Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global EraUniversity of Chicago Press, 2009 M05 15 - 272 pages The photographer and reformer Jacob Riis once wrote, “I have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club.” Riis was not alone in his belief that beauty could tame urban chaos, but are aesthetic experiences always a social good? Could aesthetics also inspire violent crime, working-class unrest, and racial murder? To answer these questions, Russ Castronovo turns to those who debated claims that art could democratize culture—civic reformers, anarchists, novelists, civil rights activists, and college professors—to reveal that beauty provides unexpected occasions for radical, even revolutionary, political thinking. Beautiful Democracy explores the intersection of beauty and violence by examining university lectures and course materials on aesthetics from a century ago along with riots, acts of domestic terrorism, magic lantern exhibitions, and other public spectacles. Philosophical aesthetics, realist novels, urban photography, and black periodicals, Castronovo argues, inspired and instigated all sorts of collective social endeavors, from the progressive nature of tenement reform to the horrors of lynching. Discussing Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlie Chaplin, William Dean Howells, and Riis as aesthetic theorists in the company of Kant and Schiller, Beautiful Democracy ultimately suggests that the distance separating academic thinking and popular wisdom about social transformation is narrower than we generally suppose. |
Contents
1 | |
The Beauty and Danger of Ethical Citizenship | 27 |
Translation Strike and the Time of Political Possibility | 65 |
Lynching Form and Aesthetics | 106 |
Motion Pictures Mass Art and Universal Language | 136 |
Fascism Globalism and Frank Norris | 180 |
Afterword | 213 |
Notes | 217 |
Acknowledgments | 299 |
Aesthetics and the Anarchy of Global Culture | 1 |
The Beauty and Danger of Ethical Citizenship | 27 |
Translation Strike and the Time of Political Possibility | 65 |
Lynching Form and Aesthetics | 106 |
Motion Pictures Mass Art and Universal Language | 136 |
Fascism Globalism and Frank Norris | 180 |
Afterword | 213 |
Other editions - View all
Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era Russ Castronovo No preview available - 2007 |
Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era Russ Castronovo No preview available - 2007 |
Common terms and phrases
Addams aesthetic discourse aesthetic experience aesthetic formalism aesthetic judgment aesthetic theory aestheticization Aesthetics 101 American Literature anarchist anarchy artistic artwork essay audiences become Bois’s century Charles Charlie Chaplin cinema citizens City civic collective common counteraesthetic Crisis criteria Criticism Critique Critique of Judgment crowd D. W. Griffith democratic Eighteenth Brumaire Esperanto ethical fascism feeling film flowers formal Frank Norris global Howells Howells's human images individual instinct Jacob Riis Kant language literary lynching Marx mass culture mechanical reproduction Modern motion pictures Moving Picture Negro nickelodeon Norris’s novel Octopus Paris Commune Philosophy pleasure popular potential Presley Princeton produce propaganda psychology radical reformers revolution revolutionary Riis Riis's Schiller seems sense social socialist strike taste terror theater thetic tion Tramp translation unity University of Chicago University Press urban violence W. E. B. Du Bois Walter Benjamin William Dean Howells writes York