 | |
| Author | Henry Sussman |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of Hieronymus Holzschuher - 1526 |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Published | 1997 |
| Publisher | Stanford University Press |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 336 pages |
| ISBN | 0804728429 |
| OCLC | 36589965 |
The Aesthetic Contract is a work of intellectual history and critical theory by Yale professor Henry Sussman, first published in 1997 by Stanford University Press.
In the book Sussman traces intellectual enterprise, art, and artistic conventions since what he calls the "broader modernity" (marked by the end of the Medieval period in Europe) and suggests that art and its conventions have essentially become a secular institution that have essentially replaced the moral allegiances the subject owed to the Church before the reformation increasing a sense of personal freedom.
Critical reception for The Aesthetic Contract has been positive. [1] [2] In a review in The Comparatist David Halliburton wrote "In sum, The Aesthetic Contract is a strong, broad comparative study of major patterns in the modernity of the West from the time of the Protestant Reformation to our own, soon-to-expire, century." [3] A reviewer for Studies in Romanticism praised Sussman for the book's "steadfast refusal to sacrifice a genuine intellectual undertaking for such efficacity". [4] Academic Geoffrey Galt Harpham was more mixed in his review, as he wrote that the "rhetoric of terror notwithstanding, The Aesthetic Contract displays perhaps an excessive ease, an unresisted 'liberty'", while also stating "Can any such set of understandings or conventions as general as the ones Sussman imagines be conjured in terms that would be both useful and suggestive? Perhaps not. But the effort to bring into being, by sheer force of discourse, a shadowy but defining--what do we call it?--commands a certain respect; and the very incompleteness of the project may yet provoke further efforts, by Sussman and others." [5]
Fin de siècle is a French term meaning "end of century,” a phrase which typically encompasses both the meaning of the similar English idiom "turn of the century" and also makes reference to the closing of one era and onset of another. Without context, the term is typically used to refer to the end of the 19th century. This period was widely thought to be a period of social degeneracy, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning. The "spirit" of fin de siècle often refers to the cultural hallmarks that were recognized as prominent in the 1880s and 1890s, including ennui, cynicism, pessimism, and "a widespread belief that civilization leads to decadence."
Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, pen name Novalis, was a German aristocrat and polymath, who was a poet, novelist, philosopher and mystic. He is regarded as an influential figure of Jena Romanticism.
Geoffrey Rufus, also called Galfrid Rufus was a medieval Bishop of Durham and Lord Chancellor of England.
The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was an African American-led art movement that was active during the 1960s and 1970s. Through activism and art, BAM created new cultural institutions and conveyed a message of black pride. The movement expanded from the incredible accomplishments of artists of the Harlem Renaissance.
Western literature, also known as European literature, is the literature written in the context of Western culture in the languages of Europe, and is shaped by the periods in which they were conceived, with each period containing prominent western authors, poets, and pieces of literature.
David Wight Prall (1886–1940) was a philosopher of art and an academic. His interests include aesthetics, value theory, abstract ideas, truth and the history of philosophy. He is noted for his notion of aesthetic surfaces.
Richard Alan Macksey was Professor of Humanities and co-founder and longtime Director of the Humanities Center at The Johns Hopkins University, where he taught critical theory, comparative literature, and film studies. Professor Macksey was educated at Johns Hopkins, earning his B.A. in 1953 and his Ph.D. in 1957. He taught at Johns Hopkins since 1958. He was the longtime Comparative Literature editor of MLN, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. He was a recipient of the Hopkins Distinguished Alumnus Award. Dr. Macksey also presided over one of the largest private libraries in Maryland, with over 70,000 books and manuscripts. An image of the room overspilling with books has been a popular internet meme in the 2010s and 2020s.
Geoffrey Galt Harpham is an American academic who served as president and director of the National Humanities Center from 2002–15. One of the characteristics of his tenure was the encouragement of dialogue between the humanities on the one hand and the natural and social sciences on the other. He is a senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University and also a Life Member of Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge. He is in addition a member of the board of visitors of Ralston College.
Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today is a 1980 book by literary critic Geoffrey Hartman. In the book, Hartman argues for literary criticism to be taken as seriously as a form of creative literature in its own right, and he discusses the difficulties that literature professors face in the contemporary American university.
Mark Christian Thompson is an American academic who is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor and Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. His research focuses on African American literature and philosophy, as well as German philosophy and jazz studies.
Janet Gyatso is a Religious Studies scholar currently employed as the Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies and the Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs at Harvard Divinity School. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Gyatso's research interests are in Buddhism and its relationship to Tibetan and South Asian civilizations.
Erin G. Carlston is a New Zealand academic, as of 2014 a full professor of English at the University of Auckland.
This is a select bibliography of post World War II English language books and journal articles about Stalinism and the Stalinist era of Soviet history. Book entries have references to journal reviews about them when helpful and available. Additional bibliographies can be found in many of the book-length works listed below.
Linda Dalrymple Henderson is an American art historian, educator, and curator. Henderson is currently the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor in Art History Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on modern art, specifically twentieth-century American and European art.
Robert Edward Norton is an American cultural and intellectual historian who specializes in European, and especially German, history and thought from the Enlightenment to the early twentieth century.
Diana Fuss is a professor of literature, film and feminist studies. She serves as Louis W. Fairchild Class of ‘24 Professor of English at Princeton University.
Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent is a 1997 biography of Noam Chomsky written by Robert Barsky and published by The MIT Press.
Henry Sussman is an American literary scholar who was a visiting professor of German at Yale University. His research interests focus on European-American 19th and 20th-century comparative literary studies, contemporary system theories, and critical theory. He is the author of several books, including The Aesthetic Contract: Statutes of Art and Intellectual Work in Modernity (1997).
This is a select bibliography of English language books and journal articles about the history of Poland. A brief selection of English translations of primary sources is included. Book entries have references to journal articles and reviews about them when helpful. Additional bibliographies can be found in many of the book-length works listed below; see Further Reading for several book and chapter-length bibliographies. The External Links section contains entries for publicly available select bibliographies from universities and national libraries. This bibliography specifically excludes non-history related works and self-published books.