Lexington Books
Pages: 212
•
Trim: 6 x 8¾
978-1-4985-1846-8 • Hardback • October 2015 • $95.00 • (£73.00)
978-1-4985-1848-2 • Paperback • October 2019 • $41.99 • (£32.00)
978-1-4985-1847-5 • eBook • October 2015 • $39.50 • (£30.00)
Jadranka Skorin-Kapov is professor of operations research at Stony Brook University, with additional PhDs in philosophy and art history, and author of Darren Aronofsky's Films and the Fragility of Hope.
Introduction
Chapter 1: Desire and Excess
Chapter 2: Limit Experiences, Difference, Repetition, and Singularity
Chapter 3: Surprise
Chapter 4: The Properly Aesthetic Experience and Knowledge
Chapter 5: Desire||Surprise and the Irreducible in an Aesthetic Encounter
Conclusion
Jarred by endless war and jaded by decades of ‘culture industry’, one might think of surprise as a quaintly exotic or even extinct experience. Yet in proving the irrepressible character of what she calls ‘the desire for the unexpected’ and its intrinsic tie to the ‘Aha!’ experience, Jadranka Skorin-Kapov rekindles hope in a seemingly hopeless world.
— Robert Harvey, Stony Brook University
The arguments, analyses, and insights presented in The Aesthetics of Desire and Surprise are new and important. The strongest features of the work are its originality and thoroughness. Many works refer to surprise as a component of some other analysis, but no other work that I know of is devoted exclusively to the phenomenology of surprise. Surprise is an underappreciated category of the aesthetic that gets its due in this work
— Richard Gilmore, Concordia College