Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making

by Yuriko Saito

Yuriko Saito explores the nature and significance of the aesthetic dimensions of people's everyday life. Everyday aesthetics has the recognized value of enriching one's life experiences and sharpening one's attentiveness and sensibility. Saito draws out its broader importance for how we make our worlds, environmentally, morally, as citizens and consumers. Saito urges that we have a social responsibility to encourage cultivation of aesthetic literacy and vigilance against aesthetic manipulation. Yuriko Saito argues that ultimately, everyday aesthetics can be an effective instrument for directing the humanity's collective and cumulative world-making project for the betterment of all its inhabitants.

Everyday aesthetics has been seen as a challenge to contemporary Anglo-American aesthetics discourse, which is dominated by the discussion of art and beauty. Saito responds to controversies about the nature, boundary, and status of everyday aesthetics and argues for its legitimacy. She highlights the multi-faceted aesthetic dimensions of everyday life that are not fully accounted for by the commonly-held account of defamiliarizing the familiar.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

260 pages, Hardcover

Published September 6, 2017

About the author

Yuriko Saito (斉藤 百合子 Saitō Yuriko?) is a professor of philosophy at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

Saito joined the faculty at RISD in 1981 and was the head of the Special Studies department from 1989-1992. Saito was born in raised in Sapporo, Japan and attended International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree. She then attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison for graduate school and received a PhD in Philosophy with a minor in Japanese literature. Saito received the RISD Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1999. She serves on the editorial board for Environmental Aesthetics, is an editorial consultant for The British Journal of Aesthetics, and was a trustee member for the American Society for Aesthetics. She has many publications in the fields of everyday aesthetics, environmental aesthetics, and Japanese aesthetics, and has written and reviewed numerous book chapters. One of her most recent book publications, entitled Everyday Aesthetics was released in 2008 by Oxford University Press. She has presented at University of Houston, Babson College, Baruch College, University of Montana at Missoula, Hampshire College in Massachusetts, University of Texas at Austin, as well as at various locations in the U.S., Japan, and Finland. Saito currently resides in Rhode Island with her family.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Mills College Library]

111.85 S1582 2017

[Yang]

very clear