Michael Shamansky, Bookseller Inc.
Importer of European Publications in the Fine Arts
P.O. Box 3904, Kingston, New York 12402 Phone: 845-331-8519 Email: mshamans@artbooks.com

Item Number: 126733
Title: Against Affective Formalism : Matisse, Bergson, Modernism
Author: Cronan, Todd
Price: Not Available
ISBN: 9780816676026
Description: Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 27cm., hardcover, 336pp., 69 b&w photos, 20 color plates. Summary : Against Affective Formalism confronts modernism’s dissatisfactions with representation. As Todd Cronan explains, a central tenet of modernist thought turns on the effort to overcome representation in the name of something more explicit in its capacity to generate bodily or affective experience. Henri Bergson was one of the most influential advocates of the antirepresentational impulse; his novel theories of memory and freedom gripped a generation of writers, philosophers, psychologists, and artists. Matisse and Bergson worked within and against the context of form and expression that remains in force today. Writing in opposition to prevailing theories and assumptions about the relation of intention and form—most of which accept the “death of the author” as a basic fact of interpretation—Cronan argues that the beholder’s response to art, outside a framework of intentionality, is irrelevant to a work’s meaning. Intentions are not a matter of method at all: no letter, biography, document, archive, or key will recover an intention. What matters is that intentions make works of art different from objects in the world.

We regret to inform you that this title is no longer available.
Please contact us if you need additional assistance.


Michael Shamansky, Bookseller Inc.
P.O. Box 3904, Kingston, New York 12402 US
Phone: 845-331-8519
Fax: 845-331-0852
Email: michael@artbooks.com

© Copyright 1996-2015 Michael Shamansky, Bookseller Inc.
Design & Hosting by Ives & Shaughnessy Web Information Services