Beauty and Sublimity

Erscheinungsjahr 2016
ISBN: 978-1-107-11511-8
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 298 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 585 g

Recent decades have witnessed an explosion in neuroscientific and related research treating aesthetic response. This book integrates this research with insights from philosophical aesthetics to propose new answers to longstanding questions about beauty and sublimity. Hogan begins by distinguishing what we respond to as beautiful from what we count socially as beautiful. He goes on to examine the former in terms of information processing (specifically, prototype approximation and non-habitual pattern recognition) and emotional involvement (especially of the endogenous reward and attachment systems). In the course of the book, Hogan examines such issues as how universal principles of aesthetic response may be reconciled with individual idiosyncrasy, how it is possible to argue rationally over aesthetic response, and what role personal beauty and sublimity might play in the definition of art. To treat these issues, the book considers works by Woolf, Wharton, Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Beethoven, Matisse, and Kiran Rao, among others.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hogan, Patrick Colm

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Allgemeine Psychologie Kognitionspsychologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Moderne Philosophische Disziplinen Philosophie des Geistes, Neurophilosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Neurowissenschaften, Kognitionswissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Ästhetik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction. Why beauty?; 1. Literary aesthetics: beauty, the brain, and Mrs Dalloway; 2. The idiosyncrasy of beauty: aesthetic universals and the diversity of taste; 3. Unspoken beauty: problems and possibilities of absence; 4. Aesthetic response revisited: quandaries about beauty and sublimity; 5. My Othello problem: prestige status, evaluation, and aesthetic response; 6. What is aesthetic argument?; 7. Art and beauty; Afterword. A brief recapitulation, with a coda on anti-aesthetic art.

Über Autor(innen)

Hogan, Patrick Colm
Patrick Colm Hogan is a professor in the Department of English, the Program in Cognitive Science and the Program in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of seventeen scholarly books, including What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion (Cambridge, 2011) and How Authors' Minds Make Stories (Cambridge, 2013).