Creatures of Attention: Aesthetics and the Subject before Kant (Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought)

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Synopsis
Creatures of Attention excavates the early modern prehistory of our late modern crises of attention. At the threshold of modernity, philosophers, scientists, and poets across Europe began to see attention as the key to autonomous agency and knowledge. Recovering the philosophical and literary works from eighteenth-century Germany in which "attention," "subject," and "aesthetics" developed their modern meanings, Johannes Wankhammer examines control over attention as the cultural technique underpinning the ideal of individual autonomy. Aesthetics, founded by Alexander Baumgarten as a science of sense perception, challenged this ideal by reframing art as a catalyst for alternative modes of selfhood and attention. While previous scholarship on the history of attention emphasized the erosion of subjectivity by industrial or technological modernization, Wankhammer asks how attention came to define subjectivity in the first place. When periodically recurring crises of attention threaten the coherence of the subject, the subject comes undone at the very seams that first sutured it together. Creatures of Attention offers the first systematic study of a foundational discourse on attention from 1650 to 1780. Presenting pre-Kantian aesthetics as a critique of the Enlightenment paradigm of strained attention, the book offers a fresh perspective on poetics and aesthetics in eighteenth-century Germany.
Copyright:
2021

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
Book Size:
348 Pages
ISBN-13:
9781501775826
Related ISBNs:
9781501775819, 9781501775796, 9781501775802
Publisher:
Cornell University Press
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Johns Hopkins University Press
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
History, Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts, Philosophy
Grade Levels:
Graduate Student
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

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