Transcultural Aesthetics – serie

The title of this book, The European Avant-Garde – A Hundred Years Later, implies the European avant-garde took place a century ago, that it is a thing of the past. However, it does not aim to consolidate this position, but to question it. It addresses temporality as the central dimension related to the notion of the avant-garde. The book brings forth original revisions of the theories of the avant-garde, the works of the avant-garde, the idea of the avant-garde as being the vanguard, the leading force of change. It addresses the returning of the avant-garde during the twentieth century and today.

The inclusion of this volume in Brill's Transcultural Aesthetics, a book series devoted primarily to multidisciplinary Western and non-Western aesthetics, is indispensable to enrich the nature and scope of contemporary aesthetics. Time and again, many aesthetic controversies have not been adequately addressed, and this has become a common concern among scholars in contemporary aesthetics. This volume therefore seeks to contribute new perspectives to these controversies by shedding light on some of the fresh views among the leading theorists working in the field today.

Current neuroscience discloses that all emotional feeling originates as movement. Kinesthesia, our sixth sense, begins with movement of muscle cells and ends as emotion. Depth perception, which depends on movement, is always feeling-laden. To be expressive, art must somehow move our bodies.Studies of expressive dance demonstrate that we unconsciously model observed movements, duplicating in ourselves the feelings that generated the dancer's movements. The art of landscape creates choreography for a walk. But each of the fine arts play a role in landscape design. Here, then, is a new theory of landscape that easily extends to all the fine arts, explaining our enjoyment in landscape, as well as aesthetic enjoyment more generally.

This volume presents a selection of aesthetic and art theoretical writings by the internationally renowned philosopher Aleš Erjavec from the 1990s to the present. Erjavec was an active participant in the artistic revolt in Slovenia throughout the 1980 and became one of the most notable international theorists of late- and post-socialist developments in art. His work also extended to new, emergent forms of contemporary art and visual culture in global art and culture networks. The diverse contexts and artists with which he has engaged gives him a unique critical perspective on major debates in philosophical aesthetics and art theory.

Wolfgang Welsch demonstrates for the first time that transculturality – the mixed constitution of cultures – is by no means only a characteristic of the present, but has de facto determined the composition of cultures since time immemorial. The historical transculturality is demonstrated using examples from the arts. While transculturality was often viewed with reservation where political, social, or psychological levels were at stake, it was rather welcomed and appreciated in the field of art. The book therefore demonstrates the historical prevalence of transculturality via all areas of art and does so with respect to all cultures and continents of our world.

Politics and Minor Literature offers the first global and transcultural critical intervention of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of 'minor literature'. Taking their study on Kafka as the point of departure, the authors in this collected volume travel historically, geographically, conceptually, and linguistically to examine the ways in which 'minor literature' flourishes as a nomadic concept since the publication of Deleuze and Guattari's work. The contributions in this volume extend Deleuze and Guattari's analysis to authors beyond Kafka in multilingual and translingual contexts, to the work of poetry, to historically-informed works taking place on the border of territories, and to examinations of distant and disparate ways of imagining collectivity. Each contribution offers a way of imagining how 'minor literature' appears and acts in the world today.