TY - BOOK AU - Ziarek,Ewa Płonowska TI - Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism T2 - Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts SN - 9780231161497 AV - HQ1190 .Z556 2012 U1 - 305.4201 23 PY - 2012///] CY - New York, NY : PB - Columbia University Press, KW - Aesthetics KW - Feminist criticism KW - Feminist theory KW - Modernism (Aesthetics) KW - PHILOSOPHY / Aesthetics KW - bisacsh N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgments --; Abbreviations --; Introduction: On Loss, Invention, and the Dilemmas of Feminist Aesthetics --; Part I. Revolutionary Praxis and Its Melancholic Impasses --; 1. On Suffrage Militancy and Modernism Femininity and Revolt --; 2. Melancholia, Death of Art, and Women's Writing --; 3. Woolf's Aesthetics of Potentiality --; Part II. Female Bodies, Violence, and Form --; Introduction: Rethinking the Form/Matter Divide in Feminist Politics and Aesthetics --; 4. Abstract Commodity Form and Bare Life --; 5. Damaged Materialities in Political Struggles and Aesthetic Innovations --; Part III. Toward a Feminine Aesthetics of Renaissance --; 6. The Enigma of Nella Larsen Letters, Curse, and Black Laughter --; Notes --; Index; restricted access; Issued also in print N2 - Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek's political and aesthetic investigations concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women's literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism's experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the appreciation of art's emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles UR - https://doi.org/10.7312/ziar16148 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780231530903 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780231530903/original ER -