{"title":"Wendy Steiner","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"scandal-of-pleasure-book-wendy-steiner-9780226772240","title":"The Scandal of Pleasure","description":"Surveying a wide range of cultural controversies, from the Mapplethorpe affair to Salman Rushdie's death sentence, from canon-revision in the academy to the scandals that have surrounded Anthony Blunt, Martin Heidegger, and Paul de Man, Wendy Steiner shows that the fear and outrage they inspired are the result of dangerous misunderstanding about the relationship between art and life.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49572409639185,"sku":"GOR004978652","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50480426615057,"sku":"CIN0226772241G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52635298267409,"sku":"GOR011889271","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52652674679057,"sku":"CIN0226772241VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226772241.jpg?v=1751070336"},{"product_id":"pictures-of-romance-book-wendy-steiner-9780226772295","title":"Pictures of Romance","description":"How do pictures tell stories? Why does the literary romance so often refer to paintings and other visual art objects? Beginning with these two seemingly unrelated questions, Wendy Steiner reveals an intricate exchange between the visual arts and the literary romance.   Romances violate the casual, temporal, and logical cohesiveness of realist novels, and they do so in part by depicting love as a state of suspension, a condition outside of time. Steiner argues that because Renaissance and post-Renaissance painting also represents a suspended moment of perception with \"unnatural\" clarity and compression of meaning, it readily serves the romance as a symbol of antirealism. Yet the atemporality of stopped-action painting was actually an attempt to achieve pictorial realism—the way things \"really\" look. It is this paradox that interests Steiner: to signal their departure from realism, romances evoke the symbol of \"realistic\" visual artwork. Steiner explores this problem through analyses of Keats, Hawthorne, Joyce, and Picasso. She then examines a return to narrative conventions in visual art in the twentieth century, in the work of Lichtenstein and Warhol, and speculates on the fate of pictorial storytelling and the romance in postmodern art. An aesthetic fantasia of sorts, this study combines theory and analysis to illuminate an unexpected interconnection between literature and the visual arts.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49652031422737,"sku":"GOR005604495","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51746886156561,"sku":"CIN0226772292G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226772292.jpg?v=1750974145"},{"product_id":"trouble-with-beauty-book-wendy-steiner-9780434007356","title":"The Trouble with Beauty","description":"Explores the twentith century's troubled relationship with beauty, where previous eras have celebrated beauty as the central aim of art, the twentieth century modernist avant-garde were deeply suspicious of beauty and its perennial symbols, woman and ornament.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49859942285585,"sku":"GOR006707999","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50273280426257,"sku":"CIN0434007358G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50538929750289,"sku":"GOR003846843","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51797529952529,"sku":"GOR014406107","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52796929245457,"sku":"GOR011067780","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0434007358.jpg?v=1751292585"},{"product_id":"venus-in-exile-book-wendy-steiner-9780684857817","title":"Venus in Exile","description":"In \u003ci\u003eVenus in Exile\u003c\/i\u003e renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner explores the twentieth century's troubled relationship with beauty. Disdained by avant-garde artists, feminists, and activists, beauty and its major symbols of art--the female subject and ornament--became modernist taboos. To this day it is hard to champion beauty in art without sounding aesthetically or politically retrograde. Steiner argues instead that the experience of beauty is a form of communication, a subject-object interchange in which finding someone or something beautiful is at the same time recognizing beauty in oneself. This idea has led artists and writers such as Marlene Dumas, Christopher Bram, and Cindy Sherman to focus on the long-ignored figure of the model, who function in art as both a subject and an object. Steiner concludes \u003ci\u003eVenus in Exile\u003c\/i\u003e on a decidedly optimistic note, demonstrating that beauty has created a new and intensely pleasurable direction for contemporary artistic practice. \u003cbr\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50128795599121,"sku":"CIN0684857812VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53203767853329,"sku":"GOR012170592","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53203892404497,"sku":"GOR003973662","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53515764728081,"sku":"CIN0684857812G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0684857812.jpg?v=1750783331"},{"product_id":"scandal-of-pleasure-book-wendy-steiner-9780226772233","title":"The Scandal of Pleasure","description":"This is a report from the battleground of contemporary culture, a landscape littered with the remains of vilified artworks, demonized artists and discredited orthodoxies. Caught between extremists of the right and the left, liberal defenders of art have stood mutely by as these cultural battles rage and have failed to explain the special value of aesthetic experience. This study counters the surge in fundamentalist thinking about the arts with a liberal aesthetic for our times. The author surveys a wide range of controversies - the Mapplethorpe affair and the death sentence against Salman Rushdie; Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin's crusade to equate