Ruskin

We have to find our way back to beauty," writes Lars Spuybroek in the introduction to The Sympathy of Things. In this book Spuybroek argues that we must "undo" the twentieth century - the age in which the sublime turned from an art category into a technical reality. This leads him to the aesthetical insights of the nineteenth-century English art critic John Ruskin, from which he distils pointers for our time. In The Sympathy of Things, the old romantic notion of sympathy, a core concept in Ruskin's aesthetics, is re-evaluated as the driving force of the aesthetic experience. For Ruskin, beauty always comprises variation, imperfection and fragility, three concepts that wholly disappeared from our mindsets during the twentieth century. Spuybroek addresses the five central dual themes of Ruskin in turn: the Gothic and work, ornament and matter, sympathy and abstraction, the picturesque and time, ecology and design. He wrests each of these themes from the Victorian era and compares them with the related ideas of later aestheticians and philosophers like William James and Bruno Latour.

The first book on the Victorian critic and public intellectual John Ruskin by a scholar of religion and ethics, this work recovers both Ruskin's engaged critique of economic life and his public practice of moral imagination. With its reading of Ruskin as an innovative contributor to a tradition of ethics concerned with character, culture, and community, this book recasts established interpretations of Ruskin's place in nineteenth-century literature and aesthetics, challenges nostalgic diagnoses of the supposed historical loss of virtue ethics, and demonstrates the limitations of any politics that eschews common purpose as vital to individual agency and social welfare. Although Ruskin's moralistic efforts did not always allow for democratic individuality, equality, and contestation, his eclecticism, Craig argues, helps to correct these problems. Further, Ruskin's interdisciplinary explorations of beauty, work, nature, religion, politics, and economic value reveal the ways in which his insights into the practical connections between aesthetics and ethics, and culture and character, might be applied to today's debates about liberal modernity today. With the triumph of global capitalism, and the near-silence of any opposing voice, Ruskin's model of an engaged reading of culture and his public practice of moral imagination deserve renewed attention. This book provides students in religion, politics, and social theory with a timely reintroduction to this timeless figure.

In these inspiring essays about why we read, Proust explores all the pleasures and trials that we take from books, as well as explaining the beauty of Ruskin and his work, and the joys of losing yourself in literature as a child. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves – and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives – and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Who was John Ruskin? What did he achieve--and how? Where is he today? One possible answer: almost everywhere. Ruskin was the Victorian age's best-known and most controversial intellectual and polymath--an artist, scientist, critic, polemicist, social crusader, philanthropist, and early environmentalist. Two hundred years since his birth in 1819, his ideas have a fierce modern relevance. In Ruskinland, Andrew Hill, the award-winning Financial Times columnist, builds on Ruskin's pin-sharp appreciation of art and architecture, his extraordinary draughtsmanship, and his insistence that to see and draw the world is the best way to understand it better. The book lays out how Ruskin envisaged radical solutions to social inequality, excessive executive pay, flawed economic orthodoxy, advancing automation, environmental disaster, and meaningless work. It explains the importance of his prescient view of our fragile, interconnected world, and shows how Ruskin's radical ideas can still help us run our governments, our museums, our galleries, our companies, and our lives. Part travelogue, part quest, part unconventional biography, Ruskinland retraces Ruskin's steps, telling his exceptional and tragic life story, unearthing his influence, talking to people and visiting places--from Venice to Florida's Gulf coast--where Ruskin's foresighted ideas are, sometimes unexpectedly, alive today.

To most people, technology has been reduced to computers, consumer goods, and military weapons; we speak of "technological progress" in terms of RAM and CD-ROMs and the flatness of our television screens. In Human-Built World, thankfully, Thomas Hughes restores to technology the conceptual richness and depth it deserves by chronicling the ideas about technology expressed by influential Western thinkers who not only understood its multifaceted character but who also explored its creative potential. Hughes draws on an enormous range of literature, art, and architecture to explore what technology has brought to society and culture, and to explain how we might begin to develop an "ecotechnology" that works with, not against, ecological systems. From the "Creator" model of development of the sixteenth century to the "big science" of the 1940s and 1950s to the architecture of Frank Gehry, Hughes nimbly charts the myriad ways that technology has been woven into the social and cultural fabric of different eras and the promises and problems it has offered. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, optimistically hoped that technology could be combined with nature to create an Edenic environment; Lewis Mumford, two centuries later, warned of the increasing mechanization of American life. Such divergent views, Hughes shows, have existed side by side, demonstrating the fundamental idea that "in its variety, technology is full of contradictions, laden with human folly, saved by occasional benign deeds, and rich with unintended consequences." In Human-Built World, he offers the highly engaging history of these contradictions, follies, and consequences, a history that resurrects technology, rightfully, as more than gadgetry; it is in fact no less than an embodiment of human values.

A delectable offering from a writer who not only knows how to make us laugh but also knows how to laugh at himself Playful tigers; ‘ghosts’; elephants; crows and old favourites like Uncle Ken; Miss Bun; the author’s slightly eccentric grandfather and Bond himself weave in and out of the pages of this wildly eclectic; thoroughly delightful and absolutely irresistible anthology featuring previously unpublished pieces like ‘Respect Your Breakfast’ and ‘Uncle Ken Goes to Sea’ as well as beloved classics from Bond’s books. Marked by the signature charm and subtle wit of one of India’s best-loved writers; Ruskin Bond’s Book of Humour; will make even the hardened among us crack a smile.

In 1875 John Ruskin gave a large collection of drawings to the University of Oxford. These works, now in the Ashmolean Museum, form the basis for this fascinating study. Selecting the finest drawings in the colection, Nicholas Penny traces Ruskin's care