Description: The scope of this book is the characterization of the template for the properly aesthetic experience, composed of the prerequisite (desire) and the three subsequent phases: excess, pause (rupture, break), and recuperation (surprise).
Brief description: Jadranka Skorin-Kapov is Professor of Operations Research at Stony Brook University, USA.
Review Quotes:
"The book's strength is in her [Skorin-Kapov's] imaginative reading of the history of philosophy. . . .Skorin-Kapov's book connects well with a history of aesthetics that deserves to be scrutinized and rewritten from new exciting angles." --Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
"Jarred by endless war and jaded by decades of 'culture industry', one might think of surprise as a quaintly exotic or even extinct experience. Yet in proving the irrepressible character of what she calls 'the desire for the unexpected' and its intrinsic tie to the 'Aha!' experience, Jadranka Skorin-Kapov rekindles hope in a seemingly hopeless world." --Robert Harvey, Stony Brook University "The arguments, analyses, and insights presented in The Aesthetics of Desire and Surprise are new and important. The strongest features of the work are its originality and thoroughness. Many works refer to surprise as a component of some other analysis, but no other work that I know of is devoted exclusively to the phenomenology of surprise. Surprise is an underappreciated category of the aesthetic that gets its due in this work" --Richard Gilmore, Concordia College