Abstract
In this reply to four commentaries on my book, Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema, I address several conceptual and methodological issues raised by the respondents. Those issues include the book's focus on aesthetic pleasure; the functions of narrative, style, ideology, and genre in Hollywood cinema; the relationship between ideology and aesthetics; the use of scientific research in the humanities; normative aesthetic evaluations; real versus hypothetical spectators; and the practices of aesthetic film analysis.
Contributor Notes
Todd Berliner, Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, teaches film aesthetics, narration, and style and American film history. He is the author of Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema (University of Texas Press, 2010) and Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2017). Email: berlinert@uncw.edu