Religion and aesthetic experience in Joyce and Yeats
By: Tudor Balinisteanu
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2015
Place of publication: New York, NY
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9781137434760
Subjects: Art and religion; Aesthetics; LITERARY CRITICISM / General; Religion; PHILOSOPHY / Aesthetics; Religious aspects; Social change; Political and social views; RELIGION / General; Art and society; Social aspects; LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Capitalism; LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry
Description: "This monograph is based on archival research and close readings of James Joyce's and W. B. Yeats's poetics and political aesthetics. Georges Sorel's theory of social myth is used as a starting point for exploring the ways in which the experience of art, like that of social myth, can be seen as a form of religious experience. The theorisation of the experience of art as a form of religious experience illuminates the role of art in engendering social attitudes in opposition to economic materialism and capitalism. Based on these analyses, the arguments explore the ways in which a theory that defines the experience of art as a form of religious experience can help us to answer three questions of pressing interest for the contemporary moment: How can we read cultural texts to imagine forms of social belonging through which to challenge the isolation of economic materialism? How can we imagine cultural texts to create the collective relations necessary for social change in global capitalism? How can we define an ethics of satisfaction that does not relate to this capital modernity?"--
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note:; title: Acknowledgements  Introduction: Argument and Contexts  PART I: THE CREATIVE PROCESS AND SOCIAL ACTION 1. Yeats and Art as a Form of Religious Experience  2. Joyce and Art as a Form of Religious Experience  3. Sorel's Social Myth and Art as a Form of Religious Experience  PART II: READER RESPONSE AND SOCIAL ACTION  4. Aesthetic Experience, Religion, and Economic Materialism in Yeats  5. Aesthetic Experience, Religion, and Economic Materialism in Joyce  6. Sorel's Social Myth, Aesthetico-Religious Experience, and Economic Materialism  Conclusion: Art and Life Rhythms  Notes  Bibliography.