The aesthetics of loss and lessness
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The aesthetics of loss and lessness
（Language, discourse, society）
Macmillan, 1992
Available at 6 libraries
Note
Bibliography: p. 219-230
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This text probes the psychic and social roots of artistic scenarios of loss. Demonstrating that artistic activity is inextricably bonded to imaginary scripts of bereavement and these in turn to patterns of social dominance, the author argues in favor of an "aesthetics of lessness" that is, postmodern resistance to imaginary inscriptions of grief and their misogynist sequels. The book draws on psychoaesthetics, discourse theory and feminist social critiques to analyse literary visual figurations of loss. Included in its analysis of the romantic and post-romantic imaginary are readings of Merimee, Nerval, Hoffmann, H.D., Anne Hebert, Proust and Beckett, and essays, among others, on Kollwitz, Glacometti, Bellmer, Klee, Gidal and Oulton.
Table of Contents
- Part 1 Figurations of the artistic imaginary: the psychoaesthetics of mourning - pygmalion and the venus motif
- cryptanalysis - the fetish-bride - Hoffmann's "Der Sandmann". Part 2 Repetitions of grief 1 - war, male artists and projections of loss: the fragmented body motif - Dix, Masson, Giacometti, Picasso
- anagrams of self - Hans Bellmer
- exile, fracture and the dance of death - Paul Klee and Walter Benjamin
- HAP Grieshaber and Alfred Kubin. Part 3 Repetitions of grief 2 - women artists and the maternal metaphor: sacrifice, mourning and reparation - Kathe Kollwitz
- beyond the imaginary mother-father - H.D.
- misogyny and dissolution - Anne Hebert's "Les Fous de Bassan"
- dislocating the maternal metaphor - Therese Oulton. Part 4 Toward an aesthetics of lessness - resisting the imaginary: Proustian cryptanalysis
- Beckett's unnamable
- Beckett, Gidal and lessness.
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