Intended Audience
Scholarly & Professional
Reviews
"In this book, Hogan works to bridge the humanities and sciences, a longstanding challenge when issues of beauty and aesthetics are involved. His distinction between public and personal beauty is a significant scholarly contribution that will surely spur debate." Pablo P. L. Tinio, Montclair State University, New Jersey and Editor, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts
Dewey Edition
23
Dewey Decimal
111/.85
Table Of Content
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.
Synopsis
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., 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.
LC Classification Number
BH39
