Aesthetic Subjects Pamela R. Matthews and David McWhirter, editors Table of Contents		$27.50 Paper ISBN: 0-8166-3993-0 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-3993-9 $82.50 Cloth ISBN: 0-8166-3992-2 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-3992-2
Demonstrates the remarkable resurgence of interest in the aesthetic. Recent calls for a return to aesthetics occur precisely at a moment when it is increasingly evident that nothing concerning aesthetics is self-evident anymore. Determined to recover the value of aesthetic experience for artistic, cultural, and social analysis, the contributors to this volume-prominent scholars in literature, philosophy, art history, architecture, history, and anthropology—begin from a shared recognition that ideological readings of the aesthetic have provided invaluable insights, in particular, that analyses of aesthetics within historical and social contexts tell us a great deal about the experience of aesthetic encounters. From multiple and complementary perspectives, the contributors address topics as varied as Nabokov and Dickens, Caravaggio and Shelley Winters, gender and sexuality, advertising and AIDS. Taken together, their essays constitute a sustained and multifarious effort to resituate aesthetic pleasure in the mixed, impure conditions characteristic of every social practice and experience, however privileged or marginalized, and to ask what happens to the aesthetic if we consider it apart from—or at least in tension with—its historically dominant discursive formulations. As such, this volume establishes a renewed sense of aesthetic discourse and its usefulness as a tool for understanding culture. Contributors: Leo Bersani, Susan Bordo, Bill Brown, Beatriz Colomina, Ulysse Dutoit, Lee Edelman, Maureen Harkin, Howard Horwitz, Audrey Jaffe, Martin Jay, Kay Bea Jones, Robert Kaufman, Alphonso Lingis, Joseph Litvak, Douglas Mao, Barbara Stafford, Kathleen Stewart, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Judith Stoddart, Michael Taussig. Pamela R. Matthews and David McWhirter are associate professors of English at Texas A&M University. 384 pages | 24 halftones | 7 x 10 | 2003 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction: Exile's Return? Aesthetics Now Pamela R. Matthews and David McWhirter PART I Locating Aesthetic Experience: Sites, Situations, Discourses 1. Drifting into Dangerous Waters: The Separation of Aesthetic Experience from the Work of Art Martin Jay 2. Armed Assault Alphonso Lingis 3. Reinventing the Wall: Looking into Zaha Hadid Kay Bea Jones 4. Pleasures Incarnate: Aesthetic Sentiment in the Nineteenth-Century Work of Art Judith Stoddart 5. Caravaggio's Secrets Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit PART II Aesthetics in Social Contexts: Economies and Ethics 6. The Moral Content of Nabokov's Lolita Susan Bordo 7. The Aesthetics of Jewishness: Shelley Winters Joseph Litvak 8. Theorizing Popular Practice in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics: Lord Kames and Alexander Gerard Maureen Harkin 9. The Labor Theory of Beauty: Aesthetic Subjects, Blind Justice Douglas Mao 10. Sinthom-osexuality Lee Edelman PART III Aesthetic Subjects: Bodies, Minds, Identities 11. The Combinatorial Aesthetics of Neurobiology Barbara Maria Stafford 12. Cloth Wounds: Queer Aesthetics of Debasement Kathryn Bond Stockton 13. Embodying Culture: Dorian's Wish Audrey Jaffe 14. Bad Taste, the Root Evil: I. A. Richards and the Postnational Subject Howard Horwitz PART IV Rethinking Aesthetics: Secrets and Magic, the Gift and the Child 15. The Gift: Reflections on the Eames House Beatriz Colomina 16. What Is Construction, What's the Aesthetic, What Was Adorno Doing? Robert Kaufman 17. The Secret Life of Things: Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism Bill Brown 18. Arresting Images Kathleen Stewart 19. The Adult's Imagination of the Child's Imagination Michael Taussig Contributors Index

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