Everyday Aesthetics PDF Download

Author: Yuriko Saito
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019160853X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Everyday aesthetic experiences and concerns occupy a large part of our aesthetic life. However, because of their prevalence and mundane nature, we tend not to pay much attention to them, let alone examine their significance. Western aesthetic theories of the past few centuries also neglect everyday aesthetics because of their almost exclusive emphasis on art. In a ground-breaking new study, Yuriko Saito provides a detailed investigation into our everyday aesthetic experiences, and reveals how our everyday aesthetic tastes and judgments can exert a powerful influence on the state of the world and our quality of life. By analysing a wide range of examples from our aesthetic interactions with nature, the environment, everyday objects, and Japanese culture, Saito illustrates the complex nature of seemingly simple and innocuous aesthetic responses. She discusses the inadequacy of art-centered aesthetics, the aesthetic appreciation of the distinctive characters of objects or phenomena, responses to various manifestations of transience, and the aesthetic expression of moral values; and she examines the moral, political, existential, and environmental implications of these and other issues.

Author: Andrew Light
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231135025
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
This collection explores the aesthetic qualities of human relationships, sports, taste, smell, food, and natural and built environments.

Author: Katya Mandoki
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131713849X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Katya Mandoki advances in this book the thesis that it is not only possible but crucial to open up the field of aesthetics (traditionally confined to the study of art and beauty) toward the richness and complexity of everyday life. She argues that in every process of communication, whether face to face or through the media, fashion, and political propaganda, there is always an excess beyond the informative and functional value of a message. This excess is the aesthetic. Following Huizinga's view of play as an ingredient of any social environment, Mandoki explores how various cultural practices are in fact forms of playing since, for the author, aesthetics and play are Siamese twins. One of the unique contributions of this book is the elaboration and application of a semiotic model for the simultaneous analysis of social interactions in the four registers, namely visual, auditory, verbal and body language, to detect the aesthetic strategies deployed in specific situations. She argues that since the presentation of the self is targeted towards participants' sensibilities, aesthetics plays a key role in these modes of exchange. Consequently, the author updates important debates in this field to clear the way for a socio-aesthetic inquiry through contexts such as the family, school, medical, artistic or religious traditions from which social identities emerge.

Author: Thomas Leddy
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1770483071
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
This book explores the aesthetics of the objects and environments we encounter in daily life. Thomas Leddy stresses the close relationship between everyday aesthetics and the aesthetics of art, but places special emphasis on neglected aesthetic terms such as ‘neat,’ ‘messy,’ ‘pretty,’ ‘lovely,’ ‘cute,’ and ‘pleasant.’ The author advances a general theory of aesthetic experience that can account for our appreciation of art, nature, and the everyday.

Author: Yuriko Saito
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191652210
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Yuriko Saito explores the nature and significance of the aesthetic dimensions of people's everyday life. Everyday aesthetics has the recognized value of enriching one's life experiences and sharpening one's attentiveness and sensibility. Saito draws out its broader importance for how we make our worlds, environmentally, morally, as citizens and consumers. Saito urges that we have a social responsibility to encourage cultivation of aesthetic literacy and vigilance against aesthetic manipulation. Yuriko Saito argues that ultimately, everyday aesthetics can be an effective instrument for directing the humanity's collective and cumulative world-making project for the betterment of all its inhabitants. Everyday aesthetics has been seen as a challenge to contemporary Anglo-American aesthetics discourse, which is dominated by the discussion of art and beauty. Saito responds to controversies about the nature, boundary, and status of everyday aesthetics and argues for its legitimacy. She highlights the multi-faceted aesthetic dimensions of everyday life that are not fully accounted for by the commonly-held account of defamiliarizing the familiar.

