Fred Orton's teaching and writing has always combined theoretical and formal-which is to say structural-analysis with historical research and reflection. This collection of essays brings together some of his most decisive contributions to thinking about fine art practice and rethinking the theory and methods of the social history of art. In this collection Orton brilliantly moves from Paul Cezanne to Jasper Johns, from the American cultural critic Harold Rosenberg to a discussion of Marx and Engels' notion of ideology. What emerges is more than an anthology, this collection offers a vivid demonstration of the way theory can work to generate new interpretations and unsettle old ones.
Publication date: January 31, 2023
Acknowledgements
'Present, the Scene of ... Selves, the Occasion of ... Ruses': Fred Orton's Art History
Steve Edwards
Publications by Fred Orton
1 Beginning ... with Intention
2 Painting Out of Time
Symbol and Allegory
Modernist Painting
On the Motif
Sensations
A Dabbing Sensation
As If. As If.
Paul de Man, 'The Rhetoric of Temporality'
Slack Links and Gaps
Allegory
3 Action, Revolution and Painting (Resumed)
I
II
III
IV
4 Ideology: Reading Paul de Man Reading Marx and Engels
'The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism' (1956)
'Georg Lukacs's "Theory of the Novel" ' (1966)
'The Contemporary Criticism of Romanticism' (1967)
'Roland Barthes and the Limits of Structuralism' (1972)
'Metaphor (Second Discourse)' (1973)
'The Resistance to Theory' (1982)
Excursus: Aberration
'The Resistance to Theory' (Continued)
Coda: Aesthetics, Rhetoric, Ideology
For the End ...
Bibliography
Index