Dimensions of Aesthetic Encounters : Perception, Interpretation, and the Signs of Art

We encounter in our lives things and situations that elicit from us special forms of attention. They affect and inform us in various ways, drawing us in and holding us in their grasp or turning us away. Works of art of all sorts, and nature in its myriad manifestations, exemplify these luring and repelling qualities and potencies. Dimensions of Aesthetic Encounters explores central perceptual, interpretative, and semiotic dimensions of these encounters, combining a wide range of examples and intellectual resources from pragmatist, hermeneutical, and semiotic frameworks. Practicing a kind of "method of rotation" Robert E. Innis breaks down barriers in aesthetic theory and shows their complementary powers. Recurring themes link each chapter, throwing a powerful light on aesthetic encounters by foregrounding such pivotal notions as play, fundedness and the role of memory, the defining quality of an artwork, energies of objects, potencies, rhythm, form, presentational abstraction, medium, symbolization, intuition, role of the body, and the non-argumentative nature of art. Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Dimensions of an Aesthetic Encounter: Encountering Giorgione’s Sunset Encountering Giorgione’s Sunset Perception and the Qualitative Matrix The Play of Interpretants Gadamer’s Hermeneutic Distinctions Mimesis, Poiesis, and Semiosis 2. Energies of Objects: Between Dewey and Langer Framing the Issues Giorgione’s The Tempest and Hustvedt’s Game of Glances On Rhythms On Livingness On Experiential Forces Between Description and Prescription 3. Quality and the Theory of Signs: Dewey’s Peircean Aesthetics Centrality of the Theory of Quality Going Out into Symbolization Imaginal, Diagrammatical, and Metaphorical Dimensions Deweyan Interpretants and the Artwork An Exemplification: Engaging Michelangelo’s Moses Robert Browning John Dewey Sigmund Freud Giorgio Vasari Beyond the Propositional Conclusion 4. Aesthetic Naturalism and the “Ways of Art”: Linking Dewey and Samuel Alexander Embodiment in a Medium Understanding Quality More on the Medium The Materiality of Inspiration Open Nature of Experiencing Metaphysical Links 5. Between Nature and Art: Analytical Exemplifications of Dewey’s Aesthetics Nature as Matrix and Medium The Scroll and the Smile: Experience Has No Edges Paradigms of Painting: On Representation, Expression, and Abstraction Shaping Nature: Qualities of Space-Time in Art and Life The Exemplary Place of Architecture On Design and the Hand Feeling and Materiality Architecture and the Articulation of the Existential Space of Meaning Conclusion 6. Pragmatism and the Challenge of a Cosmopolitan Aesthetics: On Theory beyond Borders The Problem—Scharfstein’s Challenge Some Analytical Complexities Engaging Boundaries and Affinities: The Great Image Has No Form On Blandness and the Circle of the Perceived Peirce’s Aesthetics and the Way of Beauty The Poem of the Universe and the Primacy of Quality Peircean Parallels in the Taoist Way of Beauty 7. Filling the Hole in Sense: Between Art and Philosophy The Wound in Consciousness Art and the “Far Side of Use”: Being in the Presence of Something Form between Symbolization and Abstraction Philosophy as Epiphanic and Episodic Being Affected: The Ineffable and the Invisible Art, Philosophy, and the Noise of Meaninglessness: Letting Go of Argumentation Art’s Challenge to Philosophy References Index "A novel fusing of multiple approaches and range of examples exploring the dimensions, objects, and import of aesthetic encounters"-- Provided by publisher