Critical and theoretical essays by a long-time participant in the Art & Language movement. These essays by art historian and critic Charles Harrison are based on the premise that making art and talking about art are related enterprises. They are written from the point of view of Art & Language, the artistic movement based in England—and briefly in the United States—with which Harrison has been associated for thirty years. Harrison uses the work of Art & Language as a central case study to discuss developments in art from the 1950s through the 1980s. According to Harrison, the strongest motivation for writing about art is that it brings us closer to that which is other than ourselves. In seeing how a work is done, we learn about its achieved identity: we see, for example, that a drip on a Pollock is integral to its technical character, whereas a drip on a Mondrian would not be. Throughout the book, Harrison uses specific examples to address a range of questions about the history, theory, and making of modern art—questions about the conditions of its making and the nature of its public, about the problems and priorities of criticism, and about the relations between interpretation and judgment.

In 'Conceptual Art and Painting', a companion to his 'Essays on Art and Language', Charles Harrison reconsiders Conceptual Art in light of renewed interest in the original movement and of the various forms of 'neo-Conceptual' art--Publisher's description.

Critical and theoretical essays by a long-time participant in the Art & Language movement.

This book is a collection of essays in honor of Paul Ziff written by his col leagues, students, and friends. Many of the authors address topics that Ziff has discussed in his writings: understanding, rules and regularities, proper names, the feelings of machines, expression, and aesthetic experience. Paul Ziff began his professional career as an artist, went on to study painting with J. M. Hanson at Cornell, and then studied for the Ph. D. in philosophy, also at Cornell, with Max Black. Over the next three decades he produced a series of remarkable papers in philosophy of art, culminating in 1984 with the publica tion of Antiaesthetics: An Appreciation of the Cow with the Subtile Nose. In 1960 he published Semantic Analysis, his masterwork in philosophy of lan guage. Throughout his career he made important contributions to philosophy of mind in such papers as "The Simplicity of Other Minds" (1965) and "About Behaviourism" (1958). In addition to his work in these areas, his lec tures at Harvard on philosophy of religion are an underground classic; and throughout his career he has continued to make art and to search for the meaning of life in the properties of prime numbers. Although his interests are wide and deep, questions about language, art, and mind have dominated his philosophical work, and it is problems in these areas that provide the topics of most of the essays in this volume.

Collecting and recontextualizing writings from the last twenty years of John Cayley's research-based practice of electronic literature, Grammalepsy introduces a theory of aesthetic linguistic practice developed specifically for the making and critical appreciation of language art in digital media. As he examines the cultural shift away from traditional print literature and the changes in our culture of reading, Cayley coins the term “grammalepsy” to inform those processes by which we make, understand, and appreciate language. Framing his previous writings within the overall context of this theory, Cayley eschews the tendency of literary critics and writers to reduce aesthetic linguistic making-even when it has multimedia affordances-to “writing.” Instead, Cayley argues that electronic literature and digital language art allow aesthetic language makers to embrace a compositional practice inextricably involved with digital media, which cannot be reduced to print-dependent textuality.

Literary Nonfiction. Edited with an introduction by Jenny Penberthy, and an afterword by August Kleinzahler. This volume gathers twenty-four essays by the English critic Kenneth Cox (1916-2005) on various writers, including James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, Louis Zukofsky, and Lorine Niedecker. In each case, Cox's exposition proves rigorous, idiosyncratic, drily passionate, and full of keen insights. Always, he proceeds with an "emphasis on literature as the art of language." Thom Gunn declared, "I have learned more from Kenneth Cox's essays than from any other living critic of twentieth-century poetry. He writes with masterly directness about the masters of indirection, and his summarizing power rivals that of Samuel Johnson."

Essays on poetics and language by Cid Corman.

In this newest book, the author presents a theory of art which is at once universal in its general conception and historically-grounded in its attention to aesthetic practices in diverse cultures. The author argues that especially today art not only enjoys a special king of autonomy but also has important social and political responsibilities.