Aesthetic Autonomy

by Heusden, Barend Van; Altes, Liesbeth Korthals

• ISBN13: 9789042915794
• ISBN10: 904291579X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-06-01
• Publisher: Peeters Pub & Booksellers

Summary

This volume contains a selection of essays presented at the international conference on Cultural Crises in Art and Literature, held in Groningen in November 2002, in a special session on the question of the autonomy of the arts. Do we witness, in western culture, the end of the autonomy of the arts as it has been conceptualized and institutionalized since the eighteenth century? Indeed, developments of quite a different nature seem to have contributed to a blurring of boundaries between art and non-art, art and the market, art and politics or ethics, as well as between the arts themselves, and between 'high' and 'low' art. Although this volume does not pretend to map this complex process in its entirety-partly because it is impossible to step out of one's own history-it is meant as a contribution to the elucidation of the process itself, offering some challenging explanations as to the heat of the current debate.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Some reflections on literature, autonomy and crisis	p. 1
Aesthetic autonomy and literary commitment : a pattern in nineteenth-century literature	p. 21
From 'work of art' to 'text' and 'thing' : the contra-facture of the symbolists' concept of artistic creation in the art and literature of Russian avant-gardism	p. 37
The end of artistic autonomy? : literature and the arts between modernism and postmodernism	p. 59
After art : the hybrid autonomy of pop music	p. 73
Crossed borders? : the debate about culture and art in South Africa during the period of political transformation	p. 87
Torn between two (autonomous) lovers : mimesis and beauty in modern art	p. 113
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