Perspectives on Taste
Perspectives on Taste

Author: Jeremy Wyatt

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-04-27

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1000579697

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book offers a sustained, interdisciplinary examination of taste. It addresses a range of topics that have been at the heart of lively debates in philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and experimental philosophy. Our everyday lives are suffused with discussions about taste. We are quick to offer familiar platitudes about taste, but we struggle when facing the questions that matter—what taste is, how it is related to subjectivity, what distinguishes good from bad taste, why it is valuable to make and evaluate judgments about matters of taste, and what, exactly, we mean in speaking about these matters. The essays in this volume open up new, intersecting lines of research about these questions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. They address the notion of aesthetic taste; connections between taste and the natures of truth, disagreement, assertion, belief, retraction, linguistic context-sensitivity, and the semantics/pragmatics interface; experimental inquiry about taste; and metaphysical questions underlying ongoing discussions about taste. Perspectives on Taste will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in aesthetics, philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, and experimental philosophy.

The Language of Literature and its Meaning
The Language of Literature and its Meaning

Author: Ashima Shrawan

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2019-04-23

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 1527533565

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

There is a marked awareness about the language of literature and its meaning both in Indian and Western aesthetic thinking. The aestheticians of both schools hold that the language of literature embodies a significant aspect of human experience, and represents a creative pattern of verbal structure to impart meaning effectively. Modern Western aesthetic thinking, which includes theories like formalism, new criticism, stylistics, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, discourse analysis, semiotics and dialogic criticism, in one way or another emphasizes the study of the language of literature in order to understand its meaning. Similarly, there is a distinct focus on the language of literature and its meaning in Indian literary theories which include the theory of rasa (aesthetic experience), alaṁkāra (the poetic figure), rīti (diction), dhvani (suggestion), vakrokti (oblique expression) and aucitya (propriety). This book explores how the language of literature and its meaning have been dealt with in both Indian and Western aesthetic thinking. In doing so, the study concentrates on Kuntaka’s theory of vakrokti and Ānandavardhana’s theory of dhvani in Indian aesthetic thinking and Russian formalism and deconstruction in Western thinking. The book categorically focuses on the intersection between the theory of vakrokti and Russian formalism and the meeting-point between the theory of dhvani and deconstruction.

Bilingual Aesthetics
Bilingual Aesthetics

Author: Doris Sommer

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2004-04-07

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0822385791

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Knowing a second language entails some unease; it requires a willingness to make mistakes and work through misunderstandings. The renowned literary scholar Doris Sommer argues that feeling funny is good for you, and for society. In Bilingual Aesthetics Sommer invites readers to make mischief with meaning, to play games with language, and to allow errors to stimulate new ways of thinking. Today’s global world has outgrown any one-to-one correlation between a people and a language; liberal democracies can either encourage difference or stifle it through exclusionary policies. Bilingual Aesthetics is Sommer’s passionate call for citizens and officials to cultivate difference and to realize that the precarious points of contact resulting from mismatches between languages, codes, and cultures are the lifeblood of democracy, as well as the stimulus for aesthetics and philosophy. Sommer encourages readers to entertain the creative possibilities inherent in multilingualism. With her characteristic wit and love of language, she focuses on humor—particularly bilingual jokes—as the place where tensions between and within cultures are played out. She draws on thinking about humor and language by a range of philosophers and others, including Sigmund Freud, Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hannah Arendt, and Mikhail Bakhtin. In declaring the merits of allowing for crossed signals, Sommer sends a clear message: Making room for more than one language is about value added, not about remediation. It is an expression of love for a contingent and changing world.

