The Scandal of Pleasure

by Wendy Steiner

The Scandal of Pleasure is a report from the battle-ground of contemporary culture, a landscape littered with the remains of vilified artworks and discredited orthodoxies. Caught between extremists of the right and the left, standing mutely by as culture wars rage, liberal defenders of art have failed to explain the special value of aesthetic experience. This book counters the rise of fundamentalist thinking about the arts with a liberal aesthetic for our times. Steiner reminds us that aesthetic experience requires the ability to distinguish fiction from nonfiction, the figurative from the...

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