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

1102436766
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
Pleasure and the Arts: Enjoying Literature, Painting, and Music

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

by Christopher Butler
Pleasure and the Arts: Enjoying Literature, Painting, and Music

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

by Christopher Butler

eBook

$49.95 

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Overview

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


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780191534126
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication date: 02/29/2000
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Christopher Butler is Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and Student of Christ Church. His books include Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe, 1900-1916 and Post-Modernism: A Very Short Introduction.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrationsix
Introductionxi
1Jokes, Poems, Understanding1
2Emotions and Narrative30
3Beyond Words: Sensation80
4Beyond Words: Enjoying Abstractions105
5Beyond Words: Appreciation, Technique, and Form132
6Specificity, Fantasy, and Critique164
Appendix on Beauty227
Picture Credits231
Index233
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