Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays

by Noël Carroll

Beyond Aesthetics brings together philosophical essays addressing art and related issues by one of the foremost philosophers of art at work today. Countering conventional aesthetic theories--those maintaining that authorial intention, art history, morality and emotional responses are irrelevant to the experience of art--Noël Carroll argues for a more pluralistic and commonsensical view in which all of these factors can play a legitimate role in our encounter with art works. The book explores works of high culture and the avant-garde, as well as works of popular culture, jokes, horror novels, and suspense films.

Genres: Philosophy, Art

468 pages, Paperback

First published July 4, 1997

About the author

Noël Carroll (born 1947) is an American philosopher considered to be one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy of art. Although Carroll is best known for his work in the philosophy of film, he has also published journalism, works on philosophy of art generally, theory of media, and also philosophy of history.

As of 2012, he is a distinguished professor of philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. He holds PhDs in both cinema studies and philosophy. As a journalist, earlier in his career he published a number of articles in the Chicago Reader, Artforum, In These Times, Dance Magazine, Soho Weekly News and The Village Voice. He is also the author of five documentaries.

Perhaps his most popular and influential book is The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (1990), an examination of the aesthetics of horror fiction (in novels, stories, radio and film). As noted in the book's introduction, Carroll wrote Paradoxes of the Heart in part to convince his parents that his lifelong fascination with horror fiction was not a waste of time. Another important book by Carroll is Mystifying Movies (1988), a critique of the ideas of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and the semiotics of Roland Barthes, which has been credited with inspiring a shift away from what Carroll describes as the "Psycho-Semiotic Marxism" that had dominated film studies and film theory in American universities since the 1970s.

Reviews

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

aesthetics from the analytical philosophy tradition. as opposed to the dreamy, highly coded and often obfuscatory theorizing associated with the continental tradition, carroll writes with the sensibility and desire for clarity of the best analytic philosophy. his primary target (particularly in the first part, but really throughout) is the aetshetics of monroe beardsley. dumbed down, beardlsey held that the only relevant criteria for identification of an aesthetic object and evaluation of said object are experiential. carroll brings in dickie (his teacher) and danto to back up the idea that beyond aesthetic experience, interpretation and the creator's intentionality are also important considerations. please read these essays.

[Mark Staff Brandl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book, a collection of philosophical essays on a wide range of topics important to the arts. In particular, the chapter/essay entitled “Visual Metaphor,” the first in this direction which contributed so much to my thought, leading to my book (also on Goodreads), ‘A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art,’ for which I cannot thank him enough. I enjoy all his books (e.g the one on mass culture especially), but this collection is a peak achievement.

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Philosopher Noel Carroll has spent a lifetime thinking about art, and this book, Beyond Aesthetics, collects his main arguments regarding theories of art and art-related concepts. The title Beyond Aesthetics comes from Carroll's stance that concern with aesthetics has for too long dominated the discussion about art. Carroll understands aesthetics as viewing a work of art in terms of its formal properties and relations. But Carroll says that there's much value to the other ways in which we ordinarily approach art, including when we think about an artwork in terms of particular content, and that means also judging it morally, politically, or socially, if the categories apply to that particular work of art or that kind of art.

You'll also find in this work Carroll's ideas about what makes something a work of art. He has claimed that the best way to understand art is as a set of historical practices that imitate or build on one another or challenge one another. We understand art, he claims, in relation to the history of other art pieces. This has come to be called the "historical theory of art."

At the end of this collection, Carroll writes about a variety of topics, including how jokes work, the value of junk fiction, and how we can be delighted by works even when we're already familiar with the stories.

The book is very readable and highly enjoyable. There are moments at which it becomes technical but Carroll is so good at explaining his concepts that I think most people would enjoy reading this.

[Good Thing]

Material Culture