This book investigates the nature of aesthetic experience and aesthetic objects. Written by leading philosophers, psychologists, literary scholars and semioticians, the book addresses two intertwined issues. The first is related to the phenomenology of aesthetic experience: The understanding of how human beings respond to artworks, how we process linguistic or visual information, and what properties in artworks trigger aesthetic experiences. The examination of the properties of aesthetic experience reveals essential aspects of our perceptual, cognitive, and semiotic capacities. The second issue studied in this volume is related to the ontology of the work of art: Written or visual artworks are a specific type of objects, containing particular kinds of representation which elicit a particular kind of experience. The research question explored is: What properties in artful objects trigger this type of experience, and what characterizes representation in written and visual artworks?
The volume sets the scene for state-of-the-art inquiries in the intersection between the psychology and ontology of art. The investigations of the relation between the properties of artworks and the characteristics of aesthetic experience increase our insight into what art is. In addition, they shed light on essential properties of human meaning-making in general.
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This is an open access book, the electronic versions are freely accessible online.
Introduction: Peer F. Bundgaard.- Temporal aspects of literary reading;
David S. Miall.- Memory and mental states in the appreciation of literature;
Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon.- Temporal conflict in the reading
experience; Cathrine Kietz.- The aesthetic experience with visual art at
first glance; Paul J. Locher.- What is a surface? In the real world? And
pictures?; John M. Kennedy and Marta Wnuczko.- The idiosyncrasy of beauty:
Aesthetic universals and the diversity of taste; Patrick Colm Hogan.- Why we
are not all novelists; Shaun Gallagher.- Aesthetic relationship, cognition,
and the pleasures of art; Jean-Marie Schaeffer.- More seeing-in: surface
seeing, design seeing, and meaning seeing in pictures; Peer F. Bundgaard.-
Depiction; John Hyman.- Green war banners in central Copenhagen: A recent
political struggle over interpretation and some implications for art
interpretation as such; Frederik Stjernfelt.- The appropriation of the work
of art as a semiotic act; FrancisÉdeline and Jean-Marie Klinkenberg.-
Sculpture, diagram, and language in the artwork of Joseph Beuys; Wolfgang
Wildgen. Index.
Peer Bundgaard is professor at the Center for Semiotics, Aarhus University, and is the Editor-in-Chief of Cognitive Semiotics.
Frederik Stjernfelt is professor at the Center for Semiotics, Aarhus University, and is member of the Danish Academy as well as the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Post-doctoral habilitation Diagrammatology (Springer 2007). He is also a guest professor at Humboldt University Berlin 2010.
