Emerging Visions of the Aesthetic Process explores the processes underlying aesthetics and play from the perspectives of psychologists, philosophers, and semiologists. It reveals the different ways in which scholars think about the following questions: (1) What is the origin of the creative process? (2) How do biological, social, and cognitive processes shape the activities of artists and the responses of viewers? (3) How does literary activity draw on our experiences of everyday life and how is it tied to other kinds of media? (4) How does play affect the process of growth from childhood to adulthood? The contributors consider artistic, literary, and play activity from its most biological roots through individual cognitive and emotional processing to its expression at the social level. Emerging Visions of the Aesthetic Process offers a stimulating basis for the discussion of aesthetic processes and will serve as an integrative, comprehensive treatise on the topic for researchers and students.

In this book, some of the world's foremost 'experts on expertise' provide scientific knowledge on expertise and expert performance.

This book is a study of the “Great Movies,” that fluid category of feature films deemed by various authorities—film societies, critics, academics, and movie enthusiasts—to be the enduring and memorable works of cinematic history. But what are they about? In Wit’s End, the author attempts to “make sense” of these films in order to understand their greatness in the context of their relation to other films and to the worlds they come from and recreate on screen. To that end, we employ the conceptual power of pragmatic social theory and the rich idea of aesthesis to explore and arrange these films as a means of understanding what they express about the universality of human life in our keen use of wit, organization of social wont, and direction of cultural way. It is hoped that such an inquiry will illuminate the glory of the great films and contribute to the advance of film studies.

This book focuses on leadership as a visual discourse and explores the construction of this discourse within the context of Bedouin Arabia, and the Middle East more broadly. In it, the author considers business and organisational leadership from an aesthetic perspective and in the context of various geographical and historical settings. The book examines the work of a variety of artists, and examines how public representations of business and political figures are used as a tool of leadership. Using a Foucauldian perspective, the book explores the interconnected concepts of power and knowledge, examining how visual images are used in the Middle Eastern context for leaders to communicate with their followers and the public. The Bedouin business world provides a unique opportunity for the researcher to examine the interplay between culture, management and politics. The book will be of interest to academics working in the fields of aesthetics, leadership, management, culture, and the Middle East more broadly.

Psyche and the Literary Muses focuses on the psychology of literature from an empirical point of view, rather than the more typical psychoanalytic position, and concentrates on literary content rather than readers or writers. The book centers on the author’s quantitative studies of brief literary and quasi-literary forms, ranging from titles of short stories and names of literary characters to clichés and quotations from literary sources, in demonstrating their contribution to the topics of learning, perception, thinking, emotions, creativity, and especially person perception and aging. More broadly, Psyche bears on literary studies, art, and psychology in general, as well as interdisciplinarity. This book deepens the understanding and appreciation of literature for scholars, academics and the general reader.

This book presents several original studies of artistically talented children and their less-talented peers. The focus is on the spontaneous drawings children produce and on the types of compositions children generate when given materials to compose. Milbrath's model of artistic talent attributes individual differences to the figurative abilities of talented children, and her theory is richly supported by original examples of children's artwork.

Malnar (architecture, U. of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign) and Vodvarka (fine arts, Loyala U. Chicago) explore the nature of sensory response to the spatial constructs that people invest with meaning, ranging from buildings of various sorts and purposes to gardens to constructions of fantasy. These responses can serve as a typology for the design of si