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  • Mere Materialism: Aesthetics of Attrition in Paint, Text, and Paper

    Mere Materialism by Goldsmith, Steven;

    Aesthetics of Attrition in Paint, Text, and Paper

    Series: Lit Z;

      • GET 10% OFF

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      • Publisher's listprice GBP 104.00
      • The price is estimated because at the time of ordering we do not know what conversion rates will apply to HUF / product currency when the book arrives. In case HUF is weaker, the price increases slightly, in case HUF is stronger, the price goes lower slightly.

        49 686 Ft (47 320 Ft + 5% VAT)
      • Discount 10% (cc. 4 969 Ft off)
      • Discounted price 44 717 Ft (42 588 Ft + 5% VAT)

    49 686 Ft

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    Product details:

    • Edition number 1
    • Publisher Fordham University Press
    • Date of Publication 2 June 2026

    • ISBN 9781531514150
    • Binding Hardback
    • No. of pages304 pages
    • Size 229x152 mm
    • Weight 666 g
    • Language English
    • 700

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    Long description:

    "

    Mere Materialism challenges us to recognize a neglected, transhistorical aesthetics of loss. Against the affirmative materialisms prevalent in cultural criticism today, mere materialism in art and literature documents the slow, ordinary violence of routine physical deterioration, including art’s own. It inhabits a space where loss can remain nothing but loss, without having to serve any productive or redemptive purpose.

    Attending to material surfaces and the processes of attrition Goldsmith examines works from Rembrandt to the present that that stand in counterpoint to the typical materialist emphasis on dynamic, generative possibility. These works turn aside from such future horizons to pose a central question: Amid the urgent purposes we ask art to serve, and amid the many values we invest in the concept of materialism, is it possible for art to occupy the everyday damage of erosion and, on occasion, simply let loss be?

    Wide-ranging in philosophical reference and in discussions of specific materials, conservation theory, and reception histories, the book draws out the phenomenon of mere materialism through a series of extended case studies: a Rembrandt portrait of Saint Bartholomew; Melville’s slave-revolt novella Benito Cereno; a Dada collage by Kurt Schwitters; and recent ""gray"" writings by Karl Ove Knausgaard and C. S. Giscombe. Together, these works index an aesthetics of fragility and decay, without presupposing that material vulnerability is in a dialectical relationship with deeper meaning, and without assuming that an encounter with it has a redeeming cognitive, affective, political or social function.

    "

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