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

Description

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.

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).

'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 ''It will be clear to readers by the end of this book, that I like beauty quite a bit' says Patrick Hogan; a prediction that does not disappoint. An enthusiastically written, thought provoking book, which applies cognition, neuroscience, and social-cognitive scientific thinking to our understanding of the distinction between beauty, the beautiful and the sublime. I like this book quite a bit.' Alex Forsythe, University of Liverpool 'Combining intimate and capacious knowledge of recent cognitive science research and social psychology with in-depth command of a global range of literary works, films, and cultures, Hogan offers a powerful challenge to long-established ways of theorizing aesthetics. Integrating the cognitive and affective, the formal and the contextual, the neurophysiological and the historical, Beauty and Sublimity speaks to resurgent discourses of aesthetic appreciation within contemporary humanities scholarship while providing such work rigorous, flexible, and fertile theoretical frameworks to engage and develop.' Donald Wehrs, Hargis Professor of English Literature, Auburn University, Atlanta 'In Beauty and Sublimity, Patrick C. Hogan makes yet another invaluable contribution to philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of art in the naturalistic tradition.' Ryan P. Doran, British Journal of Aesthetics