POSING SEX. Toward a Perceptual Ethics for Literary and Visual Art.

Singer, Alan.

ISBN 10: 1501339184 / ISBN 13: 9781501339189

Published by Bloomsbury Academic, New York NY 2018., 2018

About this Item

1st edition. 8vo. 217pp. B/w. illustrations. Original pictorial white boards lettered in black and orange. ISBN 9781501339189 US$12.

Seller Inventory # 196112

Bibliographic Details

• Title: POSING SEX. Toward a Perceptual Ethics for Literary and Visual Art.
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, New York NY 2018.
• Publication Date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501339184
• ISBN 13: 9781501339189
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Seller catalogs:
  • ART

About this title

Synopsis

Posing Sex: Toward a Perceptual Ethics for Literary and Visual Art views the long and provocative tradition of representing the sexual act in Western art as an occasion for challenging assumptions about personhood. It is uncontroversial that what Singer dubs the “sex image,” the artist’s posing of human figures in the act of coitus, is an enduring compositional armature for artists from antiquity to the present. Singer, however, makes the quite controversial claim that this aesthetic practice, in literature and painting especially, serves as a powerful métier for exploring how the mind is continuous with the sensuously lively body rather than its rationalistic antagonist. Singer draws upon a rich philosophical tradition—from the Greek Stoics, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hegel to contemporary theorists of perception and aesthetic agency—to show how the stakes of aesthetic experience epitomized in the sex image are essentially ethical. Referencing a broad range of image-based artworks—literary, painterly, and cinematic—Singer illustrates the proposition that “posing sex” broadens the scope of our knowledge about how feeling reciprocates with reason-giving.

About the Author

Alan Singer is Professor of English at Temple University, USA. He is the author of four critical books, including The Self-Deceiving Muse: Notice and Knowledge in the Work of Art (2010) and Aesthetic Reason: Artworks and the Deliberative Ethos (2003). He is the author of many articles on aesthetics and co-editor of Literary Aesthetics: A Reader (2001).