The essays, collected by Berleant in this volume all express the impulse to reject the received wisdom of modern aesthetics: that art demands a mode of experience sharply different from others and unique to the aesthetic situation, and that the identity of the aesthetic lies in keeping it distinct from other kinds of human experience, such as the moral, the practical, and the social. Berleant shows, on the contrary, that the value, the insight, the force of art and the aesthetic are all enhanced and enlarged by recognizing their social and human role, and that this recognition contributes both to the significance of art and to its humanizing influence on what we like to call civilization.

CONTENTS

 Preface                                                                                                                                             

Introduction: Art and the Future of Aesthetics                                                             

I.  THE FOCUS OF AESTHETICS

            Chapter I.    Re-thinking Aesthetics                                                            

            Chapter II.   The Historicity of Aesthetics                                                       

            Chapter III.  Beyond Disinterestedness                                                          

            Chapter IV.  Aesthetics and the Contemporary Arts                                       

II. ICONOCLASTIC IMPLICATIONS

            Chapter V.     The Sensuous and the Sensual in Aesthetics                            

            Chapter VI.    Aesthetic Embodiment                                                             

            Chapter VII.   Intuition in Art, or Pygmalion Revisited                                  

            Chapter VIII.  Art without Object                                                                   

            Chapter IX.    The Art of the Unseen                                                               

III.  RE-THINKING THE ARTS

            Chapter X.    Death in Image, Word, and Idea                                                

            Chapter XI.   Brancusi and the Phenomenology of Sculptural Space              

            Chapter XII.  The Verbal Presence:  An Aesthetics of Literary Performance  

            Chapter XIII.  The Intuitive Impulse in Literary Performance                       

            Chapter XIV.  A Phenomenology of Musical Performance                             

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