Beauty and Sublimity Recent decades have witnessed an explosion in neuroscientific and related research treating aesthetic response. This book integrates this research with insights from philosophical aesthetics to propose new answerstolong-standingquestionsaboutbeautyandsublimity.Hogan beginsbydistinguishingwhatwerespondtoasbeautifulfromwhatwe countsociallyasbeautiful.Hegoesontoexaminetheformerintermsof informationprocessing(specifically,prototypeapproximationandnon- habitualpatternrecognition)andemotionalinvolvement(especiallyof theendogenousrewardandattachmentsystems).Inthecourseofthe book, Hogan examines such issues as how universal principles of aes- theticresponsemaybereconciledwithindividualidiosyncrasy,howitis possibletoarguerationallyoveraestheticresponse,andwhatroleper- sonalbeautyandsublimitymightplayinthedefinitionofart.Totreat theseissues,thebookconsidersworksbyWoolf,Wharton,Shakespeare, ArthurMiller,Beethoven,Matisse,andKiranRao,amongothers. patrick colm hogan isaprofessorintheDepartmentofEnglish, the Program in Cognitive Science, and the Program in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of seventeen scholarly books, including What Literature TeachesUsAboutEmotion(Cambridge,2011),andHowAuthors’Minds MakeStories(Cambridge,2013). Beauty and Sublimity A Cognitive Aesthetics of Literature and the Arts Patrick Colm Hogan UniversityofConnecticut UniversityPrintingHouse,CambridgeCB28BS,UnitedKingdom CambridgeUniversityPressispartoftheUniversityofCambridge. ItfurtherstheUniversity’smissionbydisseminatingknowledgeinthepursuitof education,learningandresearchatthehighestinternationallevelsofexcellence. www.cambridge.org Informationonthistitle:www.cambridge.org/9781107115118 (cid:2)C PatrickColmHogan2016 Thispublicationisincopyright.Subjecttostatutoryexception andtotheprovisionsofrelevantcollectivelicensingagreements, noreproductionofanypartmaytakeplacewithoutthewritten permissionofCambridgeUniversityPress. Firstpublished2016 AcataloguerecordforthispublicationisavailablefromtheBritishLibrary ISBN978-1-107-11511-8Hardback CambridgeUniversityPresshasnoresponsibilityforthepersistenceoraccuracy ofURLsforexternalorthird-partyinternetwebsitesreferredtointhispublication, anddoesnotguaranteethatanycontentonsuchwebsitesis,orwillremain, accurateorappropriate. For Lalita Contents Acknowledgments pageviii Introduction:whybeauty? 1 1 Literaryaesthetics:beauty,thebrain,andMrs.Dalloway 19 2 Theidiosyncrasyofbeauty:aestheticuniversalsandthe diversityoftaste 46 3 Unspokenbeauty:problemsandpossibilitiesofabsence 76 4 Aestheticresponserevisited:quandariesaboutbeauty andsublimity 107 5 MyOthelloproblem:prestigestatus,evaluation,and aestheticresponse 162 6 Whatisaestheticargument? 178 7 Artandbeauty 215 Afterword:abriefrecapitulation,withacodaon anti-aestheticart 245 Workscited 257 Index 277 vii Acknowledgments AnearlierversionofpartofChapter1appearedas“LiteraryAesthetics: Beauty,theBrain,andMrs.Dalloway,”inLiterature,Neurology,andNeu- roscience, ed. Anne Stiles, Stanley Finger, and Franc¸ois Boller (Boston, MA: Elsevier, 2014), 319–337. An earlier version of some additional sections of Chapter 1 appeared as “Attachment System Involvement in Esthetic Response” in Archives of Neuroscience 1.3 (2014). An earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared as “The Idiosyncrasy of Beauty: AestheticUniversalsandtheDiversityofTaste,”inInvestigationsintothe PhenomenologyandtheOntologyoftheWorkofArt:WhatAreArtworks,and How DoWeExperience Them?, ed. Peer Bundgaard and Frederik Stjern- felt (Dordrecht, Germany: Springer Verlag, 2015, (cid:2)C Peer Bundgaard and Frederik Stjernfelt and Patrick Colm Hogan, 2015). (The latter “book is published with open access at SpringerLink.com”; the chapter ofthatvolume“isdistributedunderthetermsoftheCreativeCommons AttributionNoncommercialLicense,whichpermitsanynoncommercial use,distribution,andreproductioninanymedium,providedtheoriginal author(s) and source are credited.”) I am grateful to the publishers for permission to include the revised versions here. Earlier versions of Chapter 1 and parts of Chapter 3 were presented at the University of Mainz, the University of Vienna, Duke University, and the University ofConnecticutin2013.AnearlierversionofpartofChapter6waspre- sented at the Shakespeare 450 conference (Paris 2014). I am grateful to theorganizersoftheseeventsforgivingmetheopportunitytosharemy thoughtsonthesetopicsandtotheparticipantsfortheirstimulatingcom- ments and questions. I should particularly mention Sibylle Baumbach, Martha Cutter, Deborah Jenson, Christa Knellwolf, Vanessa Levine- Smith, Anja Mueller-Wood, Letitia Naigles, Alejandra Rodriguez, Margarete Rubik, and William Snyder. Many of the ideas of the book werepresentedinmyseminaronbeautyandsublimityattheUniversity of Connecticut. I would like to thank my students for their comments andhelpinclarifyingtheseideas:CarlaCalandra,NicoleHaiber,Rachel Kinstler,andPaigeKolakowski,withspecialthankstoKatieHires,Chris viii