Allen S. Weiss's Books

Feast and Folly

Cuisine, Intoxication, and the Poetics of the Sublime

By: Allen S. Weiss

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Feast and Folly

Cuisine, Intoxication, and the Poetics of the Sublime

By: Allen S. Weiss

What would it mean to speak of cuisine as a "fine art"? Combining an analysis of French cuisine with cutting-edge postmodernist critique, Feast and Folly provides a fascinating history of French gastronomy and cuisine over the past two centuries, as well as considerable detail regarding the preparation of some of the colossal meals described in the book. It offers a deep analysis of the social, political, and aesthetic aspects of cuisine and taste, exploring the conceptual preconditions, the discursive limits, and the poetics and rhetorical forms of the modern culinary imagination. Allen S. Weiss analyzes the structural preconditions of considering cuisine as a fine art, connects the diverse discursive conditions that give meaning to the notion of cuisine as artwork, and investigates the most extreme psychological and metaphysical condition of the aesthetic domain—the sublime—in relation to gastronomy.

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Page Count

172

Publisher

State University of New York Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0791487881

ISBN 13

9780791487884

Breathless

Sound Recording, Disembodiment, and The Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia

By: Allen S. Weiss

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Breathless

Sound Recording, Disembodiment, and The Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia

By: Allen S. Weiss

Explores how early radio and sound recording influenced modernist literature. Breathless explores early sound recording and the literature that both foreshadowed its invention and was contemporaneous with its early years, revealing the broad influence of this new technology at the very origins of Modernism. Through close readings of works by Edgar Allan Poe, Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Cros, Paul Valéry, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Jules Verne, and Antonin Artaud, Allen S. Weiss shows how sound recording's uncanny confluence of human and machine would transform our expectations of mourning and melancholia, transfiguring our intimate relation to death. Interdisciplinary, the book bridges poetry and literature, theology and metaphysics. As Breathless shows, the symbolic and practical roles of poetry and technology were transformed as new forms of nostalgia and eroticism arose.

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Page Count

199

Publisher

Wesleyan University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0819572527

ISBN 13

9780819572523

French Food

On the Table, On the Page, and in French Culture

By: Lawrence R. Schehr,Allen S. Weiss

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French Food

On the Table, On the Page, and in French Culture

By: Lawrence R. Schehr,Allen S. Weiss

More than a book about food alone, French Food uses diet as a window into issues of nationality, literature, and culture in France and abroad. Outstanding contributors from cultural studies, literary criticism, performance studies, and the emerging field of food studies explore a wide range of food matters.

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Page Count

269

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1135347042

ISBN 13

9781135347048

The Aesthetics of Excess

By: Allen S. Weiss

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The Aesthetics of Excess

By: Allen S. Weiss

This book investigates the reciprocal and often transgressive relations between rhetorical figures and libidinal activity. The works of Nietzsche, Artaud, Bataille, Klossowski, and Sade are reconsidered in light of the modernist and postmodernist problematics of simulacra, fascination, sublimation and desublimation, perversion, deconstruction, and libidinal economies. Reading across the boundaries of philosophy, art history, comparative literature, film studies, and psychoanalytic theory, this work reveals the manner in which theoretical discourse is imbued with passional motivations, and, conversely, shows how the passions are structured according to logical and rhetorical figures. In offering specific rereadings of several key figures of our modernist tradition, this work helps identify the sources of the 'postmodern condition.' It thus provides a theoretical foundation for contemporary art and literary criticism—especially of those works to be found at the margins of our culture.

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Page Count

240

Publisher

State University of New York Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1438423659

ISBN 13

9781438423654

Zen Landscapes

Perspectives on Japanese Gardens and Ceramics

By: Allen S. Weiss

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Zen Landscapes

Perspectives on Japanese Gardens and Ceramics

By: Allen S. Weiss

The essential elements of a dry Japanese garden are few: rocks, gravel, moss. Simultaneously a sensual matrix, a symbolic form, and a memory theater, these gardens exhibit beautiful miniaturization and precise craftsmanship. But their apparent minimalism belies a true complexity. In Zen Landscapes, Allen S. Weiss takes readers on an exciting journey through these exquisite sites, explaining how Japanese gardens must be approached according to the play of scale, surroundings, and seasons, as well as in relation to other arts—revealing them as living landscapes rather than abstract designs. Weiss shows that these gardens are inspired by the Zen aesthetics of the tea ceremony, manifested in poetry, painting, calligraphy, architecture, cuisine, and ceramics. Japanese art favors suggestion and allusion, valuing the threshold between the distinct and the inchoate, between figuration and abstraction, and he argues that ceramics play a crucial role here, relating as much to the site-specificity of landscape as to the ritualized codes of the tea ceremony and the everyday gestures of the culinary table. With more than one hundred stunning color photographs, Zen Landscapes is the first in-depth study in the West to examine the correspondences between gardens and ceramics. A fascinating look at landscape art and its relation to the customs and craftsmanship of the Japanese arts, it will appeal to readers interested in landscape design and Japan’s art and culture.

