Research Catalog

Title

In praise of nonsense : aesthetics, uncertainty, and postmodern identity / Ted Hiebert.

Author

Hiebert, Ted.

Publication

Montréal : McGill-Queen's University Press 2012.

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Holdings

Details

Description

viii, 296 p. : ill.; 23 cm.

Summary

What is truth in the postmodern age? The artistic generation of the twentieth century has grown up immersed in the delirious imagination of postmodern thought, which insists upon the ultimate uncertainty of meaning and that there is no self-evident truth. This title explores the possibilities and parameters of a postmodern imagination freed from the philosophical responsibilities of fiction, fact, and replication of lived experience. Mobilizing an array of scholars and contemporary artists, this study examines postmodern thinking through the lenses of identity and visual culture. Speculative, critical, and always creative in its approach, In "Praise of Nonsense" focuses on theories of disappearance, irony, and nonsense, where the pleasures of the imaginary give rise to artistic inspiration.

Subject

• Aesthetics
• Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.)
• Création (Arts)
• Esthétique
• Imagination
• Incertitude
• Postmodernism
• Postmodernisme
• Uncertainty

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Preface -- Willful alienation -- Prosthetic phenomenology -- Vacuous being -- Playing dead -- Fantasies of trauma -- Perspectival roadkill -- Becoming-Rorschach -- Photographing vampires -- Metaphysical laziness -- Postscript.

ISBN

• 9780773539730
• 0773539735
• 9780773539747
• 0773539743

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library