GRABES, Herbert, Making Strange. Beauty, Sublimity, and the (Post) Modern ‘Third Aesthetic', Amsterdam / New York, Rodopi, 2008, 172 p.
ISBN 978-90-420-2433-5
RÉSUMÉ
This compact, indispensable overview answers a vexed question: Why doso many works of modern and postmodern literature and art seem designedto appear ‘strange', and how can they still cause pleasure in thebeholder? To help overcome the initial barrier caused by this‘strangeness', the general reader is given an initial, non-technicaldescription of the ‘aesthetic of the strange' as it is experienced inthe reading or viewing process. There follows a broad survey of modernand postmodern trends, illustrating their staggering variety and makingplain the manifold methods and strategies adopted by writers andartists to ‘make it strange'. The book closes with a systematic summaryof the theoretical underpinnings of the ‘aesthetic of the strange',focussing on the ways in which it differs from both the earlier‘aesthetic of the beautiful' and the ‘aesthetic of the sublime'. It ismade amply clear that the strangeness characteristic of modern andpostmodern art has ushered in an entirely new, ‘third' kind ofaesthetic – one that has undergone further transformation over the pasttwo decades. Beyond its usefulness as a practical introduction to the‘aesthetic of the strange', the present study also takes up the mostrecent, cutting-edge aspects of scholarly debate, while initiates areoffered an original approach to the theoretical implications of thisseminal phenomenon.
TABLE DES MATIÈRES
List of Colour Plates
Introductory Note
The Aesthetic of the Strange
Not Beautiful, but Strange
Not Sublime, but Strange
The Aesthetic of the Strange
The Strange Art and Literature of Modernism
Radical Strangeness in Early Modernism
Varieties of Strangeness in the Later Phase of Modernism
The Strange Art and Literature of Postmodernism
New Radicalness in the Early Phase of Postmodernism
The Strange as Subtle Difference in the Later Phase of Postmodernism
The Aesthetic of the Strange as the Aesthetic of Modernism and Postmodernism
Theoretical Foundations of the Aesthetic of the Strange
Works Cited