Art and technology have been converging rapidly in the past few years; an important example of this convergence is the alliance of neuroscience with aesthetics, which has produced the new field of neuroaesthetics.Irving Massey examines this alliance, in large part to allay the fears of artists and audiences alike that brain science may "explain away" the arts. The first part of the book shows how neuroscience can enhance our understanding of certain features of art. The second part of the book illustrates a humanistic approach to the arts; it is written entirely without recourse to neuroscience, in order to show the differences in methodology between the two approaches. The humanistic style is marked particularly by immersion in the individual work and by evaluation, rather than by detachment in the search for generalizations. In the final section Massey argues that, despite these differences, once the reality of imagination is accepted neuroscience can be seen as the collaborator, not the inquisitor, of the arts.

The Neural Imagination: Aesthetic and Neuroscientific Approaches to the Arts (Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture Series)

Arts & Photography

Massey, Irving

History & Criticism

University of Texas Press

The Neural Imagination: Aesthetic and Neuroscientific Approaches to the Arts (Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture)

he Gaping Pig: Literature and Metamorphosis [Feb 13, 1976] Massey, Irving

The Gaping Pig: Literature and Metamorphosis

Literature & Fiction

University of California Press

Posthumous Poems: Mary Shelley's Fair Copy Book

McGill-Queen's University Press

This book deals with the intersection of desire, imagery and the literary in the context of ethical concerns, reviewing these themes from several points of view and using a wide variety of literary examples as illustrations.

Find You the Virtue: Ethics, Image and Desire in Literature

Reference

Univ Publ Assn

Necessary Nonsense: Aesthetics, History, Neurology, Psychology (Cognitive Approaches to Culture)

What is nonsense? How has it permeated our day-to-day speech and thought processes in order to become a vital part of the way we interpret the world? In Necessary Nonsense: Aesthetics, History, Neurology, Psychology, world-renowned expert Irving Massey commits nearly forty years of scholarly musings on the topic of nonsense to the page. Employing a writing style of overlap, repetition, discontinuity, and contradiction in order to describe the history and of grammatical, philosophical, and semantic nonsense, Massey opens his readers to the cognitive possibilities of accepting nonsense as a fundamental human feature. In Necessary Nonsense, Massey explores a range of literary and philosophical subjects, from Immanuel Kant to Lewis Carroll—parsing the ways in which nonsense permeates their writing and dialectics—including an exploration of the inability of those who suffer from Asperger's syndrome to distinguish between metaphor and nonsense, and an investigation of the neural signature of the nonsense words and phrases that occur during the transition from waking to sleep. Massey argues that while nonsense may be the “archenemy of reason,” it is also tied to the intrinsic nature of reason; the two, simply put, cannot exist without each other. Through a stunning array of exploratory topics, Massey concludes that we all live under a canopy of nonsense.

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Ohio State University Press

Review\n“Necessary Nonsense is at once a learned and an entertaining book. Irving Massey pursues not only such expected nonsense suspects as Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, but he also has much to say about Keats’s poems and philosophical texts by Kant and Wittgenstein, not to speak of examples drawn from other art forms that challenge our sense of what constitutes ‘sense.’” —Herbert S. Lindenberger, Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, Stanford University\n“This elegant essay may be the best book ever written on nonsense. It explains its occurrence and necessity in the human mind, in perception and language, in poetry and art, in life and thinking. Nonsense is what makes us human. The sense in which nonsense is meaningful in this way is made clear and will be game-changing to all readers.” —Per Aage Brandt\nWhat is nonsense? How has it permeated our day-to-day speech and thought processes in order to become a vital part of the way we interpret the world? In Necessary Nonsense: Aesthetics, History, Neurology, Psychology, world-renowned expert Irving Massey commits nearly forty years of scholarly musings on the topic of nonsense to the page. Employing a writing style of overlap, repetition, discontinuity, and contradiction in order to describe the history and of grammatical, philosophical, and semantic nonsense, Massey opens his readers to the cognitive possibilities of accepting nonsense as a fundamental human feature.\nIn Necessary Nonsense, Massey explores a range of literary and philosophical subjects, from Immanuel Kant to Lewis Carroll—parsing the ways in which nonsense permeates their writing and dialectics—including an exploration of the inability of those who suffer from Asperger's syndrome to distinguish between metaphor and nonsense, and an investigation of the neural signature of the nonsense words and phrases that occur during the transition from waking to sleep. Massey argues that while nonsense may be the “archenemy of reason,” it is also tied to the intrinsic nature of reason; the two, simply put, cannot exist without each other. Through a stunning array of exploratory topics, Massey concludes that we all live under a canopy of nonsense.

In Identity and Community, Irving Massey, a Jewish Canadian from Montreal, reexamines his cultural roots and connections. This issues of Canada and Canadian identity lie at the heart of his book, as he struggles with questions of the personal, the communal, and the political in his own background and in the discussion of three authors representative of different Canadian cultures with which Massey identifies. In an unusual coupling of topics, Sir Charles G.D. Roberts is taken as an instance of Anglophone individualism; Ida Maza, of centripetal Jewish solidarity; and Michel Tremblay, of a beleaguered but expansive Francophone communitarianism. Identity and Community is not intended to be a survey of Canadian literature and the whole spectrum of its attitudes toward community and identity. Instead, the book concentrates on a small number of examples and couples them with a theoretical study of the larger issues.

Identity and Community: Reflections on English, Yiddish, and French Literature in Canada

Wayne State University Press

The work deals with philo-Semitic texts by the non-Jewish authors of the 19th century. The writer who provides the largest body of relevant material is Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, but works by Gutzkow, Bettine von Arnim, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Hebbel, Freytag, Raabe, Fontane, Grillparzer, Ebner-Eschenbach, Anzengruber, and Ferdinand von Saar are also examined, as are several tales by the Alsatian authors Erckmann and Chatrian. There is a short chapter on women and philo-Semitism. The conclusion draws attention to the feelings of guilt that are revealed in a number of the texts.

Philo-Semitism in Nineteenth-Century German Literature (Conditio Judaica, 29)

de Gruyter

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Massey, Irving. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Massey, Irving

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Massey, Irving. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Neural Imagination: Aesthetic and Neuroscientific Approaches to the Arts (Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture Series)

The Neural Imagination: Aesthetic and Neuroscientific Approaches to the Arts (Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture)

The Gaping Pig: Literature and Metamorphosis

Posthumous Poems: Mary Shelley's Fair Copy Book

Find You the Virtue: Ethics, Image and Desire in Literature

Necessary Nonsense: Aesthetics, History, Neurology, Psychology (Cognitive Approaches to Culture)

Necessary Nonsense: Aesthetics, History, Neurology, Psychology (Cognitive Approaches to Culture)

Identity and Community: Reflections on English, Yiddish, and French Literature in Canada

Philo-Semitism in Nineteenth-Century German Literature (Conditio Judaica, 29)