Feeling Beauty

Description

A theory of the neural bases of aesthetic experience across the arts, which draws on the tools of both cognitive neuroscience and traditional humanist inquiry.

In Feeling Beauty, G. Gabrielle Starr argues that understanding the neural underpinnings of aesthetic experience can reshape our conceptions of aesthetics and the arts. Drawing on the tools of both cognitive neuroscience and traditional humanist inquiry, Starr shows that neuroaesthetics offers a new model for understanding the dynamic and changing features of aesthetic life, the relationships among the arts, and how individual differences in aesthetic judgment shape the varieties of aesthetic experience.

Starr, a scholar of the humanities and a researcher in the neuroscience of aesthetics, proposes that aesthetic experience relies on a distributed neural architecture—a set of brain areas involved in emotion, perception, imagery, memory, and language. More important, it emerges from networked interactions, intricately connected and coordinated brain systems that together form a flexible architecture enabling us to develop new arts and to see the world around us differently. Focusing on the “sister arts” of poetry, painting, and music, Starr builds and tests a neural model of aesthetic experience valid across all the arts. Asking why works that address different senses using different means seem to produce the same set of feelings, she examines particular works of art in a range of media, including a poem by Keats, a painting by van Gogh, a sculpture by Bernini, and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Starr’s innovative, interdisciplinary analysis is true to the complexities of both the physical instantiation of aesthetics and the realities of artistic representation.

An ambitious text…exciting as it is timely…Feeling Beauty is at its best when Starr is engaged in close reading leading the reader step by step through a careful explanation and elucidation of a body of text with the aid of her model…clear, legible, and, frankly, a delight to read.—Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism—

Feeling Beauty by G. Gabrielle Starr is an elegantly written (lucid and even literary) examination of the neurobiology of aesthetic experience crossing poetry, visual art, and music.

—Consciousness, Literature and the Arts—

Feeling Beauty, however, is distinctive in both presenting new research on the regions of the brain activated by intense aesthetic responses and suggesting the ways in which this research might open up a new, dynamic understanding of aesthetics.

—Modern Philology—G. Gabrielle Starr is Seryl Kushner Dean of the College of Arts and Science and Professor of English at New York University.US

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