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Page Count

258

Publisher

Reaktion Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1780232314

ISBN 13

9781780232317

Shattered Forms

Art Brut, Phantasms, Modernism

By: Allen S. Weiss

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Shattered Forms

Art Brut, Phantasms, Modernism

By: Allen S. Weiss

Art Brut, also termed Outsider Art, has long been suppressed from most art historical writing. Why this rejection? The hyperbolic expressions of Romanticism and Symbolism nourished a desire for derangement and dissociation that inspired both Expressionism and Surrealism. Simulated delirium became the object of the new art -- experimental, avant-garde, modernist -- which arose from the fragmented codes, the shattered forms of everyday communication. But what of those artists whose works, and often whose deliria, are the manifestations of sheer eccentricity, of social isolation and marginalization, or of madness? In this book Weiss investigates the origins of the unrestricted contemporary artistic field, seeking its sources in those works hitherto absent from the official histories of art -- works that constitute art's dark interior, its disturbing netherworld. Secluded, occluded, excluded, Art Brut nevertheless extends the limits of artistic creativity and aesthetic discourse, regardless of whatever anxieties such works may produce. Shattered Forms explores the relations between Art Brut, the psychopathology of expression, and avant-garde Modernism, attempting to show how the consideration of Art Brut should lead to a revision of our theoretical and museological paradigms.

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Page Count

174

Publisher

SUNY Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0791411176

ISBN 13

9780791411179

Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon

By: Allen S. Weiss

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Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon

By: Allen S. Weiss

Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon analyzes the limits of the applicability of psychoanalytic theory to aesthetic discourse, and in doing so expands the range of non-normative paradigms of spectatorial identification and sexual identity. These considerations are based on the epistemological premises that the ideal seldom coincides with the empirical, and that identification is always partial, fragmented, heterogeneous, mixed, such that total identification would be tantamount to delirium. The imagination is but the ephemera of partial objects torn from culture and history, the transgression by fragmentation of a contemporary cosmos all too unified and all too controlled to admit the most singular, and idiosyncratic, phantasms of our desires. Thus we must posit an aesthetics where theory and interpretation are juxtaposed to, or traced above, the effects of the passions, where a muscular contraction or spasm is worth as much as a concept. It is here, at the fragile limit between iconophilia and iconoclasm, that the ironies and exigencies of poetic justice reside.

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Page Count

180

Publisher

SUNY Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0791421554

ISBN 13

9780791421550

Phantasmic Radio

By: Allen S. Weiss

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Phantasmic Radio

By: Allen S. Weiss

About radio and the alienation of the self

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Page Count

140

Publisher

Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0822316641

ISBN 13

9780822316640

Unnatural Horizons

Paradox and Contradiction in Landscape Architecture

By: Allen S. Weiss

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Unnatural Horizons

Paradox and Contradiction in Landscape Architecture

By: Allen S. Weiss

Unnatural Horizons presents a selective history of the last five centuries of landscape architecture at the intersection of poetics and science, rhetoric and technology, and philosophy and politics. It investigates the relations between garden aesthetics and metaphysics, discussing issues similar to those raised by Weiss's critically acclaimed Mirrors of Infinity. The Western garden has always served as a setting for music, dance, theater, sculpture, and architecture, as well as the minor arts of meditative contemplation and erotic seduction. The history of landscape architecture is therefore inextricable from the histories of the other arts, and must be studied from an interdisciplinary and polycultural point of view. Some of the topics included in this book are the influence of neo-Platonic philosophy on the Italian Renaissance garden, erotic fantasies and the 18th-century libertine garden, the contrast between Thoreau's romantic notion of virgin nature and changes in perception due to increasing speed and mechanization, and the limits of landscape architecture as art form in 20th-century gardens.

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Page Count

180

Publisher

Princeton Architectural Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1568981392

ISBN 13

9781568981390

Mirrors of Infinity:

The French Formal Garden and 17th-Century Metaphysics

By: Allen S. Weiss

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Mirrors of Infinity:

The French Formal Garden and 17th-Century Metaphysics

By: Allen S. Weiss

Resource added for the Landscape Horticulture Technician program 100014.

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Page Count

116

Publisher

Princeton Architectural Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1568980507

ISBN 13

9781568980508

The Grain of the Clay

Reflections on Ceramics and the Art of Collecting

By: Allen S. Weiss

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The Grain of the Clay

Reflections on Ceramics and the Art of Collecting

By: Allen S. Weiss

Ceramics give pleasure to our everyday lives, from the beauty of a vase’s elegant curves to the joy of a meal served upon a fine platter. Ceramics originate in a direct engagement with the earth and maintain a unique place in the history of the arts. In this book, Allen S. Weiss sharpens our perception of and increases our appreciation for ceramics, all the while providing a critical examination of how and why we collect them. Weiss examines the vast stylistic range of ceramics and investigates both the theoretical and personal reasons for viewing, using, and collecting them. Relating ceramics to other arts and practices—especially those surrounding food—he explores their different uses such as in the celebrated tea ceremony of Japan. Most notably, he considers how works previously viewed as crafts have found their rightful way into museums, as well as how this new-found engagement with finely wrought natural materials may foster an increased ecological sensitivity. The result is a wide-ranging and sensitive look at a crucial part of our material culture.

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Page Count

247

Publisher

Reaktion Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1780236905

ISBN 13

9781780236902

Book's by Allen S. Weiss

Feast and Folly

Feast and Folly

Breathless

Breathless

French Food

French Food

The Aesthetics of Excess

The Aesthetics of Excess

Zen Landscapes

Zen Landscapes

Shattered Forms

Shattered Forms

Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon

Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon

Phantasmic Radio

Phantasmic Radio

Unnatural Horizons

Unnatural Horizons

Mirrors of Infinity:

Mirrors of Infinity:

The Grain of the Clay

The Grain of the Clay

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