Art Mind And Narrative

This volume presents new essays on art, mind, and narrative inspired by the work of the late Peter Goldie, who was Samuel Hall Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester until 2011. Its three sections cover Narrative Thinking; Emotion, Mind, and Art; and Art, Value, and Ontology. Within these sections, leading authorities in the philosophy of mind, aesthetics and the emotions offer the reader entry points into many of the most exciting contemporary debates in these areas of philosophy. Topics covered include the role that narrative thinking plays in our lives, our imaginative engagement with fiction, the emotions and their role in the motivation of action, the connection between artistic activity and human well-being, and the appreciation and ontological status of conceptual artworks.

This volume presents new essays on art, mind, and narrative inspired by the work of the late Peter Goldie, who was Samuel Hall Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester until 2011. Its three sections cover Narrative Thinking; Emotion, Mind, and Art; and Art, Value, and Ontology. Within these sections, leading authorities in the philosophy of mind, aesthetics and the emotions offer the reader entry points into many of the most exciting contemporary debates in these areas of philosophy. Topics covered include the role that narrative thinking plays in our lives, our imaginative engagement with fiction, the emotions and their role in the motivation of action, the connection between artistic activity and human well-being, and the appreciation and ontological status of conceptual artworks.

These beautifully illustrated picture books encourage discussion about the everyday emotive issues that children face in todays world. Your mind is a bit like an amazing garden. A garden has lots of tracks and paths that lead in different directions. It has wide open spaces where we can create and play. A garden has places to grow things and do work. It has clever parts that help us to grow and learn.

Peter Goldie explores the ways in which we think about our lives—our past, present, and future—in narrative terms. The notion of narrative is highly topical, and highly contentious, in a wide range of fields including philosophy, psychology and psychoanalysis, historical studies, and literature. The Mess Inside engages with all of these areas of discourse, and steers a path between the sceptics who are dismissive of the idea of narrative as having any worthwhile use at all, and those who argue that our very selfhood is somehow constituted by a narrative. After introducing the notion of narrative, Goldie discusses the way we engage with the past in narrative terms. This involves an exploration of the essentially perspectival nature of narrative thinking, which gains support from much recent empirical work on memory. Drawing on literary examples and on work in psychoanalysis, Goldie considers grief as a case study of this kind of narrative thinking, extending to a discussion of the crucial notion of 'closure'. Turning to narrative thinking about our future, Goldie discusses the many structural parallels between our imaginings of the future and our memories of the past, and the role of our emotions in response to what we imagine in thinking about our future in the light of our past. This is followed by a second case study—an exploration of self-forgiveness. In this ground-breaking book, Goldie supports scepticism about the idea that there is such a thing as a narrative self, but argues that having a narrative sense of self, quite distinct from any metaphysical notion of selfhood, is at the heart of what it is to think of ourselves, and others, as having a narratable past, present, and future.

"This book offers many literary occasions for thinking about the challenging and ever changing connections and disconnections of truth and beauty in their times and in their texts." ──Professor Rachel Bowlby, UCL This book aims to be a guidance, showing a way of reading a literary text not only verbally but also visually. Through artistic terms and movements, the readers can see that a literary text can be enjoyed not only through the black words on the whitepapers. A solid and profound understanding of the visual arts can especially remind us how different and also, how difficult, when it comes to read a verbal painting. For scholars, students, and also for people who are interested in the mutual development of visual and verbal narrative forms, this book is also innovative.

Philosophical questions about the arts go naturally with other kinds of questions about them. Art is sometimes said to be an historical concept. But where in our cultural and biological history did art begin? If art is related to play and imagination, do we find any signs of these things in our nonhuman relatives? Sometimes the other questions look like ones the philosopher of art has to answer. Anyone who thinks that interpretation in the arts is an activity that leaves the intentions of the author behind needs to explain how and why this differs so fundamentally from ordinary conversational interpretation, where the only decent models we have are ones that depend crucially on the recovery of intention. Anyone who thinks that imaginative literature has anything to tell us about time had better have a position on how earlier and later relate to past and future. Anyone who thinks that empathy plays a role in literary engagement had better have a psychologically plausible account of what empathy is. Philosophical questions about the arts also go naturally with other kinds of philosophical questions: we can't think constructively about representation in art without thinking about representation; text, meaning, reference and existence get similarly drawn into the conversation. Some ideas that philosophers of art deal with emerge from other disciplines. In literary theory an enormous amount of attention has been lavished on tracing the sources of unreliability in narrative. Is the result adequate to the details of the particular works we call unreliable? Contemporary film theory is generally hostile to the fiction/documentary distinction. Are there in fact any grounds for this? This book of thirteen connected essays examines questions of all these kinds. It ranges from the semantics of proper names, through the pragmatics of literary and filmic interpretation, to the aesthetic function of stone age implements. Some of the essays have not been published before; some that have are here substantially revised.

Narratives enable readers to vividly experience fictional and non-fictional contexts. Writers use a variety of language features to control these experiences: they direct readers in how to construct contexts, how to draw inferences and how to identify the key parts of a story. Writers can skilfully convey physical sensations, prompt emotional states, effect moral responses and even alter the readers' attitudes. Mind, Brain and Narrative examines the psychological and neuroscientific evidence for the mechanisms which underlie narrative comprehension. The authors explore the scientific developments which demonstrate the importance of attention, counterfactuals, depth of processing, perspective and embodiment in these processes. In so doing, this timely, interdisciplinary work provides an integrated account of the research which links psychological mechanisms of language comprehension to humanities work on narrative and style.

A rich, thought-provoking collection of essays, critiques and interviews from the influential author of Ain't I a Woman and All About Love ‘If one could make a people lose touch with their capacity to create, lose sight of their will and their power to make art, then the work of subjugation, of colonization, is complete. Such work can be undone only by acts of reclamation.’ In a collection of essays, critiques and interviews, bell hooks responds to the ongoing dialogues about producing, exhibiting and criticising art and aesthetics in a world increasingly concerned with identity politics. hooks shares her own experience of the transformative power of art whilst exploring topics ranging from art in education and the home to the politics of space and imagination as a revolutionary tool. She positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be empowering within the Black community. Speaking with artists such as Carrie Mae Weems and Alison Saar, and examining the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Art on My Mind is a generous and expansive body of work that has become increasingly relevant since it was first published in 1995. Here is an essential tool for understanding the contemporary moment, and a fundamental text for any reader concerned with making and sustaining a democratic artistic culture.