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

298 Pages·2016·2.79 MB·English

by  Patrick Colm Hogan

Beauty and Sublimity
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
answerstolong-standingquestionsaboutbeautyandsublimity.Hogan
beginsbydistinguishingwhatwerespondtoasbeautifulfromwhatwe
countsociallyasbeautiful.Hegoesontoexaminetheformerintermsof
informationprocessing(specifically,prototypeapproximationandnon-
habitualpatternrecognition)andemotionalinvolvement(especiallyof
theendogenousrewardandattachmentsystems).Inthecourseofthe
book, Hogan examines such issues as how universal principles of aes-
theticresponsemaybereconciledwithindividualidiosyncrasy,howitis
possibletoarguerationallyoveraestheticresponse,andwhatroleper-
sonalbeautyandsublimitymightplayinthedefinitionofart.Totreat
theseissues,thebookconsidersworksbyWoolf,Wharton,Shakespeare,
ArthurMiller,Beethoven,Matisse,andKiranRao,amongothers.
patrick colm hogan isaprofessorintheDepartmentofEnglish,
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
TeachesUsAboutEmotion(Cambridge,2011),andHowAuthors’Minds
MakeStories(Cambridge,2013).

Beauty and Sublimity
A Cognitive Aesthetics of Literature and the Arts
Patrick Colm Hogan
UniversityofConnecticut
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Contents
Acknowledgments pageviii
Introduction:whybeauty? 1
1 Literaryaesthetics:beauty,thebrain,andMrs.Dalloway 19
2 Theidiosyncrasyofbeauty:aestheticuniversalsandthe
diversityoftaste 46
3 Unspokenbeauty:problemsandpossibilitiesofabsence 76
4 Aestheticresponserevisited:quandariesaboutbeauty
andsublimity 107
5 MyOthelloproblem:prestigestatus,evaluation,and
aestheticresponse 162
6 Whatisaestheticargument? 178
7 Artandbeauty 215
Afterword:abriefrecapitulation,withacodaon
anti-aestheticart 245
Workscited 257
Index 277
vii
Acknowledgments
AnearlierversionofpartofChapter1appearedas“LiteraryAesthetics:
Beauty,theBrain,andMrs.Dalloway,”inLiterature,Neurology,andNeu-
roscience, ed. Anne Stiles, Stanley Finger, and Franc¸ois Boller (Boston,
MA: Elsevier, 2014), 319–337. An earlier version of some additional
sections of Chapter 1 appeared as “Attachment System Involvement
in Esthetic Response” in Archives of Neuroscience 1.3 (2014). An
earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared as “The Idiosyncrasy of Beauty:
AestheticUniversalsandtheDiversityofTaste,”inInvestigationsintothe
PhenomenologyandtheOntologyoftheWorkofArt:WhatAreArtworks,and
How DoWeExperience Them?, ed. Peer Bundgaard and Frederik Stjern-
felt (Dordrecht, Germany: Springer Verlag, 2015, (cid:2)C Peer Bundgaard
and Frederik Stjernfelt and Patrick Colm Hogan, 2015). (The latter
“book is published with open access at SpringerLink.com”; the chapter
ofthatvolume“isdistributedunderthetermsoftheCreativeCommons
AttributionNoncommercialLicense,whichpermitsanynoncommercial
use,distribution,andreproductioninanymedium,providedtheoriginal
author(s) and source are credited.”) I am grateful to the publishers
for permission to include the revised versions here. Earlier versions of
Chapter 1 and parts of Chapter 3 were presented at the University of
Mainz, the University of Vienna, Duke University, and the University
ofConnecticutin2013.AnearlierversionofpartofChapter6waspre-
sented at the Shakespeare 450 conference (Paris 2014). I am grateful to
theorganizersoftheseeventsforgivingmetheopportunitytosharemy
thoughtsonthesetopicsandtotheparticipantsfortheirstimulatingcom-
ments and questions. I should particularly mention Sibylle Baumbach,
Martha Cutter, Deborah Jenson, Christa Knellwolf, Vanessa Levine-
Smith, Anja Mueller-Wood, Letitia Naigles, Alejandra Rodriguez,
Margarete Rubik, and William Snyder. Many of the ideas of the book
werepresentedinmyseminaronbeautyandsublimityattheUniversity
of Connecticut. I would like to thank my students for their comments
andhelpinclarifyingtheseideas:CarlaCalandra,NicoleHaiber,Rachel
Kinstler,andPaigeKolakowski,withspecialthankstoKatieHires,Chris
viii