Frontiers of Pleasure

Abstract

This book calls into question a number of influential modern notions regarding aesthetics by going back to the very beginnings of aesthetic thought in Greece and raising critical issues about Greek conceptions of how one responds to the beautiful. The analysis centers on a dominant aspect of beauty—the aural—associated with a highly influential sector of culture that comprised both poetry and instrumental music, the “activity of the Muses” named mousikê. The main argument relies on a series of close-grained readings of literary and philosophical texts, from Homer and Plato to Kant, Joyce, and Proust. Through detailed attention to such scenes as Odysseus’s encounter with the Sirens and Hermes’s playing of his newly invented lyre for his brother Apollo, the book demonstrates that the most telling moments in the conceptualization of the aesthetic are found in the Greeks’ debates and struggles over intense models of auditory pleasure. Despite a recent rebirth of interest in aesthetics, extensive discussion of this key cluster of topics has been lacking. Unlike current tendencies to treat poetry as an early, imperfect mode of meditating upon such issues, the author claims that Greek poetry and philosophy employed equally complex, albeit different, ways of articulating notions of aesthetic response. As a whole, the book discusses alternative modes of understanding aesthetics in its entirety.