Coming soon. Experience: A History
- Author: Kramer, Lawrence
Coming soon. Experience: A History
- Author: Kramer, Lawrence
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About
A lyrical, provocative journey into the art, memory, and meaning of experience.
What does it mean to have an experience? When did we begin to believe we could “have" one at all? In Experience: A History, Lawrence Kramer traces the cultural birth of experience as a singular, life-defining event. Moving lyrically between criticism and memoir, he guides readers from Petrarch and Nietzsche to Virginia Woolf and Anne Carson; from Haydn’s luminous Creation to Billie Holiday's searing “Strange Fruit.” Along the way we encounter Niagara Falls and the Galápagos, Parisian department stores and Manhattan nightclubs, and luminaries such as Franz Schubert, Henry and William James, and Benjamin Britten.
As early as the fourteenth century and accelerating after the eighteenth, records of concentrated, unforgettable moments begin to proliferate—until the possibility of having an experience becomes a demand for one. Experience turns into something to seek, curate, even consume. Yet its power lies in its particulars: the convergence of history, art, memory, and self. At once personal and tender, challenging and vulnerable, Experience fuses philosophical argument with intimate recollection. The result is both a sweeping intellectual history and a deeply human reckoning with the experiences that shape and unsettle modern life.
Contents
- CONTENTS
- Preface
- Introduction: The Concept of Experience
- Framing Experience: From Androids to Screens
- Experience, Enchantment, and the Ordinary
- Experience, Immanence, and Transcendence
- Recognizing an Experience
- Possibility and Privilege
- Language and the Claiming of Experience
- I. Having an Experience: From Petrarch to Billie Holiday
- Anticipations I: Michel de Montaigne
- Anticipations II: Francis Petrarch
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Henry David Thoreau
- Henry James
- Strange Fruit: Henry James, Robert Hayden, Billie Holiday
- Experience and the Penitentiary: Charles Dickens and Henry James
- Experience, Commerce, and Wonder: Dickens and James at Niagara Falls
- Niagara Falls, Continued: Walt Whitman and Margaret Fuller
- An Experience or Not? Sources
- An Experience or Not? Standards I: The Frame
- An Experience or Not? Standards II: The Unforetold
- Phantasmagoria
- Moments of Being: Virginia Woolf
- II. The Varieties of Aesthetic Experience: From Schubert to William James
- Aspect Change
- The Aesthetics of Thinking
- Music and Modern Experience
- The Aesthetic, Entertainment, and Anarchy
- Beauty
- Two Winter Journeys: Schubert and Thoreau
- Another Wanderer: Yee of Toishan
- Beauty Revisited: The Return of the Aesthetic
- Love, Enlightenment, and the Rise of Ordinary Life
- A Turning Point: Franz Joseph Haydn’s The Creation
- Aesthetic Understanding: The As-If
- Experience, Chance, and Existential Modesty
- Trust, Reality, and Chance: From Signification to Experience
- The Stream of Consciousness: William James and Virginia Woolf
- Experience and Mortality
- The Flux of Experience and Modern Life
- Sounding Experience: Niagara Falls Revisited (Joyce Carol Oates)
- Sounding Experience: Walk, Water, Pilgrimage (Anne Carson)
- Sounding Experience: Tropical Études (Claude Lévi-Strauss)
- Sounding Experience: A Prelude (Frédéric Chopin)
- Preserving the Singular: Mourning, Memory, Elegy
- III. Experience Regained: Two Walks by the River of Time
- Durable Experience
- First Encounters: Prison, River, City
- A Company of Walkers
- Some Personal History
- Itineraries
- In the Doorway
- Henry James and Me
- Wordsworth, Too (The Way Home)
- Another Walk
- A Postscript
- Notes
- Index
