Pleasure and the Arts: Enjoying Literature, Painting, and Music
How do the arts give us pleasure? Covering a very wide range of artistic
works, from Auden to David Lynch, Rembrandt to Edward Weston, and Richard
Strauss to Keith Jarrett, Pleasure and the Arts offers us an explanation
of our enjoyable emotional engagements with literature, music, and
painting. The arts direct us to intimate and particularized
relationships, with the people represented in the works, or with those we
imagine produced them. When we listen to music, look at a purely abstract
painting, or drink a glass of wine, can we enjoy the experience without
verbalizing our response? Do our interpretative assumptions, our
awareness of technique, and our attitudes to fantasy, get in the way of
our appreciation of art, or enhance it? Examining these questions and
more, we discover how curiosity drives us to enjoy narratives, ordinary
jokes, metaphors, and modernist epiphanies, and how narrative in all the
arts can order and provoke intense enjoyment. Pleasurable in its own
right, Pleasure and the Arts presents a sparkling explanation of the
enduring interest of artistic expression.
1102436766
Features
A sparkling, engaging essay by a leading critic on a perennially
fascinating topic
Pleasure and the Arts: Enjoying Literature, Painting, and Music
How do the arts give us pleasure? Covering a very wide range of artistic
works, from Auden to David Lynch, Rembrandt to Edward Weston, and Richard
Strauss to Keith Jarrett, Pleasure and the Arts offers us an explanation
of our enjoyable emotional engagements with literature, music, and
painting. The arts direct us to intimate and particularized
relationships, with the people represented in the works, or with those we
imagine produced them. When we listen to music, look at a purely abstract
painting, or drink a glass of wine, can we enjoy the experience without
verbalizing our response? Do our interpretative assumptions, our
awareness of technique, and our attitudes to fantasy, get in the way of
our appreciation of art, or enhance it? Examining these questions and
more, we discover how curiosity drives us to enjoy narratives, ordinary
jokes, metaphors, and modernist epiphanies, and how narrative in all the
arts can order and provoke intense enjoyment. Pleasurable in its own
right, Pleasure and the Arts presents a sparkling explanation of the
enduring interest of artistic expression.
Features
A sparkling, engaging essay by a leading critic on a perennially
fascinating topic
49.95
In Stock
5
1

Pleasure and the Arts: Enjoying Literature, Painting, and Music

Pleasure and the Arts: Enjoying Literature, Painting, and Music
49.95
In Stock
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780191534126 |
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Publisher: | Oxford University Press |
Publication date: | 02/29/2000 |
Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
Format: | eBook |
File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
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