UPC: 9781503631045 | Cultural Memory in the Present: Figures of Possibility: Aesthetic Experience Mysticism and the Play of the Senses (Paperback)

UPC lookup results for: 9781503631045 | Cultural Memory in the Present: Figures of Possibility: Aesthetic Experience Mysticism and the Play of the Senses (Paperback)

From medieval contemplation to the early modern cosmopoetic imagination to the invention of aesthetic experience to nineteenth-century decadent literature and to early-twentieth century essayistic forms of writing and film Niklaus Largier shows that mystical practices have been reinvented across the centuries generating a notion of possibility with unexpected critical potential. Arguing for a new understanding of mystical experience Largier foregrounds the ways in which devotion builds on experimental practices of figuration in order to shape perception emotions and thoughts anew. Largier illuminates how devotional practices are invested in the creation of possibilities and this investment has been a key element in a wide range of experimental engagements in literature and art from the seventeenth to the twentieth century and most recently in forms of new materialism. Read as a history of the senses and emotions the book argues that mystical and devotional practices have long been invested in the modulating and reconfiguring of sensation affects and thoughts. Read as a book about practices of figuration it questions ordinary protocols of interpretation in the humanities and the priority given to a hermeneutic understanding of texts and cultural artifacts.