1st Edition
Aesthetics across Cultures Intertextuality, Intermediality and Interculturality
This book critically examines the "mutual illuminations" between literature, religion, architecture, films, performative arts, paintings, woodworks, memes and masks cutting across time and space. Architecture is a good example where the eventual success of a project depends on the harmony between physical sciences and aesthetics, design and planning, knowledge of building material, the local climate and awareness of cultural sensibilities. This volume affirms that aesthetics and arts are deeply linked through existential issues of who I am. The chapters in this volume present diverse discursive structures highlighting the in-between spaces between various art forms and mediums, such as:
• Architecture, literature and memory
• Kafka in SoHo; Kafka and Bernhard
• Kirchner’s woodcuts; pictorial and stage representations of E.T.A. Hoffmann
• Hesse’s fairy tales; translations of Pañcatantra
• Nietzsche, ritual arts and face masks; martyrdom in La chanson de Roland
• Goethe and Hafiz; Indian thought in Martin Buber
• Rhythms of the "Third" across cultures
• Dadaism and contemporary memes
This book examines these sublime linkages in a comparative and interdisciplinary way. Engaging and intersectional, this volume will appeal to students and scholars of arts and aesthetics, literature, philosophy, architecture, sociology, translation studies and readers who are interested in cultural, intertextual, intermedial and comparative studies.
Introduction- Rosy Singh Part I: On the Programmatic Concept of Intersectionality and Comparative Research 1. Intermediality or 'Mutual Illumination of the Arts'? - Wolfgang Braungart Part II: Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory 2. Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Phenomenon- Babu Thaliath 3. Beauty, Arts and Artists in Hermann Hesse’s Fairytales- Sadhana Naithani 4. Aestheticization of Martyrdom in La Chanson de Roland- Abhimanyu Sharma 5. Dadaism and Internet Meme: Aesthetics of Non-sense- Vaibhav Sharma Part III: Religion, Mysticism, History of Ideas 6. “Nachahmung des schon Dagewesenen”: Goethe’s Discourse on Poetry and Religion in the Poem Open Secret of the West-Eastern Divan- Hamid Tafazoli 7. Indian Thought in Martin Buber’s I and Thou: Chandrika Kumar 8. A secular Pañcatantra and its religious journey- Priyada S. Padaye Part IV: Literature, Film and Intertextuality 9. How Franz Kafka’s ‘Mann vom Lande’ sneaks into Thomas Bernhard’s Der Diktator - Rosy Singh 10. Kafka In SoHo: An Analysis of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985)- Syed Habeeb Tehseen 11. The Intersection of Visual Arts and Literature: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Woodworks of Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte - Mercy Vungthianmuang Guite Part V: Performing and Fine Arts 12. Rhythms of the ‘Third’ Across Cultures - A Study of Performance Aesthetics- Anuradha Ghosh 13. To play the puppet. Intermediality in Robert Wilsons adaptation of E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Sandman- Thomas Wortmann 14. Intermedial Study of Stuart Patience’s Paintings and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (1816)-Sahib Kapoor . Index
Biography
Rosy Singh is professor of German literature in Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. Her research interests include literature, arts, translation and semiotic studies. She has worked extensively on Kafka, Rilke, Thomas Mann, Peter Handke and in the South-Asian context on Shah Hussain and Manto. She is the author of Rilke, Kafka, Manto: The Semiotics of Love, Life and Death (2001), Tagore, Rilke, Gibran: A Comparative Study (2002), Autobiography: Fact and Fiction (ed.) (2009), Franz Kafka and Literary Criticism: ‘The Metamorphosis’ and ‘The Burrow’ (2010), and Essays on Contemporary German Literature (2017).
