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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
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