain second-order questions about ethics--questions not in ethics, but rather ones about our thought and talk about ethics, and how the ethical facts fit into reality. Analogously, the branch of contemporary philosophy of law that is often called "general jurispru...(展开全部)

Striking out at the conception of criticism as restricted to mere opinion or ritual gesture, Northrop Frye wrote this magisterial work proceeding on the assumption that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge in its own right. In four brilliant essays on historical, ethical, archetypical, and rhetorical criticism, employing examples of world literature from ancient ti...(展开全部)

A sociological history of literary studies—both as a discipline and as a profession. As the humanities in higher education struggle with a labor crisis and with declining enrollments, the travails of “English” have been especially acute and long-standing. No scholar has analyzed the discipline’s contradictions as authoritatively as John Guillory. In this much-anticipated new b...(展开全部)

A sociological history of literary studies—both as a discipline and as a profession. As the humanities in higher education struggle with a labor crisis and with declining enrollments, the travails of “English” have been especially acute and long-standing. No scholar has analyzed the discipline’s contradictions as authoritatively as John Guillory. In this much-anticipated new b...(展开全部)

When we view a work of art, we often experience an emotional response, but the causes of our reactions are complex. Our knowledge of why we respond to art as we do is rooted in science—in psychology and biology. Eric R. Kandel traces the origins of this understanding to early twentieth-century Vienna, which gave rise to the concept of the “beholder’s share,” the realization tha...(展开全部)

Essays on media systems and contemporary art by a leading theorist of modern visual culture. Tricks of the Light brings together essays by critic and art historian Jonathan Crary, internationally known for his groundbreaking and widely admired studies of modern Western visual culture. This collection features a compelling selection of Crary’s responses to modern and contemporar...(展开全部)