[PDF] The Aesthetics Of Wonder eBook

Author : Philip Fisher
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 32,63 MB
Release : 1998
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780674955615

GET BOOK

Why pause and study this particular painting among so many others ranged on a gallery wall? Wonder, which Descartes called the first of the passions, is at play; it couples surprise with a wish to know more, the pleasurable promise that what is novel or rare may become familiar. This is a book about the aesthetics of wonder, about wonder as it figures in our relation to the visual world and to rare or new experiences. In three instructive instances--a pair of paintings by Cy Twombly, the famous problem of doubling the area of a square, and the history of attempts to explain rainbows--Philip Fisher examines the experience of wonder as it draws together pleasure, thinking, and the aesthetic features of thought. Through these examples he places wonder in relation to the ordinary and the everyday as well as to its opposite, fear. The remarkable story of how rainbows came to be explained, fraught with errors, half-knowledge, and incomplete understanding, suggests that certain knowledge cannot be what we expect when wonder engages us. Instead, Fisher argues, a detailed familiarity, similar to knowing our way around a building or a painting, is the ultimate meeting point for aesthetic and scientific encounters with novelty, rare experiences, and the genuinely new.

Author : A. Ve Cuppiramaṇiyan̲
Publisher : Motilal Banarsidass Publishe
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 45,97 MB
Release : 1988
Category : Literature
ISBN : 9788120804449

GET BOOK

This little work has been done on the aesthetics of wonder; the writers on Sanskrit poetics have had little to say about this most attractive sensation. This work examines, in great depth, the excitants of the sense of wonder and the various purposes for which poets harness it and presents the concepts, for the first time in the history of Sanskrit aesthetics, embellished with ddlectable examples drawn from the whole of Sanskrit literature. The crowning achievement of the author is the startlingly new discovery about the nature and the role played by wonder which will revolutionize the existing concept of the sensation. The most attractive and unusual feature of the book is the high readability achieved through a scintillating style of presentation distinguished by sparkling wit and humour. An epoch-making book which scholars and lay lovers of literature alike would love to read.

Author : Cecilia González-Andrieu
Publisher :
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 17,6 MB
Release : 2022-04-15
Category :
ISBN : 9781602583535

GET BOOK

It is often difficult to describe beauty or even justify attempts to experience something beautiful. Yet if artists--whether painters or poets, actors or musicians, architects or sculptors--teach us anything, it is that the pursuit of beauty is a common feature among all humanity. As Cecilia González-Andrieu contends, these varied experiences with artistic beauty are embedded with revelatory and prophetic power that not only affects a single individual but allows for communal formation. Named one of America magazine's most promising young theologians, González-Andrieu seeks to engage art in order to reveal its religious significance. Bridge to Wonder proposes a method of theological aesthetics allowing readers to mine the depths of creative beauty to discover variegated theological truths that enable greater communion with each other and the One source of all that is beautiful.

Author : Jadranka Skorin-Kapov
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 213 pages
File Size : 19,65 MB
Release : 2015-10-08
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1498518478

GET BOOK

The Aesthetics of Desire and Surprise: Phenomenology and Speculation covers issues central to contemporary continental philosophy (desire, expectations, excess, rupture, transcendence, immanence, surprise). The proposed term desire||surprise captures the phenomenological-speculative character of the pair not yet and no longer. Non-obvious parallels between different thinkers are drawn, and the argumentation is organized around philosophical figures relevant in the sequence desire – excess –pause (rupture, break) – recuperation (surprise). The works of Levinas, Žižek, Bataille, Blanchot, Foucault, and Ricoeur are interpreted and positioned according to the proposed template of desire - excess - pause. The consideration of limit experiences involves authors fascinated by transgression, and the question of whether excess is immanent or transcendent. This discussion considers works by Nietzsche, Deleuze, Žižek, and Foucault. The analysis of surprise and the beginning of recovery after the pause considers works by Fink, Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, Lyotard, Dufrenne, Bachelard, and Seel. The provocative argument elaborated in this work is that surprise starts with indifference. Furthermore, the argument is that surprise begins where the concept reaches its ending, hence that the limit of speculative thinking at its ending is the limit of aesthetics at its beginning. The work of Hegel, Schelling and Jaspers are discussed in order to argue for the beginning of aesthetics there where knowledge ends. Philosophical thematic is contextualized via sections on artists such as Duchamp and Mondrian, and on some films, provoking interest of aestheticians working in art history and cultural studies departments.

Author : Lara Harb
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 14,22 MB
Release : 2020-05-14
Category : History
ISBN : 1108490212

GET BOOK

Revealing how an aesthetic of wonder underlies classical Arabic treatments of poetry, the Quran, and Aristotelian poetics, this fresh look at the question of literary quality, using the framework of aesthetic theory, is essential reading for scholars and students of Arabic literature, Islamic Studies, literary theory and Islamic art history.

