The question of the aesthetic / George Levine.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Levine, George, editor.

Series:

Oxford Academic.

Oxford scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Aesthetics.

Aesthetics--Study and teaching.

Education--Philosophy.

Arts--Study and teaching.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (297 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, [2022]

Summary:

This book provides a justification for the renewed study of the aesthetic in times during which the aesthetic is often regarded as mere diversion from our national and global crises. It offers a "defense" of aesthetic education in these times. Working within the philosophical tradition that dissociates the aesthetic from utility, it argues not only that uselessness has important utility, but that attention to the aesthetic is not incompatible with attention to politics, and might even be more powerful politically if politics were not the direct object of its working. Among the various theories and examples this book offers, the introduction adds one,by way of Darwin's theory of sexual selection, that can be taken as an argument for the centrality of the aesthetic to human well being.

Contents:

List of Illustrations

List of Contributors

Introduction / George Levine

1. Two theories

1. The Experience of Art / Derek Attridge

2. The Ontology of Artworlds: A Post-Human, Coevolutionary Framework for Aesthetics, Art History, and Art Criticism / Richard O. Prum

2. Beauty and utility

3. Beauty and Her Sisters in the Nineteenth Century and After / Jonah Siegel

4. Gates of Horn in Ivory Towers: On Beauty's Truth / Herbert F. Tucker

3. Aesthetics and politics

5. What We Do: The New This and the New That / Isobel Armstrong

6. Can Migrants Be Seen? Some Representations of Migration in Contemporary Art, Film, and Literature / Josephine McDonagh

7. Aesthetic Poison / Edgar Garcia

8. Aesthetic Criticism and the Postcolonial / Ankhi Mukherjee

4. Reading closely: form and meaning

9. On the Last Paragraph of the 1859 Edition of Darwin's Origin of Species / Myra Jehlen

10. Wild Aesthetics: D.H. Lawrence's "Art for My Sake" / Philip Davis

11. "Whose Eye Darted Contagious Fire": Aesthetic Form, Performative Action, and Paradise Lost / Richard Eldridge

12. Tennyson's Tears, Brooks's Motivations / Susan J. Wolfson

5. Overview

13. Do Birds Disagree? The Place of Aesthetic Value in Advocacy for the Humanities / Helen Small

Works Cited

Index.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on Publisher website; title from home page (viewed on May 18, 2022).

Other Format:

Print version: Levine, George The Question of the Aesthetic

ISBN:

0-19-193721-5

0-19-265931-6

0-19-265930-8

OCLC:

1333084116