Starr, G. Gabrielle (President, Pomona College)

Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience - Feeling Beauty Starr, G. Gabrielle (President, Pomona College)

Commendation Quotes: No prior work has so firmly established that neuroscience and aesthetics can be mutually illuminating. Informed by her rich knowledge of art history and literature, Starr deciphers brain scans with unprecedented subtlety, drawing important lessons about the embodied nature of aesthetic experience and the hidden unity of seemingly disparate arts. Commendation Quotes: G. Gabrielle Starr exhibits a rare constellation of skills: a fine literary sensitivity coupled with extensive knowledge of recent work in neuroscience. As a result, "Feeling Beauty" represents a new level of excellence in neuroaesthetics. This groundbreaking field is lucky to count G. Gabrielle Starr among its finest practitioners. Table of Contents: Figures -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Aesthetics, Neuroaesthetics, and the Sister Arts -- Pleasure and Emotion -- Imagination and Imagery -- Aesthetic Knowledge -- What Holds Aesthetic Experiences Together? -- Toward a Neuroaesthetic Model -- 1. Seen and Heard: A Model for the Sister Arts -- Emotion and Variation -- Pleasure, Comparison, and Reward -- Conceiving of Difference and of Self -- 2. Aesthetics beyond the Mind's Eye: Imagery and the Sister Arts -- The Imagery of Sense -- Knowledge and Multisensory Imagery -- Moving Pictures: Aesthetics and Imagery Networks -- 3. Toward a Dynamic Aesthetics: The Sister Arts and Beyond -- Invisible Beauty: Keats and the Limits of the Senses -- Dynamic Knowledge: Ovid, What Is New and What Is Not -- Music and Temporality: Beethoven and Bluegrass -- Endings and Rebirth: Van Gogh and Erasure -- Conclusion: Carmen Perpetuum -- Appendix: The Brain on Art (Excerpt) -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index. Publisher Marketing: 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. Review Citations:

Choice 05/01/2014 (EAN 9780262019316, Hardcover)

Contributor Bio:  Starr, G Gabrielle G. Gabrielle Starr is Seryl Kushner Dean of the College of Arts and Science and Professor of English at New York University.