The Protoliterary Steps Toward an Anthropology of Culture 1st Edition by Ludwig Pfeiffer 0804734631 9780804734639

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ISBN 10: 0804734631

ISBN 13: 9780804734639

Author: K. Ludwig Pfeiffer

This is a broad-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink aesthetic and literary studies in terms of an “anthropology” of symbolic media generally. Central to the author’s argument is the proposition that the idea of literature—at least as it has been understood in the West since the eighteenth century—as the paradigm for artistic experience is both limited and limiting. In its place, the author offers a more general theory of aesthetic experience appropriate to a wide range of media (in the term’s broadest sense) and geared toward performativity and bodily experience. The author develops the idea of the “protoliterary” as a cultural-aesthetic discourse prior to and external to the “literary” as traditionally conceived in Western aesthetics. Manifestations of the protoliterary tend to occur within forms of multimedia theatricalization in which suggestive images of the body loom large. The appeal of the protoliterary lies in its ability to function on both cognitive and somatic levels, thereby neutralizing such distinctions as self/society and reality/fiction. The author’s argument is indebted to John Dewey’s belief in a basic human need for aesthetic experience, a need that can be met in a variety of ways, from tattoos and scarification, through sports, parades, and cosmetics, to literature, opera, and film. From this basis the book theorizes a history of the development of separate, hierarchical arts in the West while suggesting that independent histories of single arts and artistic experience are no longer desirable or even possible. Although the genesis of particular forms of media are inextricably linked to specific historical, sociological, and technological conditions, their potential functions and effects are not tied to those conditions, nor should they be.

The Protoliterary Steps Toward an Anthropology of Culture 1st Table of contents:

Part I. Dimensions: Theoretical and Illustrative

1. First Exemplifications: The Novel and the Self-Therapy of the Medium

Wilhelm Meister: The Cultural Potentials and Failures of Theatricality,

Joseph Andrews and Painting

The Bride of Lammermoor, Opera, and Madame Bovary

The Maltese Falcon: The Novel and the Film

Provisional Consequences

2. Theory: Trends, Past and Present

The Eighteenth Century: G. C. Lichtenberg and Media Analysis versus the Literary System

The Nineteenth Century: Systems, Play, and the Anthropological Return of Experience

Systems Theory: Implications, Historical and Otherwise

Games and Play

Experience and Play Again

Nietzsche

Images of Evolution

3. The Shrinkage of Fact and the Expansion of Performative Discourse

The Poietic-Poetic Dilemma: “Drama,” “Audience,” Representation

Tragedy and the Production of Social Realities

The Play as a Model Discourse: Oedipus, Knowledge, and Power

Part II. Spectacular Dynamics: Paradigms of Anthropological Import

4. Appearances: Shadowy Substances and Substantial Shadows

5. Between Sociology and Anthropology: Trends, Past and Present

Ambivalences of Western Spectacles

Japanese Theater and the West: A Quasi-Theoretical Outline

Spectacular Theater, Sumo, and the Labors of “Literature”

6. Fragments of an Absent World Theater: “Baroque” and the Implicit Denial of Segment Culture

Other Histories, and Their Theory

Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, John Dryden: Alternative Episodes in Western Cultural History

The “Rise” of Opera: A Logical Coincidence in Media Development

The Operatic Principle Extended, or: From Dewey via Hegel to Adorno

Part III. The Spectacular and the Vanishing Body: Sports and Literature

7. First Steps—Theoretical and Practical

Outlines and Perspectives

More Examples: A Tennis Novel and Soccer Poetry

8. Symptoms: Exposed Flanks in Older Cultural Theories

A Brutal Prelude and Its Implications

Schiller: Conceptual Frictions and Cultural Discontinuities

Marcuse: Aesthetics, Politics, and Atavisms

Systems Theory against Itself

Dance in Literature: The Poetry of the Body?

9. Ecstasy, Violence, “Literature”: Early Western Cultures and Codes of Vitality

Situations and Context Switches: Greek Models

Rome: Culture Complex, the Imaginary, and Sports Reporting

Sequels: More of the Same, but More Complicated

10. The Persistence of the Obsolete

Byron and the Romantic Denial of Romantic Maximations

Literary Skating; Or, Culture as Compromise

Nietzsche (Once More) and the Fusion of Plausibility and Nonsense

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Ludwig Pfeiffer,Protoliterary,Toward,Anthropology