Alan Singer is Professor of English at Temple University. His previous books include Aesthetic Reason: Artworks and the Deliberative Ethos (Penn State, 2003).

• ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1 The Self-Deceiving Muse2 Illusionism and the Self-Deceiving I3 Learning from Self-Deception4 Being Out of Character / Normativizing Self-Deception5 Picturing Self-Deception6 Spelling Out the Viewer7 Shameless Self-DeceptionNotesBibliography Index

“Raising the scandalous proposition that the ’self-deceiver’ should be seen less as the condemnable antagonist of Reason than as the perpetrator of the active imagination that gives rise to genuine aesthetic experience, Singer tests his claim with a series of brilliant arguments grounded in literary, philosophical, and art studies extending from familiar classics—Parmigianino, Tintoretto, Flaubert, and Hegel—to such moderns as Jeff Wall, Bill Viola, Gerhard Richter, and Peter Greenaway. The Self-Deceiving Muse should add significantly to contemporary debate on the relations between reason, aesthetics, and ethics in a language thoroughly conversant with recent critical theory.”—Josef Chytry, University of California, Berkeley, and California College of the Arts