Janet Wolff

Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism

List of Plates. 1. The Female Stranger: Marginality and Modes of Writing. 2. Eddie Cochran, Donna Anna and the Dark Sister: Personal Experience and Cultural History. 3. Memoirs and Micrologies: Walter Benjamin, Feminism and Cultural Analysis. 4. Death and the Maiden: Does Semiotics Justify Murder? 5. Dance Criticism: Feminism, Theory and Choreography. 6. The Artist and The Flaneur: Rodin, Rilke and Gwen John in Paris. 7. On the Road Again: Metaphors of Travel in Cultural Criticism. 8. Angry Young Men and Minor (Female) Characters: The Idea of +ACI-America+ACI- in 1950s Popular Culture. Index.

After cultural theory: the power of images, the lure of immediacy

A number of recent tendencies seem to have resulted in the evaporation of the social in visual and cultural theory. This article begins by exploring arguments for the ‘power of images’, invoked by scholars for good reason to draw attention to the ways in which images appear to compel their own interpretations. The problem only arises when this power seems to have its own autonomy, and its origins in social–historical relations are ignored or obscured. Similarly, recent important correctives to social and cultural theory have taken their critiques too far in the direction of a notion of experience unmediated by language, experience and social life. Specifically, the article addresses revivals of phenomenology, theories of affect, theories of the post-human and neuroaesthetics. All of these correctly note the sense of immediacy in aesthetic experience, but mistakenly conclude that this ‘presence’ is not in fact mediated in many ways, necessarily invisible at the moment of the encounter. The article reviews the historic lacks in cultural theory that these developments seek to address, agreeing with their project but ultimately rejecting their overstatement of an idea of immediacy.

Groundless beauty feminism and the aesthetics of uncertainty

The ‘return to beauty’ raises a number of questions for feminism. This paper begins by suggesting that there is no real reason for a feminist distrust either of beauty or of the discourses of beauty. The more difficult question is how to comprehend the bases of aesthetic judgement more generally, given feminist and other critiques of aesthetics and art criticism. The paper proposes looking at the cognate ‘value’ fields of ethics and political philosophy, in order to develop an approach to aesthetics that recognizes aesthetic criteria as grounded in community. It has been argued that uncertainty is the necessary basis for morality and for political judgement after the demise of ideologies of universalism. For the same reasons, an ‘aesthetics of uncertainty’ can be developed which refuses both the new universalism of the ‘return to beauty’ and the temptation to abandon principled criteria of judgement.

Manchester, capital of the nineteenth century

This essay accepts David Frisby’s invitation to take seriously the method of sociological impressionism employed by Georg Simmel, and the related strategies of Walter Benjamin (sequences of quotations, selection of key aspects of modernity – dialectical images). To that end, it proposes Manchester, instead of Paris, as the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’, through the presentation of examples of its paradigmatic figures and events: the 1857 exhibition, the collector and the art dealer, the discovery of a synthetic colour, a certain historic desk, and the warehouse and the mill. Through this writing strategy, the ‘fragments of modernity’ take on a rather different aspect.

Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art

Explores sociocultural influences on the construction of traditional aesthetic theories and judgments