Includes bibliographical references (pages 201-208) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: Argument and Contexts -- Part I. The Creative Process and Social Action: 1. Yeats and Art as a Form of Religious Experience; 2. Joyce and Art as a Form of Religious Experience; 3. Sorel's Social Myth and Art as a Form of Religious Experience -- Part II. Reader Response and Social Action: 4. Aesthetic Experience, Religion, and Economic Materialism in Yeats; 5. Aesthetic Experience, Religion, and Economic Materialism in Joyce; 6. Sorel's Social Myth, Aesthetico-Religious Experience, and Economic Materialism -- Conclusion: Art and Life Rhythms.
Summary:
"This monograph is based on archival research and close readings of James Joyce's and W. B. Yeats's poetics and political aesthetics. Georges Sorel's theory of social myth is used as a starting point for exploring the ways in which the experience of art, like that of social myth, can be seen as a form of religious experience. The theorisation of the experience of art as a form of religious experience illuminates the role of art in engendering social attitudes in opposition to economic materialism and capitalism. Based on these analyses, the arguments explore the ways in which a theory that defines the experience of art as a form of religious experience can help us to answer three questions of pressing interest for the contemporary moment: How can we read cultural texts to imagine forms of social belonging through which to challenge the isolation of economic materialism? How can we imagine cultural texts to create the collective relations necessary for social change in global capitalism? How can we define an ethics of satisfaction that does not relate to this capital modernity?"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.