Böcker av Patrick Colm (University of Connecticut) Hogan

Recent decades have witnessed an explosion in neuroscientific and related research treating aesthetic response. This book integrates this research with the insights of philosophical aesthetics to propose new answers to longstanding questions about beauty and sublimity. To treat these issues, Hogan considers works by Woolf, Wharton, and Matisse, among others.

Literature provides us with insights into the ways emotions are produced, experienced and enacted in human social life. Hogan's study explores emotions in the context of current neurobiological, psychological and sociological research. In each case, he draws on Shakespeare and writers from different historical periods or different cultural backgrounds.

This book explores how the creations of great authors result from the same cognitive processes as our everyday counterfactual and hypothetical imaginations. Patrick Colm Hogan develops a rigorous theory of the principles governing simulation, drawing on recent research in neuroscience and literary analyses of works by Austen, Faulkner, Shakespeare, Racine, Brecht, Kafka and Calvino.

Hogan argues that the stories people admire in different cultures follow a limited number of patterns determined by cross-culturally constant ideas about emotion. He concludes with a discussion of the relations among narrative, emotion concepts, and the biological and social components of emotion.