Literature & Language

Gaga Aesthetics

Art, Fashion, Popular Culture, and the Up-Ending of Tradition

Adam Geczy, University of Sydney, Australia & Vicki Karaminas, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand Taking Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘The Culture Industry’ as a crucial departure point, this book explores the dialectic of high and low that forms the foundation of Adornian aesthetics as well as those in his wake. It considers the tradition of philosophical aesthetics and the extent to which Adorno’s aesthetics may still have valency, at a time when high culture has become deeply enmeshed with popular culture. This is “Gaga Aesthetics”, aesthetics that are no longer confined to fine art, but can be found in phenomena such as fashion and music video.

UK November 2021 • US November 2021 • 256 pages HB 9781350102699 • £85.00 / $115.00 ePub 9781350102712 • £76.50 / $100.32 ePdf 9781350102705 • £76.50 / $100.32 Series: Aesthetics and Contemporary Art • Bloomsbury Academic

Contemporary Chinese Art, Aesthetic Modernity and Zhang Peili

Towards a Critical Contemporaneity

Paul Gladston, University of New South Wales, Australia Addressing art in and from the People’s Republic of China as a significant aspect of post-West contemporaneity, Paul Gladston provides a new critical understanding of what it means to be 'contemporary' and the profound changes taking place in the art world today. Informed by deconstructivism as well as syncretic Confucianism, Gladston extends this theory to a reading of the work of the artist Zhang Peili and his involvement with the Hangzhoubased art group, the Pond Association (Chi she). Revealed is a critical aesthetic productively resistant to any single interpretative viewpoint.

UK April 2021 • US April 2021 • 248 pages PB 9781350254015 • £28.99 / $39.95 Previously published in HB 9781350041974 ePub 9781350041998 • £26.09 / $35.17 ePdf 9781350041981 • £26.09 / $35.17 Series: Aesthetics and Contemporary Art • Bloomsbury Academic

Readings in Infancy

Jean-Francois Lyotard Edited by Robert Harvey, Stony Brook University, USA & Kiff Bamford, Leeds Beckett University, UK ‘Nobody knows how to write’. Thus opens this nuanced and accessible collection of essays by one the most important philosophers of the 20th century, Jean-François Lyotard. First published as Lectures d’enfance, investigating Lyotard's idea of infantia, or the infancy of thought that resists all forms of development, these essays are published together in English for the first time. Each essay responds to thinkers central to cultural modernism, such as James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, and Sigmund Freud. With an introduction and afterword by Robert Harvey and Kiff Bamford, this volume contextualises Lyotard’s thought and demonstrates his continued relevance today.

UK December 2021 • US December 2021 • 208 pages PB 9781350167346 • £19.99 / $26.95 • HB 9781350167353 • £65.00 / $90.00 ePub 9781350167377 • £17.99 / $23.44 ePdf 9781350167360 • £17.99 / $23.44 Bloomsbury Academic World English

Names and Context

A Use-Sensitive Philosophical Account

Dolf Rami, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany Presenting a new contextualist account of names, Dolf Rami introduces two new ways to capture the rigidity of names by proposing a pluralist version of the causal chain picture. He covers popular contextualist accounts of names and develops a use-sensitive alternative based on a semantic comparison between names, pronouns and demonstratives. Extending and applying his approach to a wide variety of uses, including names in fiction, Rami offers the first comprehensive explanation of why we should interpret proper names as use-sensitive expressions.

UK November 2021 • US November 2021 • 288 pages HB 9781350180628 • £85.00 / $115.00 ePub 9781350180642 • £76.50 / $100.32 ePdf 9781350180635 • £76.50 / $100.32 Series: Mind, Meaning and Metaphysics • Bloomsbury Academic

The Babylonian Planet

Culture and Encounter Under Globalization

Sonja Neef, Late of Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany and Évry Val d'Essonne University, France What is astro-culture? In The Babylonian Planet it is an aesthetic, a position, a practice. It helps to engineer the shift from a segregated to an integrated world view – from global to planetary; distance to intimacy and where closeness and cosmic distance live side-by-side. By combining the Babylonian concept of the encounter and the planetary concept of the whole-earth, Neef creates a space in which she can examine topics as varied as language, modernity, migration and the moon, and instigate a renewed cultural understanding receptive to the kinder forms of cultural encounter and globalisation that she hopes will come.

UK December 2021 • US December 2021 • 240 pages HB 9781350173231 • £85.00 / $115.00 ePub 9781350173262 • £76.50 / $100.32 ePdf 9781350173255 • £76.50 / $100.32 Bloomsbury Academic World English

Ordinary Literature Philosophy

Lacanian Literary Performatives between Austin and Rancière

Jernej Habjan, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU), Ljubljana, and Postgraduate School, ZRC SAZU, Slovenia

The first extended Lacanian reading of J. L. Austin’s ordinary language philosophy, this book examines how it has been received in the continental tradition by Derrida and Butler, Rancière and Ducrot. Charting each of these interactions with a Lacanian reading of the thinker, which Habjan achieves through different case studies – from a Hollywood blockbuster to a Shakespearean bestseller – he offers a new materialist reading of the ‘ordinary’ status of literary language. This is a vital contribution to current debates within both literary studies and contemporary philosophy.

UK June 2021 • US June 2021 • 192 pages PB 9781350267404 • £28.99 / $39.95 Previously published in HB 9781350086074 ePub 9781350086081 • £81.00 / $106.83 ePdf 9781350086067 • £81.00 / $106.83 Bloomsbury Academic