Rethinking Comparative Aesthetics in a Contemporary Frame

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

About the Book This volume revisits comparative aesthetics by taking a broad view of aesthetic concerns across disciplines like art history, literary studies, philosophy and linguistics, bringing forth the questions of class, caste, and religion too. Questions of translation and methodological concerns to update aesthetics in contemporary times are at the forefront. The contributors revisit Indian aesthetics from the contemporary lens of politics of aesthetics and aesthetics of politics.

It also addresses the intercultural framework of comparative aesthetics that juxtaposes larger cultural entities like the Indian, the Chinese and the Western around some key terms of aesthetics like originality, creativity, beauty, mimesis and resonance. While it highlights the methodological challenges that comparative aesthetics faces in the wake of globalization that has thrown up new disciplines of study, it also signals certain unevenness that exists in the field. While dealing with new interpretative lenses to understand terminology of aesthetics, it also draws attention to new primary texts that were less explored or were there in fragments and therefore overlooked. Finally, it attempts to update comparative aesthetics through new interdisciplinary conversations that throw light on crucial aspects of Indian aesthetics today.

About the Author Professor R.N. Misra taught at the Universities of Saugor, Gwalior and Allahabad (1959-2001) and was also a Fellow at the IIAS (1973-75; 2002-2005) and Tagore National Fellow (2012-15). His published works relate to pre-modern Indian art, specially Yaksha cult and iconography, ancient artists, silpa tradition, regional sculptures, and Saiva ascetics in piety and power.

Professor Parul Dave-Mukherji teaches at the Department of Visual Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She holds a PhD from Oxford University and has held fellowships at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, USA; South Asia Institute, Heidelberg, Germany; British Academy fellowship, Goldsmiths' College, London; Kunst Historische Institute, Florence. Her published works concern silpasastras, classical Sanskrit aesthetics, comparative aesthetics and global art history.

Preface Comparative Aesthetics in India has its roots in post-colonial movement of the 1950s when comparing aesthetic concepts and aesthetics practices across cultures seemed to resonate with the aspirations 191 of a new nation and its conception of cultural sovereignty. In the wake of globalization, assumed to entail reduced distance )n Aesthetics between cultures and concomitant contestation of the nation of state, world literature and world art studies (Zijlmans, 2008) have emerged as new areas of research and inquiry within which the 207 discipline of comparative aesthetics may rightly find its place. The comparative aesthetics of the mid-20th century, however, was driven by a different agenda. In the 1950s, comparative in aesthetics enjoyed popularity in the newly de-colonized India 240 as a field that was expected to bring to light an alternative knowledge system that the West had overlooked in its desire to colonize the world. After a decade and a half, the euphoria Zell-Being 273 came to an end since the discourse of comparative aesthetics could not extricate itself from certain Eurocentric notions of 327 representations.

However, the reinvention of comparative aesthetics in the present seems to be in the wake of comparative literature 345 (Hussain, 2006). Moving beyond the cultural politics of Cold War hostility between the West and the rest, where the latter was subsumed under area studies, comparative literature offered a new model of hospitality drawn from the former interaction across European literary cultures (Spivak, 2003).

Book's Contents and Sample Pages