Beauty and Sublimity - A Cognitive Aesthetics of Literature and the Arts

Integrating science and art, this accessible, but nuanced work explains how we experience beauty and why we enjoy it.

List of contents

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.

About the author

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).

Summary

Recent decades have witnessed an explosion in neuroscientific and related research treating aesthetic response. This book integrates this research with the insights of philosophical aesthetics to propose new answers to longstanding questions about beauty and sublimity. To treat these issues, Hogan considers works by Woolf, Wharton, and Matisse, among others.

Product details

• Authors: Patrick Colm Hogan, Patrick Colm (University of Connecticut) Hogan, Hogan Patrick Colm
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.12.2018
• EAN: 9781107535497
• ISBN: 978-1-107-53549-7
• No. of pages: 296
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Psychology > Theoretical psychology; Non-fiction book > Psychology, esoterics, spirituality, anthroposophy > Psychology: general, reference works; PHILOSOPHY / Mind & Body, The arts: general issues, LITERARY CRITICISM / General, ART / General, SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind, PHILOSOPHY / Aesthetics, PSYCHOLOGY / Cognitive Psychology & Cognition, Cognition & cognitive psychology, Neurosciences, Philosophy: aesthetics, Literary studies: general, Cognition and cognitive psychology, The arts: general topics