English: The Aesthetic Experience

The Aesthetic Experience and The Phenomenological Approach

My suggestions for the classroom’s shared and collective creation of the interpretation of literary works is based on our intuitive and bodily experiences with language and communication. A conscious use and knowledge of language prepares us to meet and observe the written art unbiased and open-minded. Arnold Berleant, the American phenomenologist, writes in his book The Aesthetic Field: A Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, 1970 (Cypereditions 2000):

When it is aesthetic, intuition takes one back before knowledge, before recognition. It makes one aware of the immediacy of experience and of the directness of one’s response to it. That is why there is such a strong sensory factor in the experience of art. (Berleant, 1970 and 2000, p.105-106)

We can sense in the muscles involved in speech production how meaning is supposed to sound, and we can register and describe what we sense. For instance: our sensation for balance and inner, bodily knowledge, the sense of kinaesthesia and proprioception, are active and responsive when we look at an imbalanced sculpture or when enjoying a dance performance (for further reading: Maxine Sheets-Johnston 1999: The Primacy of Movement. John Benjamins Publishing Company). Our body is involved in our interpretation of the world and our actions in it, even if we do not execute the motor movements ourselves. In the same way we respond with immediacy to a reader’s prosody in a reading aloud that does not correspond with our own interpretation of the text because the meaning and interpretation is implied in the prosody and it cannot be separated from the sound expressed.

We interpret along with our perception of the world around us; we cannot apprehend entities as anything if no sort of categorisation is taking place along with our perception. This is the phenomenological belief that leads directly to the pedagogical gain of readings aloud: The students in the classroom have direct access to the reader’s/the performer’s interpretation when hearing it, they discover their own interpretation confronted with the sound of the other, and therefore they can go directly to negotiations of sounds and prosodic details. See further Oral Interpretation.

From this point of departure -the use of detailed prosodic observations - the literary work reveals the voices and the sound of feelings in the text, which can be explored in the classroom. That is the exploration of the aesthetic experience. They walk on the path of experience (term from Berleant) in the literary work.