Art and Interpretation is a comprehensive anthology of readings on aesthetics. Its aim is to present fundamental philosophical issues in such a way as to create a common vocabulary for those from diverse backgrounds to communicate meaningfully about aesthetic issues. To that end, the editor has provided selections from a wide variety of challenging works in aesthetic theory, both classical and modern. The approach is often cross-disciplinary. Within the discipline of philosophy it seeks to balance readings from the analytic tradition with continental European, hermeneutical postmodern (including deconstructionist), and feminist readings. 

The anthology is thus broadly conceived, but by grouping the readings into sections such as ‘Expression and Aesthetic object,’ ‘Psychology and Interpretation,’ ‘Marxist Theory,’ and ‘Culture, Gender, and Difference,’ it aims as well to provide depth of coverage for each topic or issue. The book opens with a historical section containing substantial selections from Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Shelley and Nietzsche; these readings introduce themes that recur and are developed in the remainder of the anthology.

Comments: 

"A very intelligent and wide-ranging collection." - Ronald Moore, University of Washington, co-author, Puzzles in Art

Eric Dayton is a professor and former Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Saskatchewan. He has published extensively on such diverse topics as pragmatism, Wittgenstein, and the philosophy of C. I. Lewis. 

Academics please note that this is a title classified as having a restricted allocation of complimentary copies. While the availability of bound complimentary copies is restricted to desk copies only, electronic complimentary copies are readily available for those professors wishing to consider this title for possible course adoption. Should you choose to adopt the book after viewing an electronic copy we will be happy to provide a bound desk copy.

Table of Contents: [Back to Top]

Preface

Part 1. Historical Readings

 

Introduction

Plato

 

Selections from Republic Book X
Selections from Symposium

Aristotle

 

Selections from Poetics

David Hume

 

Standard of Taste

Immanuel Kant

 

Selections from Analytic of the Beautiful
Selections from Analytic of the Sublime

Percy Bysshe Shelley

 

A Defence of Poetry

Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Selections from The Birth of Tragedy
On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense

Part 2. Expression and the Aesthetic Object

 

Introduction

R.G. Collingwood

 

The Craft Theory of Art and Art as Expression

John Dewey

 

Art as Experience

Susanne Langer

 

Expressiveness

Stephen Pepper

 

The Aesthetic Object

Roman Ingarden

 

On the Phenomenological Formulation of the Aesthetic Objection

Monroe C. Beardsley

 

The Aesthetic Point of View

Mary Mothersill

 

The Judgement of Taste

Christine Battersby

 

Situating the Aesthetic: A Feminist Defence

Part 3. The Task of Definition

 

Introduction

Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

On Seeing As and On Family Resemblance

Stanley Cavell

 

Excursus on Wittgenstein’s Vision of Language

Arthur C. Danto

 

Artworks and Real Things

Barbara Savedoff

 

The Art Object

George Dickie

 

The New Institutional Theory of Art

Susan L. Feagin

 

On Defining and Interpreting Art Intentionalistically

Jerrold Levinson

 

Defining Art Historically

Jenefer M. Robinson

 

Style and Personality in the Literary Work

Part 4. Psychology and Interpretation

 

Introduction

Sigmund Freud

 

The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming

Carl Gustav Jung

 

Psychology and Literature

Ursula K. LeGuin

 

The Child and the Shadow
Some Thoughts on Narrative

Part 5. Hermeneutics and Interpretation

 

Introduction

Martin Heidegger

 

Selections from Being and Time
The Origin of the Work of Art

Hans-Georg Gadamer

 

The University of the Hermeneutical Problem

Paul Ricoeur

 

The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation

E.D. Hirsch, Jr.

 

In Defense of the Author

Roland Barthes

 

The Death of the Author

Rosalind Krauss

 

Poststructuralism and the Paraliterary

Joseph Margolis

 

Reinterpreting Interpretation

Part 6. Marxist Theory

 

Introduction

Karl Marx

 

Alienated Labour

Walter Benjamin

 

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Peter Bürger

 

The Theory of the Avant-Garde and Critical Literary Science

Herbert Marcuse

 

The Aesthetic Dimension

Post 7. (Post)modernism

 

Introduction

Clement Greenberg

 

Modernist Painting

Jürgen Habermas

 

Modernity–An Incomplete Project

Jean-Françis Lyotard

 

Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?

Linda Hutcheon

 

Representing the Postmodern

Ihab Hassan

 

The Culture of Postmodernism

Part 8. Culture, Gender and Difference

 

Introduction

Andrea Huyssen

 

Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other

Janet Wolff

 

Women’s Knowledge and Women’s Art

Christine Battersby

 

The Margins Within
Post-modernism and the Female Author

Naomi Scheman

 

The Body Politic/The Impolitic Body/ Bodily Politics

James Clifford

 

On Ethnographic Allegory
On Collecting Art and Culture

Frances E. Mascia-Lees, Patricia Sharpe and Ballerino Cohen

 

The Postmodernist Turn In Anthropology: Cautions from a Feminist Perspective

Jean-Françis Lyotard

 

Universal History and Cultural Differences

Richard Rorty

 

Cosmopolitanism Without Emancipation: A Response to Lyotard