The Aesthetics and Politics of Linguistic Borders
The Aesthetics and Politics of Linguistic Borders

Author: Heidi Grönstrand

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-10-18

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0429536429

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This collection showcases a multivalent approach to the study of literary multilingualism, embodied in contemporary Nordic literature. While previous approaches to literary multilingualism have tended to take a textual or authorship focus, this book advocates for a theoretical perspective which reflects the multiplicity of languages in use in contemporary literature emerging from increased globalization and transnational interaction. Drawing on a multimodal range of examples from contemporary Nordic literature, these eighteen chapters illustrate the ways in which multilingualism is dynamic rather than fixed, resulting from the interactions between authors, texts, and readers as well as between literary and socio-political institutions. The book highlights the processes by which borders are formed within the production, circulation, and reception of literature and in turn, the impact of these borders on issues around cultural, linguistic, and national belonging. Introducing an innovative approach to the study of multilingualism in literature, this collection will be of particular interest to students and researchers in literary studies, cultural studies, and multilingualism.

Ecocritical Aesthetics
Ecocritical Aesthetics

Author: Peter Quigley

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2018-02-28

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0253032113

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This lively collection of essays explores the vital role of beauty in the human experience of place, interactions with other species, and contemplation of our own embodied lives. Devoting attention to themes such as global climate change, animal subjectivity, environmental justice and activism, and human moral responsibility for the environment, these contributions demonstrate that beauty is not only a meaningful dimension of our experience, but also a powerful strategy for inspiring cultural transformation. Taken as a whole, they underscore the ongoing relevance of aesthetics to the ecocritical project and the concern for beauty that motivates effective social and political engagement.

The Aesthetics of Grammar
The Aesthetics of Grammar

Author: Jeffrey P. Williams

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1107007127

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book provides a detailed comparative overview of an array of elaborate grammatical resources used in Southeast Asian languages.

The Beauty that Saves
The Beauty that Saves

Author: John M. Dunaway

Publisher: Mercer University Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780865545007

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Beauty That Saves, a collection of essays by many of the most prominent American and European scholars on Weil, begins with a foreword by well-known writer Vladimir Volkoff who discusses, in a very moving manner, "What Simone Weil Means to Me". An introductory essay by Eric O. Springsted highlights the general character of Weil's thought and introduces the specific problematic of this collection. The first section addresses the subject of Weil on language. A key to understanding Weil's aesthetic is grasping how she understood language and its various usages. From within that understanding is contained a point d'appui of her philosophical thought as a whole. Her universe of meaning, its hierarchies, its subjection to necessity, its mystical intimacies, is not something she simply wrote about, it is contained in the way she wrote. With Weil's language established, the second section deals with Weil's explicit reflections on aesthetics, including essays on her sacramental imagery, morality and literature, music, and her classical reading of tragedy. As these essays point out, her aesthetic demands a moral and religious reading of the universe. The third section presents a number of specific Weilan readings of art, where what has been discussed in previous essays receives concrete application and illustration through essays on Weil and Wallace Stevens, music, and Georges Bernanos.

Aesthetics, Theory and Interpretation of the Literary Work
Aesthetics, Theory and Interpretation of the Literary Work

Author: Paolo Euron

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-08-12

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 9004409238

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book introduces the reader to the literary work and to an understanding of its cultural background and its specific features. In doing so, it refers to two main traditions of Western culture: one of aesthetics and the theory of art and the other of literary theory. In our postmodern world, language and artistic creation (and above all literature as the art of language) occupy a special role in understanding the human world and become existential issues. A critical attitude requires knowledge of the relevant past in order to understand what we are today. The author presents key topics, ideas, and representatives of aesthetics, theory, and the interpretation of works of art in an historical perspective, in order to explain the Western tradition with constant attention to the present condition. Aesthetics, Theory and Interpretation of the Literary Work offers an outline of essential concepts and authors of aesthetics and theories of the literary work, presenting basic topics and ideas in their historical context and development, considering their relevance to the contemporary debate, and highlighting the specificity of the experience of the art work in our present world. The best way to approach a work of art is to enjoy it. In order to enjoy a literary work, we have to consider its correct context and its specific artistic qualities. The book is conceived as a general and enjoyable introduction to the experience of the work of art in Western culture. See inside the book.

The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics
The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics

Author: Jerrold Levinson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2005-01-27

Total Pages: 844

ISBN-13: 9780199279456

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

'The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics' has assembled 48 brand-new essays, making this a comprehensive guide available to the theory, application, history, and future of the field.