Michael John Newall

This chapter targets works of literary pornography that achieve their primary effect, sexual arousal, in part by representing a particular kind of norm-breaking, namely the violation of social or moral norms about sexual behaviour. Key examples include the Marquis de Sade's _The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom_ and Raymond Queneau's _We Always Treat Women Too Well_. While some of these norm-breaking scenarios, especially the milder ones, sometimes function as little more than an ‘interesting’ way of framing otherwise standard sex scenes, they can also add to sexual arousal, as well as provide a basis for other affective states, such as disgust, humour, and awe. Such affects, which are typically adventitious and unsolicited in popular pornography, are exploited for artistic purposes in literary pornography. This chapter not only shows how each of these affects has a basis in the norm-breaking of transgressive pornography, but also investigates the artistic value that can accrue to these affects by examining Georges Bataille's _Story of the Eye_ and the roles that disgust, humour, and awe play in it.

This book is about impossible colours. Impossible colours earn their name because they are forbidden by opponent processing, the orthodox scientific account of how the visual system encodes colour. Yet there are good reasons to think we can and do see such colours. This book investigates two different kinds of impossible colours. First, there are reddish greens and yellowish blues, which are often thought to be impossible to see or even conceive. A range of evidence is given here that shows this to be false – including colour figures that might allow the reader to see these colours themselves. The second kind of impossible colour is entirely familiar, indeed mundane, and includes colours such as orange, purple and brown. The book assembles evidence showing that these colours are experienced as phenomenologically elementary, a fact that contradicts opponent processing theory. This book also provides a new account of colour experience, to which these two kinds of colours provide the keys, and explores the deep implications for scientific and philosophical thinking which follow. For science, impossible colours call into question the opponent process theory. For philosophy they give new perspectives on long-contested questions. Are colours characteristics of the external world, which our visual systems grant us direct experiential access to? Or are they generated in some way by the visual system, an illusion we project onto the external world?

This paper, based on a talk given at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is presented as an example of philosophy done in an art gallery. Its subject is Tom Roberts’ painting Holiday Sketch at Coogee (1888), and as well as responding directly to the painting in the environment of the gallery, it draws on the author's memories of seeing that painting in other times and places. It draws on these personal experiences to relate Roberts’ painting to a controversial idea laid out by art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, and to more recent conventionalist and resemblance theories of pictorial representation. It finishes by affirming one of Roberts’ important achievements: his discarding of inherited European ways of picture‐making, and his place among the first generation of non‐indigenous artists to represent the real colours of the Australian landscape.