...Rita Felski © 2009 the minnesota review 2009 Rita Felski Everyday Aesthetics I believe art is worldly, not otherworldly: not ineffable, untranslatable, or other. But I find myself increasingly troubled by the functionalism that shadows social theories of art, as critics vault over...

...Jason Berger This essay examines how Slavoj Žižek’s conception of fantasy may open up new approaches for political, literary, and aesthetic criticism. Taking In Defense of Lost Causes (2008) as a case study, I demonstrate how Žižek’s method provides a much-needed consideration of form. Moreover, I...

...Maura Nolan This essay brings together two medieval explorations of sensation— one by St. Thomas Aquinas and one by Geoffrey Chaucer—and situates them within the twentieth-century account of aesthetics offered by Theodor Adorno. This juxtaposition reveals how past and present structures of thought...

...Elizabeth Adan; Benjamin Bateman This introduction to the special focus section, “Emergent Precarities and Lateral Aesthetics,” takes the recent work of Lauren Berlant and Judith Butler as its point of departure to map the parameters of lateral agency and precarity as a means of exploring what...

...Anna Ioanes In the wake of the linguistic turn, scholars have turned to affect and to aesthetics to account for textual experiences that exceed critical frameworks of representation and critique. Bringing formalist analysis and affect theory to bear on one another, recent works of literary, art...

...Max Brzezinski This article evaluates the methods and ideological positions that define the critical movement known as the New Modernist Studies (NMS). It treats the NMS as characteristic of recent attempts to politicize aesthetics within the corporate university. The piece argues that the NMS has...

...José Felipe Alvergue This article examines Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña’s aesthetic practices from the 1970s to today. The recent republication of Vicuña’s Saboramí by Chainlinks Press (2011) permits a new generation of readers to experience her paintings from the 1970s and to read...

...Raya Alraddadi In examining Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People (2017), this article employs a materialist framework to develop a broader critical perspective that addresses the impact of global power on emerging narratives of labor migration. In engaging both aesthetic and material elements...

..., and obscure objects, plastic triggers and challenges the imagination and builds a variety of aesthetic affordances. It constructs and inheres in a desire-principle where the material goes beyond consumerism, cultural habituality, economic viability, the eco-catastrophic mandate, and spectrality into the (im...

... or sixty years. Smith describes her foray into feminist activism in the 1960s; her love of English poetry but disaffection with the intellectual provincialism of English departments in the 1970s; her increased occupation during the 1980s and 1990s with problems of aesthetics, linguistics, and value theory...

...Derek Woods The Anthropocene demands new concepts of scale for social, cultural, and aesthetic theory. The first concept of scale critique is scale variance, which means that variable physical constraints produce disjunctures among scales. This article explicates this concept in a reading of Ray...

... directions in modern art and continental aesthetics. I argue that Nietzsche's anticathartic reading can be explained in terms of his critique of natural causation. Though this critique is often considered part of Nietzsche's naturalism, it contributes to the post-Kantian eclipse of nature and offers...

...Morgan Adamson This essay analyzes the aesthetics and politics of resistance in the work of Chilean artist Francisco Tapia (aka Papas Fritas) who burned $500 million worth of student debt promissory notes and presented them to the student movement as a work of art in May 2014. Analyzing the art...

...Christa Noel Robbins This essay describes how two works by the Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera articulate the conditions of participation within both the political and aesthetic fields. That articulation unfolds in Bruguera's specifying her performances' structures of address in order...

...Robert F. Reid-Pharr This article argues that the contemporary forms of macho populism dominating much of US political and cultural life have their ideological and aesthetic roots in the country’s vexed relationship to the memory of its own violence, particularly the many images of dead...

...Nidesh Lawtoo In this interview, J. Hillis Miller and Nidesh Lawtoo take one of the most influential concepts in Western aesthetics, mimēsis , as an Ariadne’s thread to retrace the major turns in Miller’s career and, by extension, to promote a re- turn of mimesis in literary theory and criticism...

... of “bad” in tension, Bad Modernisms points out the irony in the way evaluation has captivated both modernist artists and scholars, showing that attempts to achieve goodness or badness are always weighted toward reversal: good aesthetic innovation gravitates toward the bad...

... behind a screen of misinformation, media distortions, and affective manipulation. Camouflage has multiple genealogies spanning from military science to aesthetics, from biology to political engagement—or non-engagement. The term derives originally from the long history of siege warfare...

...Jeffrey J. Williams 2005 the minnesota review 2005 Jeffrey J. Williams Articulating Feminism: An Interview with Rita Felski Feminism is sometimes portrayed as opting for politics at the expense of aesthetics; Rita Felski's recent Literature after Feminism shows how...

... . Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press . Eco Umberto . 1989 . The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce , translated by Esrock Ellen . Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press . Hartman Geoffrey . 2007 . “ Homage to Glas .” Critical Inquiry 33 : 344...