Description
Book SynopsisThe aesthetic has come to be judged inadequate to literary criticism. It has been attacked for promoting class-based distinctions, cultivating political apathy, and irrational sensuous decadence. This examination of the history of aesthetic theorizing that has led to this critical alienation from works of art proposes an alternative view.
Trade Review“With Aesthetic Reason, Alan Singer makes a significant and unique contribution to the debate about the ethical significance of art and aesthetic experience. . . . On every front, Singer's book offers fresh perspectives on aesthetic experience that require attention from philosophers, historians, and critics of literature and art.”
—Gregg M. Horowitz,Vanderbilt University
“Aesthetic Reason is an impressive and challenging work in many ways.”
—Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan English Literature in Translation 1880-1920
“It is, indeed, difficult to do full justice to the originality, the breadth, and the depth of Singer’s outstanding work in this space of a review, but I would like to conclude with a brief comment which might add one futher twist on an already complex argument.”
—Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan English Literature in Translation 1880-1920
“Aesthetic Reason is an impressive and challenging work in many ways, the most significant of which is the solid case it builds up for cognitive aesthetics against the currently fashionable anti-aesthetic, which has problematically linked itself with the postmodernist concern for sociopolitical change and human agency.”
—Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920
Table of Contents Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Adequacy of the Aesthetic
2. Aesthetic Community: Recognition as an Other Sense of Sensus Communis
3. Acting in the Space of Appearance: Incontinent Will and the Pathos of Aesthetic Representation
4. Beautiful Errors: Aesthetics and the Art of Contextualization
5. Aesthetic Corrigibility: Bartleby and the Character of the Aesthetic
6. From Tragedy to Deliberative Heroics
7. Living in Aesthetic Community: Art and the Bonds of Productive Agency
Bibliography
Index
