Book description
From the early years of the Common Era to 1700, Indian intellectuals explored with unparalleled subtlety the place of emotion in art. Their investigations led to the deconstruction of art's formal structures and broader inquiries into the pleasure of tragic tales. Rasa, or taste, was the word they chose to…
Why read it?
1 author picked A Rasa Reader as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Indian thinkers writing in Sanskrit spent 1500 years theorizing and debating the nature of emotions and aesthetic experience as we experience them in literature and the performing arts. Pollock assembles, translates, and helps us interpret many of these debates. While not about emotions as such, these texts get at the finer shades of feeling as they relate to ways we relish the romantic, the tragic, the comic, the macabre, and so on.
While I am inspired by contemporary writing on emotions, the core of my imagination and intellectual life has been built by ideas from ancient and classical India. Sheldon…
From Maria's list on The best books to help you identify emotions you didn’t know you had.
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