Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics Nature And Culture

by Yi-Fu Tuan

In this rich and rewarding work, Yi-Fu Tuan vividly demonstrates that feeling and beauty are essential components of life and society. The aesthetic is not merely one aspect of culture but its central core - both its driving force and its ultimate goal. Beginning with the individual and his physical world, Tuan's exploration progresses from the simple to the complex. His initial evaluation of the building blocks of aesthetic experience (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch) develops gradually into a wide-ranging examination of the most elaborate of human constructs, including art, architecture, literature, philosophy, music, and more.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Geography, Essays, Sociology

288 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1993

About the author

Fu Tuan (Traditional Chinese: 段義孚, born 5 December 1930) is a Chinese-U.S. geographer.
Tuan was born in 1930 in Tientsin, China. He was the son of a rich oligarch and was part of the top class in the Republic of China. Tuan attended University College, London, but graduated from the University of Oxford with a B.A. and M.A. in 1951 and 1955 respectively. From there he went to California to continue his geographic education. He received his Ph.D. in 1957 from the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

[A · Rating 2 out of 5]

A friend gave me this book in February. I don't know if she read it or not, but she said that she thought it would be an interesting read. While towards the middle of the book, I looked to the acknowledgments in the back and noticed that a mutual friend was one of the editors of this book.

What I did like is that there was some synchronicity between this book and two others which I had brought along to read, Enrique Vila-Mates' NEVER ANY END TO PARIS, and Chris Kraus' ALIENS & ANOREXIA. There were mentions of Marguerite Duras to Simone Weil... in different contexts.

I wanted to like the book but felt that the author would bring something up and only go so far with a subject, and then move on to something else. It felt like a meal with plenty of dishes but very small portions.

[Bryn]

I have not read much on aesthetics so I don't know where this falls in the world of writing about it, but this was too much inside that weird realm of 'here is how my personal taste proves these universal truths' for me to really engage with it -- I kept wanting to argue with the author about his examples.