Author : Philip Ball
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 391 pages
File Size : 15,68 MB
Release : 2021-05-11
Category : Science
ISBN : 0262044412

GET BOOK

Images and text capture the astonishing beauty of the chemical processes that create snowflakes, bubbles, flames, and other wonders of nature. Chemistry is not just about microscopic atoms doing inscrutable things; it is the process that makes flowers and galaxies. We rely on it for bread-baking, vegetable-growing, and producing the materials of daily life. In stunning images and illuminating text, this book captures chemistry as it unfolds. Using such techniques as microphotography, time-lapse photography, and infrared thermal imaging, The Beauty of Chemistry shows us how chemistry underpins the formation of snowflakes, the science of champagne, the colors of flowers, and other wonders of nature and technology. We see the marvelous configurations of chemical gardens; the amazing transformations of evaporation, distillation, and precipitation; heat made visible; and more.

Author : Alex Nava
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 394 pages
File Size : 29,30 MB
Release : 2013-06-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0271063300

GET BOOK

In Wonder and Exile in the New World, Alex Nava explores the border regions between wonder and exile, particularly in relation to the New World. It traces the preoccupation with the concept of wonder in the history of the Americas, beginning with the first European encounters, goes on to investigate later representations in the Baroque age, and ultimately enters the twentieth century with the emergence of so-called magical realism. In telling the story of wonder in the New World, Nava gives special attention to the part it played in the history of violence and exile, either as a force that supported and reinforced the Conquest or as a voice of resistance and decolonization. Focusing on the work of New World explorers, writers, and poets—and their literary descendants—Nava finds that wonder and exile have been two of the most significant metaphors within Latin American cultural, literary, and religious representations. Beginning with the period of the Conquest, especially with Cabeza de Vaca and Las Casas, continuing through the Baroque with Cervantes and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and moving into the twentieth century with Alejo Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias, Nava produces a historical study of Latin American narrative in which religious and theological perspectives figure prominently.

Author : Sophia Vasalou
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 34,19 MB
Release : 2015-04-15
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1438455542

GET BOOK

Wonder has been celebrated as the quintessential passion of childhood. From the earliest stages of our intellectual history, it has been acclaimed as the driving force of inquiry and the prime passion of thought. Yet for an emotion acknowledged so widely for the multiple roles it plays in our lives, wonder has led a singularly shadowy existence in recent reflections. Philosophers have largely passed it over in silence; emotion theorists have shunned it as a case that sits awkwardly within their analytical frameworks. So what is wonder, and why does it matter? In this book, Sophia Vasalou sketches a "grammar" of wonder that pursues the complexities of wonder as an emotional experience that has carved colorful tracks through our language and our intellectual history, not only in philosophy and science but also in art and religious experience. A richer grammar of wonder and broader window into its past can give us the tools we need for thinking more insightfully about wonder, and for reflecting on the place it should occupy within our emotional lives.

Author : Sonia Sedivy
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 271 pages
File Size : 31,35 MB
Release : 2016-04-21
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1474255760

GET BOOK

Beauty and the End of Art shows how a resurgence of interest in beauty and a sense of ending in Western art are challenging us to rethink art, beauty and their relationship. By arguing that Wittgenstein's later work and contemporary theory of perception offer just what we need for a unified approach to art and beauty, Sonia Sedivy provides new answers to these contemporary challenges. These new accounts also provide support for the Wittgensteinian realism and theory of perception that make them possible. Wittgenstein's subtle form of realism explains artworks in terms of norm governed practices that have their own varied constitutive norms and values. Wittgensteinian realism also suggests that diverse beauties become available and compelling in different cultural eras and bring a shared 'higher-order' value into view. With this framework in place, Sedivy argues that perception is a form of engagement with the world that draws on our conceptual capacities. This approach explains how perceptual experience and the perceptible presence of the world are of value, helping to account for the diversity of beauties that are available in different historical contexts and why the many faces of beauty allow us to experience the value of the world's perceptible presence. Carefully examining contemporary debates about art, aesthetics and perception, Beauty and the End of Art presents an original approach. Insights from such diverse thinkers as Immanuel Kant, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Arthur Danto, Alexander Nehamas, Elaine Scarry and Dave Hickey are woven together to reveal how they make good sense if we bring contemporary theory of perception and Wittgensteinian realism into the conversation.

Author : Idries Trevathan
Publisher : Saqi Books
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 16,9 MB
Release : 2020-02-17
Category : Art
ISBN : 086356190X

GET BOOK

A unique investigation into the aesthetics of colour in Islamic art revealing its deeper symbolic and mystical meanings. The experience of colour in Islamic visual culture has historically been overlooked. In this new approach, Idries Trevathan examines the language of colour in Islamic art and architecture in dialogue with its aesthetic contexts, offering insights into the pre-modern Muslim experience of interpreting colour. The seventeenth-century Shah Mosque in Isfahan, Iran, represents one of the finest examples of colour-use on a grand scale. Here, Trevathan examines the philosophical and mystical traditions that formed the mosque's backdrop. He shows how careful combinations of colour and design proportions in Islamic patterns expresses knowledge beyond that experienced in the corporeal world, offering another language with which to know and experience God. Colour thus becomes a spiritual language, calling for a re-consideration of how we read Islamic aesthetics.