pornography with rape and political correctness on college campuses; and the \"scholar scoundrels\" Anthony Blunt, Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man. Steiner shows that the fear and outrage inspired by these cases rests on a dangerous misunderstanding about the relationship between art and life. Steiner reminds us that aesthetic experience requires the ability to distinguish fiction from nonfiction, the figurative from the literal, the virtual from the real. But for fundamentalists, whether the Ayatollah Khomeini or Jesse Helms, such distinctions are meaningless; saying is doing and a picture is no different from what it represents. Such literalism is at the root of the current uneasiness with difficult art; it threatens to undermine the entire basis of liberal thought and aesthetic experience. Steiner uncovers the folly of this pervasive literalism. Art, she argues, is neither identical to reality not isolated from it, but an imaginative realm tied to the world by acts of interpretation. To experience art, then, means to accept a paradox: we need not assent to a work in order to understand it, or be seduced by its ideology in order to take pleasure in it. Instead, we participate in what Steiner calls \"enlightened beguilement.\" The acknowledgment of this beguilement, this pleasure, has tended, however, to embarrass most academics. How, Steiner wonders, can liberal defenders of the arts ever expect to persuade a skeptical public if they deny or ignore the value of aesthetic experience?","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346857005329,"sku":"CIN0226772233G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51276850069777,"sku":"CIN0226772233VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53121991541009,"sku":"GOR008131514","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226772233.gif?v=1751389728"},{"product_id":"image-and-code-book-wendy-steiner-9780936534015","title":"Image and Code","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50373181931793,"sku":"CIN093653401XA","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/093653401X.jpg?v=1750820126"},{"product_id":"real-real-thing-book-wendy-steiner-9780226772196","title":"The Real Real Thing","description":"Our era is defined by the model. From Victoria's Secret and America's Next Top Model to the snapshots we post on Face-book and Twitter, our culture is fixated on the pose, the state of existing simultaneously as artifice and the real thing. In this bold view of contemporary culture, Wendy Steiner shows us the very meaning of the arts in the process of transformation. Her story begins at the turn of the last century, as the arts abandoned the representation of the world for a heady embrace of the abstract, the surreal, and the self-referential. Today though, this 'separate sphere of the aesthetic' is indistinguishable from normal life. Media and images overwhelm us: we gingerly negotiate a real-virtual divide that we suspect no longer exists, craving contact with what J. M. Coetzee has called 'the real real thing.' As the World Wide Web renders the lower-case world in ever-higher definition, the reality-based genres of memoir and documentary are displacing fiction, and novels and films are depicting the contemporary condition through model-protagonists who are half-human, half-image. Steiner shows the arts searching out a new ethical potential through this figure: by stressing the independent existence of the model, they welcome in the audience in all its unpredictability, redefining aesthetic experience as a real-world interaction with the promise of empathy, reciprocity, and egalitarian connection. A masterly performance by a penetrating, inquisitive mind, \"The Real Real Thing\" is that rarest of books, one whose provocations will inspire readers to take a new - and nuanced - look at the world around them.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50433247248657,"sku":"CIN0226772195G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226772195.jpg?v=1750876554"},{"product_id":"boaz-vaadia-book-wendy-steiner-9780996200745","title":"Boaz Vaadia","description":"Boaz Vaadia, the internationally acclaimed sculptor, amassed a prodigious body of work over his 40-year artistic career. In conjunction with  Boaz Vaadia: Sculpture, Vaadia presented the first retrospective exhibition of his indoor and outdoor works at Grounds For Sculpture in Hamilton, New Jersey. This book forms a comprehensive presentation of the artist's journey from abstraction to figuration.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50511093956881,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50511095824657,"sku":"CIN0996200746VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0996200746.jpg?v=1750748513"},{"product_id":"pictures-of-romance-book-wendy-steiner-9780226772301","title":"Pictures of Romance","description":"How do pictures tell stories? Why does the literary romance so often refer to paintings and other visual art objects? Beginning with these two seemingly unrelated questions, Wendy Steiner reveals an intricate exchange between the visual arts and the literary romance.   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Literature as Meaning also features Material on today's most provocative debates stimulating student discussion on topics such as masculinity, ecology and waste, spirituality, liberty and equality.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51333432606993,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51333434999057,"sku":"CIN032117206XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":52399022801169,"sku":"CIN032117206XA","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/032117206X.jpg?v=1751165069"},{"product_id":"venus-in-exile-book-wendy-steiner-9780226772400","title":"Venus in Exile","description":"Ever since the Renaissance, the female body has been a primary symbol of artistic beauty in the West. But with the advent of avant-garde and modernist art, beauty suddenly became suspect. 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