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What Good Are The Arts
Paperback Edition: 1/2006
Do the arts make us better people? Are they a sign of civilization? Why should 'high' be thought higher than 'low'? Are judgements about art anything more than personal opinions? What are works of art anyway - do they belong to some special, sacred category?
Can the brain-scientists who are investigating the arts tell us anything useful about them? In the first part of his new book John Carey returns startling answers to these and related questions. In the second part he makes out a self-confessedly personal and subjective case for the superiority of literature to all other arts.
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About the Author:
John Carey is Merton Professor of English at Oxford University, a distinguished critic, reviewer and broadcaster, and the author of several books, including studies of Donne, Dickens and Thackeray, and most recently, Pure Pleasure: A Guide to the Twentieth Century's Most Enjoyable Books, described, by James Wood in the London Review of Books, as 'likeable, wise and often right ... one feels an attractive sense of partisanship in Carey's writing, an alliance with the ordinary, the plain spoken, the unlettered, the sympathetic and the humane. Carey writes with an Orwellian attention to decency'. He is a regular critic on BBC2's Newsnight Review. He is also the editor of the best-selling anthologies The Faber Book of Reportage, The Faber Book of Science and The Faber Book of Utopias.
Pages : 304
Publisher : Faber & Faber
Publication date : 2006-09
Subjects: Non-fiction, Social Sciences, Sociology, Cultural Studies