Ellen Dissanayake

Author and Lecturer

Affiliate Professor
School of Music
University of Washington

Photograph by Ekkehart Malotki

Photograph by Ekkehart Malotki

Books

L’infanzia dell’Estetica. L’origine Evolutiva delle Pratiche Artistiche

2015  Milan: Mimesis.

L’infanzia dell’Estetica. L’origine Evolutiva delle Pratiche Artistiche by Ellen Dissanayake

Ed. by Fabrizio Desideri and Mariagrazia Portera, trans. by Mariagrazia Portera, 208 pp.


The book includes the translation of seven essays: 1. The Artification Hypothesis and Its Relevance to Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Aesthetics, and Neuroaesthetics; 2. In the Beginning: Pleistocene and Infant Aesthetics and Twenty-First Century Education in the Arts; 3. A Bona Fide Ethological View of Art: the Artification Hypothesis; 4. Becoming Homo Aestheticus: Sources of Aesthetic Imagination in Mother-Infant Interactions; 5. Ritual and Ritualization. Musical Means of Conveying and Shaping Emotion in Humans and Other Animals; 6. Prelinguistic and Preliterate Substrates of Poetic Narrative; 7. Root, Leaf, Blossom, or Bole: Concerning the Origin and Adaptive Function of Music), plus an introductory essay by M. Portera, outlining my work and research on the evolution of the arts.