[mscp] CFP: Towards a New Aesthetics

[Joanne Faulkner]

FYI

CALL FOR PAPERS: LITTERARIA PRAGENSIA SPECIAL ISSUE

Towards a New Aesthetics: Technology, Intensity, Heterogeneity 
eds. Martin Procházka, Brian Rosebury & Louis Armand

“If man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice, he will 
have 
to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only 
through beauty that man makes his way to Freedom” (Schiller)

Following Schiller´s Letters on Aesthetic Education, aesthetics came 
for a 
time to be seen as a political instrument, and identified as a means of 
improving and even perfecting society. In the last century, its public 
status began to be seen more negatively, as in its deconstruction by 
Paul 
de Man as aesthetic ideology, based upon progressivist notions 
of “technology” and “systems of formalization”. Aesthetics lost some of 
its 
confidence and authority, and often found itself on the defensive as an 
academic discipline. 

A number of recent attempts have been made, however, to reassert its 
importance for the present. The claims of “aesthetic specificity” are 
argued in John Joughin and Simon Malpas (eds.), The New Aestheticism 
(2003). Other approaches, such as those of Vílem Flusser and Friedrich 
Kittler, have focused upon the importance of the link between modern 
communication technologies and artistic creation, and the impact of 
contemporary media and mass culture on the transformation of 
aesthetics. 
Such approaches proceed radically beyond such earlier preoccupations as 
the 
aesthetics of representation, romantic notions of irony and the 
fragment, 
and Adorno´s negative aesthetics.
    
A special issue of Litteraria Pragensia will attempt to explore and 
assess 
aspects of the contemporary ferment in aesthetics, and its relation to 
and 
significance for contemporary society, culture and politics. Proposals 
are 
welcomed on any topic within this broadly defined field; we 
particularly 
invite submissions on such topics as the following.

1. transformation of traditional aesthetics by mass culture (kitsch, 
schlock, etc.)
2. interaction of aesthetics and communication technologies
3. prevalence of the aesthetics of intensity and heterogeneity (from 
the 
eighteenth-century notions of the picturesque to Deleuzean machines and 
rhizomes). 

Abstracts (up to 300 words) should be submitted by 31 May 2006. Papers, 
of 
up to 7000 words, should be submitted by 30 September 2006. Please 
address 
all correspondence to:

Professor Martin Procházka
Department of English and American Studies
Charles University
Jana Palacha 2, 116 38 Prague 1
Czech Republic
martin.prochazka at ff.cuni.cz