Overview

These passages from works written over the past two millennia by more than sixty authors from Aristotle to Auden afford hundreds of illuminating and often startling insights into the nature and primacy of artistic form and of its power to provide extraordinary aesthetic delight. They reject subordination of works of art to non-aesthetic purposes, arguing instead that in itself, exquisite composition is the primary element and source of the value of all great works of art. Moreover, they show that this emphasis on formal design is not merely a minority view or an exclusively modern sentiment: rather, these passages demonstrate that for more than 2,000 years, aesthetic form has served - and in our day ideally still should serve - as our primary concern in the reception and valuation of artistic works.

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9781964001210

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Johann M. Moser was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1940. He grew up in New York City and later in New Jersey. At Dartmouth College he majored in philosophy and studied with the poet Richard Eberhart. In 1970, he received a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he specialized in poetics and medieval literature. From 1970 until his retirement in 2000, he taught literature and philosophy at St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. Moser published a volume of verse titled Most Ancient of All Splendors with Sophia Institute Press in 1989, as well as edited and translated for the press both an anthology of classical Nativity verse and, in collaboration with a colleague, Robert Anderson, an edition of St. Thomas Aquinas's hymns and prayers. Moser has recently published two additional collections of verse, as well as two full-length novels and two collections of short stories. He is now embarked on bringing together his various scholarly works, which are being published by the Diamond Ledge Press in a series of volumes. The studies are the results of forty years of course teaching, of public lectures, presentations, and seminars, and of writing, in the early 2000s, for a website he once managed. Further volumes may be provided in the future as the occasion requires.

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