Abstract
The paper argues that there is a proper place for literature within aesthetics but that care must be taken in identifying just what the relation is. In characterising aesthetic pleasure associated with literature it is all too easy to fall into reductive accounts, for example, of literature as merely “fine writing”. Belleslettrist or formalistic accounts of literature are rejected, as are two other kinds of reduction, to pure meaning properties and to a kind of narrative realism. The idea is developed that literature—both poetry and prose fiction—invites its own distinctive kind of aesthetic appreciation which far from being at odds with critical practice, in fact chimes well with it.
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Notes
Kermode (2004).
For further arguments in favour of “aesthetic quality” over “ideology” in canon formation, see van Peer (1996).
Kermode (2004, p. 66).
Bloom (1994, p. 9).
Bloom (1994, p. 22).
For an overview of some of the issues, see Lamarque and Olsen (2003).
It should be noted that the conception of appreciation developed in this paper is distinct from an alternative conception, which I do not have space to consider but should not be left unmentioned, advanced by Feagin (1996). Feagin’s conception principally concerns affect or feeling, although it includes elements of interpretation and meta-reflection. She offers a sophisticated account of the psychology of our responses to literary fiction—notably our emotions of empathy and sympathy—and explores the multiple ways that literary works stimulate and manipulate feelings, which in turn ultimately ground value judgments. Much of this is highly illuminating but there are doubts about its centrality to aesthetics and indeed to literary criticism. One might suppose that critics like John Guillory would take affective response, like pleasure, to be “neutralized as the merely contingent effect of reception” (see above). There are worries too that emphasis on localised affects cannot account for a work’s overall aesthetic unity. For a discussion see Lamarque (2000b).
Sibley (1974).
It is explicitly rejected in Olsen (1987, p. 7).
E.g. Kivy (1973).
Sibley (2003, p. 133).
The singularity of the work is often remarked. Hence Malcolm Budd: “The value of poetry is singular or non-substitutable; poetry has an importance it could never lose by being replaced by something else that achieves the same end; for what we value is the experience of the poem itself, a specifically linguistic expression of a complex of thought, desire and sentiment.” (Budd (1995, p.85)). It is notable that Budd makes the point by reference to the “experience” of poetry.
Hume (1739–40).
See Lamarque (2001).
Hume has noted the inappropriateness of powerful rhetoric on such occasions: “Who could ever think of it as a good expedient for comforting an afflicted parent, to exaggerate, with all the force of elocution, the irreparable loss, which he has met with by the death of a favourite child? The more power of imagination and expression you here employ, the more you encrease his despair and affliction.” (David Hume, “Of Tragedy”)
Rowe (2004, pp.174–175).
Barthes (1977).
Rorty (1992, p. 97).
See, e.g. Carroll (1991).
Stecker (2003, p. 59).
Greene (1968, pp. 648–649).
Greene (1968, pp. 649–650).
Miller (1977, p. 951–952).
Miller (1977, pp. 948–9).
Miller (1977, p. 952).
Dickens (1977, p. 403).
For more details of this argument, see Lamarque (1996).
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Lamarque, P. Aesthetics and literature: a problematic relation?. Philos Stud 135, 27–40 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9090-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9090-3