Essays in Aesthetics

Over the course of the past forty years, Gerard Genette’s work has profoundly influenced scholars of narratology, poetics, aesthetics, and literary and cultural criticism, and he continues to be one of France’s most influential theorists. The eighteen pieces in Essays in Aesthetics are of international interest because they are concerned either with universal aesthetic problems (the receiver’s relationship to an aesthetic object, abstract art, the role of repetition in aesthetics, genre theory, and the rapport between literature and music) or with specific moments in the work of a well-known writer or artist (such as Stendhal, Proust, Manet, Pissarro, and Canaletto). Essays in Aesthetics contains a wealth of material related to the appreciation of beauty by one of the subtlest and most original minds working in aesthetics today. Genette knows the fine arts as well as he knows literature and as a result has innovative things to say to readers in that field as well as to philosophers and literary scholars.Gerard Genette helped start the influential journal Poetique and is the author of many books, including two published in translation by the University of Nebraska Press: Mimologics and Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Dorrit Cohn is a professor emerita of German and comparative literature at Harvard University and is considered one of the main contributors to modern poetics. She is the author of The Distinction of Fiction and Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction.