"What meets the eye in Renoir's paintings of nude bathers? To some viewers, they are the very picture of female sensuality and beauty. To others, they embody a whole tradition of masculine mastery and feminine display. Yet others find in these naked women a fantasy of bodily liberation. The points of view are many, various, and occasionally startling. Linda Nochlin's aim in looking at works of art is not to construct a unitary response but to pull things apart, to leave the reader unsettled, confronting the contradictions - about the body, beauty, and ways of viewing - in the work of impressionists, modern masters, contemporary realists, and postmodernists."--BOOK JACKET.

"What meets the eye in Renoir's paintings of nude bathers? To some viewers, they are the very picture of female sensuality and beauty. To others, they embody a whole tradition of masculine mastery and feminine display. Yet others find in these naked women a fantasy of bodily liberation. The points of view are many, various, and occasionally startling. Linda Nochlin's aim in looking at works of art is not to construct a unitary response but to pull things apart, to leave the reader unsettled, confronting the contradictions - about the body, beauty, and ways of viewing - in the work of impressionists, modern masters, contemporary realists, and postmodernists."--BOOK JACKET.

Tamen's concern is to show how inanimate objects take on life through their interpretation--notably, in our own culture, as they are collected and housed in museums. It is his claim that an object becomes interpretable only in the context of a "society of friends." Thus, he suggests, our inveterate tendency as human beings to interpret the phenomenal world gives objects not only a life but also a society.

Two anthropologists work to ascertain the authenticity of some South American tribal and slave artifacts, encountering collectors, native carvers, and museum officials, all of whom have different ideas of what constitutes "authentic."

“A feminist aesthetics text which bridges aesthetic theory, art and popular culture and acknowledges the evolving character of standards of beauty” (Teaching Philosophy). Emphasizing the human body in all of its forms, Beauty Unlimited expands the boundaries of what is meant by beauty, both geographically and aesthetically. Peg Zeglin Brand and an international group of contributors interrogate the body and the meaning of physical beauty in this multidisciplinary volume. This striking and provocative book explores the history of bodily beautification; the physicality of socially or culturally determined choices of beautification; the interplay of gender, race, class, age, sexuality, and ethnicity within and on the body; and the aesthetic meaning of the concept of beauty in an increasingly globalized world.

Rhetorically charged debates over theory have divided scholars of the humanities for decades. In Elegy for Theory, D. N. Rodowick steps back from well-rehearsed arguments pro and con to assess why theory has become such a deeply contested concept. Far from lobbying for a return to the "high theory" of the 1970s and 1980s, he calls for a vigorous dialogue on what should constitute a new, ethically inflected philosophy of the humanities. Rodowick develops an ambitiously cross-disciplinary critique of theory as an academic discourse, tracing its historical displacements from ancient concepts of theoria through late modern concepts of the aesthetic and into the twentieth century. The genealogy of theory, he argues, is constituted by two main lines of descent—one that goes back to philosophy and the other rooted instead in the history of positivism and the rise of the empirical sciences. Giving literature, philosophy, and aesthetics their due, Rodowick asserts that the mid-twentieth-century rise of theory within the academy cannot be understood apart from the emergence of cinema and visual studies. To ask the question, "What is cinema?" is to also open up in new ways the broader question of what is art. At a moment when university curriculums are everywhere being driven by scientism and market forces, Elegy for Theory advances a rigorous argument for the importance of the arts and humanities as transformative, self-renewing cultural legacies.