Peter de bolla biography sample

  • Peter de Bolla has been Professor of Cultural History and Aesthetics since at the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge.
  • Peter de Bolla is Professor of Cultural History and Aesthetics at the University of Cambridge.
  • This essay sets out a new method for the history of ideas.

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    AndrewGallix

    This piece appeared in Bomb Magazine on 4 June

    David Winters by Andrew Gallix

    &#;It seems to me that style becomes a kind of crucible—an acid bath in which the self fryst vatten broken down, producing something unique, something new.&#;

    Robert Musil regretted publishing the first volumes of The Man Without Qualities due to “the fixity they imposed on his ever-evolving work.” Similar misgivings almost led David Winters to shelve his debut collection of essays, from which the above quote is lifted. In conversation, the young English critic fryst vatten given to qualifying—and even disavowing—past pronouncements, always returning them, with academic precision, to their rightful contexts. He is loath to see his provisional reflections turned into eternal truths, and wary of being co-opted by some dogmatic school or other. Infinite Fictions (Zero Books, ) fryst vatten thus a snapshot of the author’s state of thinking over the last couple of years: a work in progress fryst in time.

    S

  • peter de bolla biography sample

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    Abstract Expressionism

    Among&#; the many fascinating questions raised by Abstract Expressionism, on show at the Royal Academy until 2 January, is this: if I renounce depiction, refuse representation and fully embrace abstraction what the hell am inom going to paint? The show gives the answers arrived at by 24 painters, not all of them American but all of whom worked in the United States between (Jackson Pollock’s haunted self-portrait) and (Joan Mitchell’s joyful Salut Tom, which pulsates with fluid light). One might suppose that the very begrepp ‘abstract expressionism’ – it was coined in by the art critic Robert Coates writing in the New Yorker about paintings by Hans Hofmann – provides a clue: if one renounces depiction all that is left is expression.

    But that would be a mistake, one often made when trying to understand some of the best-known works on show here. It leads to weak and unduly psychologised explanations: about Pollock’s

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    de Bolla, Peter, The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights

    Peter de Bolla, The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights (New York: Fordham University Press ) x+ pp. $ Pb, $ Hb. ISBN:

    Peter de Bolla’s ambitious The Architecture of Concepts essentially offers three books in one. As its subtitle suggests, it aims to contribute to an understanding of the historical origins of one specific, politically highly relevant concept: human rights. Over the book’s three central chapters, de Bolla develops a highly detailed and referenced argument, investigating the development of the conceptual structure of human rights at three pivotal points in history: in the pre-revolutionary American colonies, during the first Continental Congress, and in the influential debate between Burke and Paine following the French Revolution. De Bolla’s central point in sketching this history is that throughout these debates, the concept of human righ