The Aesthetic Body: Passion, Sensibility, and Corporeality in Seventeenth-Century France

by Erec R. Koch

Overview

This interdisciplinary study traces the radical changes that occurred in the understanding of the biological body and of human incarnation beginning in the first third of the seventeenth century. It is the first to examine the importance of that new corporeality in the determination of sensibility and passion in French culture of the seventeenth century. This study analyzes the development and deployment of the aesthetic body_that is, in its full etymological sense, a body whose principal function is the generation of affectivity_through an opening chapter on physiology to chapters on four major senses (sight, hearing, taste, touch). The study traces the intervention of the aesthetic body in representative cultural discourses: ethics, theatrical spectacle, rhetoric, artistic and moral judgment of 'taste,' and sociopolitical anthropology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611490800
Publisher:	University Press Copublishing Division
Publication date:	07/01/2008
Pages:	390
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Erec R. Koch is professor of French at the University of Tennessee.