検索キーワード： 美学

Au fil d’une trentaine de textes lumineux, mettant en scène ses propres expériences esthétiques, Laurence Devillairs tente d’élucider le mystère de la rencontre avec la beauté et nous invite à réapprendre à voir le beau, qui nous échappe souvent par manque de temps ou conformisme. Elle propose pour cela des « exercices d’esthétiques appliqués » - tenter d’apprécier ce qu’on n’aime pas, voyager comme Bouvier sans attentes ni plans, accomplir non pas une bonne action mais un beau geste.

When Shakespeare has the Three Witches cast Macbeth’s lot, he uses something very weird to do it: not simply “eye of newt and toe of frog,” but the number seven. And when Hamlet claims, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” Shakespeare reaches for eleven. For Shakespeare, prime numbers were magical. And he is not alone. As Marcus du Sautoy showcases in Blueprints, creativity is inseparable from mathematics.

For a century, magazines were the authors of culture and taste, of intelligence and policy — until they were overthrown by the voices of the public themselves online. Here is a tribute to all that magazines were, from their origins in London and on Ben Franklin’s press; through their boom — enabled by new technologies — as creators of a new media aesthetic and a new mass culture; into their opulent days in advertising-supported conglomerates; and finally to their fall at the hands of the internet.

In Earth, a planetary scientist and a literary humanist explore what happens when we think of the Earth as an object viewable from space. As a “blue marble,” “a blue pale dot,” or, as Chaucer described it, “this litel spot of erthe,” the solitary orb is a challenge to scale and to human self-importance. Beautiful and self-contained, the Earth turns out to be far less knowable than it at first appears: its vast interior an inferno of incandescent and yet solid rock and a reservoir of water vaster than the ocean, a world within the world.

We all wear hoods: the Grim Reaper, Red Riding Hood, torturers, executioners and the executed, athletes, laborers, anarchists, rappers, babies in onesies, and anyone who’s ever grabbed a hoodie on a chilly day. Alison Kinney’s Hood explores the material and symbolic vibrancy of this everyday garment and political semaphore, which often protects the powerful at the expense of the powerless—with deadly results.

The mall near Mat thew Newton’s childhood home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was one of the state’s first enclosed shopping malls. Like all malls in their heyday, this one was a climate-controlled pleasuredome where strangers converged. It boasted waterfalls, fish ponds, an indoor ice skating rink larger than Rockefeller Center’s, and a monolithic clock tower illuminated year-round beneath a canopy of interconnected skylights. It also became the backdrop for filmmaker George A. Romero’s zombie opus Dawn of the Dead.

Every shelf is different and every bookshelf tells a different story. One bookshelf can creak with character in a bohemian coffee shop and another can groan with gravitas in the Library of Congress. Writer and historian Lydia Pyne finds bookshelves to be holders not just of books but of so many other things: values, vibes, and verbs that can be contained and displayed in the buildings and rooms of contemporary human existence.

For as long as people have traveled to distant lands, they have brought home objects to certify the journey. More than mere merchandise, these travel souvenirs take on a personal and cultural meaning that goes beyond the object itself. Drawing on several millennia of examples—from the relic-driven quests of early Christians, to the mass-produced tchotchkes that line the shelves of a Disney gift shop—travel writer Rolf Potts delves into a complicated history that explores issues of authenticity, cultural obligation, market forces, human suffering, and self-presentation.

Among the many things expectant parents are told to buy, none is a more visible symbol of status and parenting philosophy than a stroller. Although its association with wealth dates back to the invention of the first pram in the 1700s, in recent decades, four-figure strollers have become not just status symbols but cultural identifiers.

During the breakdown of an unhappy marriage, writer Joanna Walsh got a job as a hotel reviewer, and began to gravitate towards places designed as alternatives to home. Luxury, sex, power, anonymity, privacy…hotels are where our desires go on holiday, but also places where our desires are shaped by the hard realities of the marketplace. Part memoir and part meditation, this book visits a series of rooms, suites, hallways, and lobbies—the spaces and things that make up these modern sites of gathering and alienation, hotels.

What is silence? In a series of short meditations, novelist and playwright John Biguenet considers silence as a servant of power, as a lie, as a punishment, as the voice of God, as a terrorist’s final weapon, as a luxury good, as the reason for torture—in short, as an object we both do and do not recognize. Concluding with the prospects for its future in a world burgeoning with noise, Biguenet asks whether we should desire or fear silence—or if it is even ours to choose.

Why are there so many examples of public figures, entertainers, and normal, everyday people in blackface? And why aren’t there as many examples of people of color in whiteface? This book explains what blackface is, why it occurred, and what its legacies are in the 21st century. There is a filthy and vile thread—sometimes it’s tied into a noose—that connects the first performances of Blackness on English stages, the birth of blackface minstrelsy, contemporary performances of Blackness, and anti-Black racism.

"Es geht zu Ende mit der alten Wahrheit." Die alte Wahrheit, das sind laut Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) die Götzen ihrer Zeit, die es quasi mit dem Hammer zu zerschlagen gilt. Im letzten Jahr seines Schaffens (1888) beschritt Nietzsche damit den Weg der "Umwertung aller Werte" weiter - bevor ihn die Geisteskrankheit ereilte. Sein ungeduldiger Tonfall lässt vermuten, dass Nietzsche ahnte, was ihm bevorstand...

Art has the power to move us, to spark an unexplainable connection, or to leave us cold. We might focus on small details or take in the entire piece of art, searching for something familiar. This book explores how we see art, how our experiences shape our perceptions, and why some works resonate deeply while others do not.

Many of the artists that we encounter are completely unaware of the mathematics that bubble beneath their craft, while some consciously use it for inspiration. Our instincts might tell us that these two subjects are incompatible forces with nothing in common – mathematics being the realm of precise logic and art being the realm of emotion and aesthetics – but what if we’re wrong? Blueprints asks us to consider that mathematics and art may not be polar opposites after all.

Why Did That Happen? Aristotle Has Four Answers and None of Them Are Helpful is your brutally sarcastic, surprisingly educational crash course in Aristotelian philosophy—specifically his theory of causality, aka why things happen according to a man who thought everything, including acorns and chairs, had a spiritual destiny.

Get ready to immerse yourself in the enduring power of Epictetus’ Stoic philosophy, brought to life by the strong, masculine voice of a rugged outdoors philosopher, also known as "the rucking philosopher." This audiobook isn’t just a recitation—it’s a bold journey into the timeless lessons of resilience, inner strength, and true freedom.

100 years after Proust's death, In Search of Lost Time remains one of the greatest works in World Literature. At 3,000 pages, it can be intimidating to some. This short volume invites first-time listeners and veterans alike to view the novel in a new way. Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was arguably France's best-known literary writer. He was the author of stories, essays, translations, and a 3,000-page novel, In Search of Lost Time (1913-27). This book is a brief guide to Proust's magnum opus.

In all animals, mating is a deal. But few creatures behave as if sex is a simple transaction. Many treat it with reverence, suspicion, angst and violence. In the case of the Black Grouse, the bird at the center of Matt Ridley’s investigation, the males dance and sing for hours a day, for several exhausting months, in an exhausting and sometimes deadly ritual called a ‘lek’. To prepare for the ordeal, they grow, preen and display fancy, twisted, bold-colored feathers.

In den letzten Jahren hat sich Steampunk als ein faszinierendes und vielseitiges Genre etabliert, das sowohl in der Literatur als auch in anderen Kunstformen eine bedeutende Rolle spielt.