Transit, transitional, transition: Dalia Judovitz catches Marcel Duchamp on the run with his art in a suitcase and his thought all boxed and ready to go. . . . She demonstrates how the theme of transition, reappearing from work to work, makes each piece reproduce some other piece, while all continue to exemplify an original which can no longer be found and which has no creator."—Jean-François Lyotard
What is the body? How was it culturally constructed, conceived, and cultivated before and after the advent of rationalism and modern science? This interdisciplinary study elaborates a cultural genealogy of the body and its legacies to modernity by tracing its crucial redefinition from a live anatomical entity to disembodied, mechanical and virtual analogs. The study ranges from Baroque, pre-Cartesian interpretations of body and embodiment, to the Cartesian elaboration of ontological difference and mind-body dualism, and it concludes with the parodic and violent aftermath of this legacy to the French Enlightenment. It engages work by philosophical authors such as Montaigne, Descartes and La Mettrie, as well as literary works by d'Urfé, Corneille and the Marquis de Sade. The examination of sexuality and the emergence of sexual difference as a dominant mode of embodiment are central to the book's overall design. The work is informed by philosophical accounts of the body (Nietzsche, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty), by feminist theory (Butler, Irigaray, Bordo), as well as by literary and cultural historians (Scarry, Stewart, Bynum, etc.) and historians of science (Canguilhem, Pagel, and Temkin), among others. It will appeal to scholars of literature, philosophy, French studies, critical theory, feminist theory, cultural historians and historians of science and technology. Dalia Judovitz is Professor of French, Emory University. She is also author of Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit and Subjectivity and Representation in Decartes: The Origins of Modernity.
This volume explores the central importance of appropriation, collaboration, influence, and play in French artist Marcel Duchamp's (1887-1968) work -- and in Dada and Surrealism in general -- to show how the concept of art itself became the critical fueland springboard for questioning art's fundamental premises. Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. The author maintains that rather than simply negating art, Duchamp's readymades (Duchamp's "readymades" are ordinary manufactured objects that the artist selected and modified, as an antidote to what he called "retinal art") and later works, including films and conceptual pieces, demonstrating the impossibility of defining art in the first place. Through his readymades, Duchamp explicitly critiqued the commodification of art and inaugurated a profound shift from valuing art for its visual appearance to understanding the significance of its mode of public presentation.
Not rediscovered until the twentieth century, the works of Georges de La Tour retain an aura of mystery. Their veritable celebration of light and the familiar, visible world, blinds the beholder to a deeper understanding of the meanings associated with vision and the visible in the early modern period"--
What is the body? How was it culturally constructed, conceived, and cultivated before and after the advent of rationalism and modern science? This interdisciplinary study elaborates a cultural genealogy of the body and its legacies to modernity by tracing its crucial redefinition from a live anatomical entity to disembodied, mechanical and virtual analogs. The study ranges from Baroque, pre-Cartesian interpretations of body and embodiment, to the Cartesian elaboration of ontological difference and mind-body dualism, and it concludes with the parodic and violent aftermath of this legacy to the French Enlightenment. It engages work by philosophical authors such as Montaigne, Descartes and La Mettrie, as well as literary works by d'Urfé, Corneille and the Marquis de Sade. The examination of sexuality and the emergence of sexual difference as a dominant mode of embodiment are central to the book's overall design. The work is informed by philosophical accounts of the body (Nietzsche, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty), by feminist theory (Butler, Irigaray, Bordo), as well as by literary and cultural historians (Scarry, Stewart, Bynum, etc.) and historians of science (Canguilhem, Pagel, and Temkin), among others. It will appeal to scholars of literature, philosophy, French studies, critical theory, feminist theory, cultural historians and historians of science and technology. Dalia Judovitz is Professor of French, Emory University. She is also author of Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit and Subjectivity and Representation in Decartes: The Origins of Modernity.
Transit, transitional, transition: Dalia Judovitz catches Marcel Duchamp on the run with his art in a suitcase and his thought all boxed and ready to go. . . . She demonstrates how the theme of transition, reappearing from work to work, makes each piece reproduce some other piece, while all continue to exemplify an original which can no longer be found and which has no creator."—Jean-François Lyotard
This volume explores the central importance of appropriation, collaboration, influence, and play in French artist Marcel Duchamp's (1887-1968) work -- and in Dada and Surrealism in general -- to show how the concept of art itself became the critical fueland springboard for questioning art's fundamental premises. Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. The author maintains that rather than simply negating art, Duchamp's readymades (Duchamp's "readymades" are ordinary manufactured objects that the artist selected and modified, as an antidote to what he called "retinal art") and later works, including films and conceptual pieces, demonstrating the impossibility of defining art in the first place. Through his readymades, Duchamp explicitly critiqued the commodification of art and inaugurated a profound shift from valuing art for its visual appearance to understanding the significance of its mode of public presentation.
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