1st Edition

Imperfectionist Aesthetics in Art and Everyday Life

Edited By Peter Cheyne Copyright 2023
412 Pages 23 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

412 Pages 23 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

412 Pages 23 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book presents interdisciplinary research on the aesthetics of perfection and imperfection. Broadening this growing field, it connects the aesthetics of imperfection with issues in areas including philosophy, music, literature, urban environment, architecture, art theory, and cultural studies. The contributors to this volume argue that imperfection has value in being open and inclusive. The... Read more

1. Imperfectionist Aesthetics, Broadening the Field and Clarifying the Definition

Peter Cheyne

I. Imperfection Across the Arts and Culture

2. Imperfectionist Aesthetics and the Inclusionist Ethos

Peter Cheyne

3. Imperfection and the Unfinished Work

Andy Hamilton

4. Art Proper, Perfectionism, and the Sacred Arts

Gordon Graham

II. Music

5. Revisiting the Aesthetics of Imperfection after Thirty-Five Years

Ted Gioia

6. Close Enough for Jazz: Imperfection and Jazz Improvisation

David Wild

7. A Social Aesthetics and Ethics of Imperfection: Insights from Karnatak Music, Jazz and Free Improvisation

Lara Pearson

III. Visual and Theatrical Arts

8. The Necessity of Imperfection: Philip Guston in the 1950s

Karen Lang

9. Thai Theatre and the Interplay of Perfection and Imperfection

Sirithorn Siriwan and Sarawanee Sukhumvada

10. Wabi-Sabi Aesthetic and Joseph Beuys’ Badewanne (1960)

Eda Keskin

IV. Literature

11. The Aesthetics of Weeds: A Case in Junzaburō Nishiwaki

Kaz Oishi and Yasuo Kobayashi

12. The Poetics of Ruins: Matsuo Basho and Nathaniel Hawthorne, A Comparative Study

Gregory Dunne

13. The Aesthetics of Perfection and Imperfection in Iris Murdoch’s An Accidental Man

Fiona Tomkinson

14. The Triumph of Imperfection: Yeats’s ‘Among School Children’

Joseph S. O’Leary

V. Everyday Life

15. The Role of Imperfection in Consumer Aesthetics

Yuriko Saito

16. Imperfection and the Politics of Realism

Thomas Docherty

17. Everyday Encounters with Aesthetic Imperfection and Perfection

James Kirwan

18. Aesthetic Imperfection and Ethical Edification

Lucas Scripter

19. Collecting What? Collecting as an Everyday Aesthetic Act

Laura Di Summa

VI. Body, Self, and the Person

20. Bodies, Functions, and Imperfections

Sherri Irvin

21. Imperfection as a Vehicle for Fat Visibility in Popular Media

Cheryl Frazier

22. Imperfection and Beauty of Character

Glenn Parsons

23. The Self, Perfectionism, and the Value of Imperfection

Christopher Hamilton

VII. Urban Environments

24. Street Art, Graffiti, and Tags: The Value of Imperfection in Urban Aesthetics

Andrea Baldini

25. The Aesthetics of Imperfection and Architectural Design for Memorial Sites: Four Documentation Centres on National Socialism in Germany

Rumiko Handa

26. Urban Experience as Aesthetic Compromise

Sanna Lehtinen

27. Grit and Urban (Im)Perfection

Renee Conroy.

Index

Biography

Peter Cheyne is Associate Professor in British Literature and Culture, Shimane University, Japan, and Visiting Fellow in the Department of Philosophy, University of Durham, UK. He is the author of Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy (2020). Additionally, he is the editor of Coleridge and Contemplation (2017) and co-editor, with Andy Hamilton and Max Paddison, of The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics (2020).

"This collection of essays discusses the occurrence, function, and value of imperfection in a variety of human practices ... More work can be expected in this area, and this volume will be a reference point for those who will engage in it."

Matteo Ravasio, British Journal of Aesthetics