Author: Curtis L. Carter
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443868345
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
As a new trend in aesthetics appearing concurrently in the West and the East in the last ten years, the aesthetics of everyday life points to a growing diversification among existing methodologies for pursuing aesthetics, alongside the shift from art-based aesthetics. The cultural diversity manifest in global aesthetics offers common ground for the collaborative efforts of aesthetics in both the West and the East. Given the rapidly growing interest and its potential for attracting new audiences extending beyond the more narrowly focused traditions of twentieth-century analytic and environmental aesthetics, it stands to command its own share of attention in the future of aesthetic studies. The aesthetics of everyday life has become a stream of thought with a global ambition. This interest has led to numerous systematic and in-depth works on this topic, some of which were conducted by the authors represented in this volume. A salient feature of this book is that it not only represents the recent developments of the aesthetics of everyday life in the West, but also highlights the interaction between scholars in the West and the East on this topic. Thus, the project is a contribution toward mutual progress in the collaboration between Western and Eastern aesthetics. What distinguishes this book from other anthologies and monographs on this topic is that it reconstructs the aesthetics of everyday life through cultural dialogue between the West and the East, with a view to building a new form of aesthetics of everyday life, as seen from a global perspective. At present, the aesthetics of everyday life as a newly emergent approach to aesthetics may encounter skepticism among aestheticians accustomed to the rigors of analytic philosophers who prefer to discuss aesthetics at the level of abstract concepts and argument, and who tolerate the particulars of experience mainly as illustrations. But, there is no reason to abandon the pursuit of the aesthetics of everyday life in the face of such objections. On the contrary, there are many benefits to gain in bringing aesthetics to bear on a wider sphere of human life, made possible through efforts to show the relevance of aesthetics to a broader range of human actions.

Author: Joseph H. Kupfer
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143840980X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Joseph Kupfer removes aesthetics from the exclusive province of museums, concert halls, and the periphery of human interests to reveal the impact of aesthetic experience on daily living. He combines philosophical aesthetics and critical analysis to indicate the status of aesthetic values in ordinary life, showing how aesthetic qualities and relations contribute to social, moral, and personal values. In examining the practical implications of aesthetic values for sports, sexual relationships, violence, and education, Kupfer also looks at the effect of aesthetic deprivation.

Author: Yuriko Saito
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135013418X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Building upon her previous work on everyday aesthetics, Yuriko Saito argues in this book that the aesthetic and ethical concerns are intimately connected in our everyday life. Specifically, she shows how aesthetic experience embodies a care relationship with the world and how the ethical relationship with others, whether humans, non-human creatures, environments, or artifacts, is guided by aesthetic sensibility and manifested through aesthetic means. Weaving together insights gained from philosophy, art, design, and medicine, as well as artistic and cultural practices of Japan, she illuminates the aesthetic dimensions of various forms of care in our management of everyday life. Emphasis is placed on the experience of interacting with others including objects, a departure from the prevailing mode of aesthetic inquiry that is oriented toward judgment-making from a spectator's point of view. Saito shows that when everyday activities, ranging from having a conversation and performing a care act to engaging in self-care and mending an object, are ethically grounded and aesthetically informed and guided, our experiences lead to a good life.

Author: Crispin Sartwell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000159108
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 135

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Book Description
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but it's also in the language we use and everywhere in the world around us. In this elegant, witty, and ultimately profound meditation on what is beautiful, Crispin Sartwell begins with six words from six different cultures - ancient Greek's 'to kalon', the Japanese idea of 'wabi-sabi', Hebrew's 'yapha', the Navajo concept 'hozho', Sanskrit 'sundara', and our own English-language 'beauty'. Each word becomes a door onto another way of thinking about, and looking at, what is beautiful in the world, and in our lives. In Sartwell's hands these six names of beauty - and there could be thousands more - are revealed as simple and profound ideas about our world and our selves.

Author: John Forrest
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501726307
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
Lord I'm Coming Home focuses on a small, white, rural fishing community on the southern reaches of the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina. By means of a new kind of anthropological fieldwork, John Forrest seeks to document the entire aesthetic experience of a group of people, showing the aesthetic to be an "everyday experience and not some rarefied and pure behavior reserved for an artistic elite." The opening chapter of the book is a vivid fictional narrative of a typical day in "Tidewater," presented from the perspective of one fisherman. In the following two chapters the author sets forth the philosophical and anthropological foundations of his book, paying particular attention to problems of defining "aesthetic," to methodological concerns, and to the natural landscape of his field site. Reviewing his own experience as both participant and observer, he then describes in scrupulous detail the aesthetic forms in four areas of Tidewater life: home, work, church, and leisure. People use these forms, Forrest shows, to establish personal and group identities, facilitate certain kinds of interactions while inhibiting others, and cue appropriate behavior. His concluding chapter deals with the different life cycles of men and women, insider-outsider relations, secular and sacred domains, the image and metaphor of "home," and the essential role that aesthetics plays in these spheres. The first ethnography to evoke the full aesthetic life of a community, Lord I'm Coming Home will be important reading not only for anthropologists but also for scholars and students in the fields of American studies, art, folklore, and sociology.