Abstract
Some thinkers about literature regard the aesthetic approach to literary art as the only valid one. They adopt what I have called “the delightful-object view” of literature and maintain that application is not aesthetically relevant, since application is not concerned with the aesthetic aspect of literature.1 This is the aesthetic argument against application, intrinsically related to, but not identical with, the textual-supremacy argument. As I emphasized in Chapter 7, “aesthetic” can be understood in several ways, and application is easy to reconcile with weaker versions of the aesthetic approach to literature. Yet the strong, “delightful-object” variety of the aesthetic approach is, by definition, impossible to combine with a belief in the artistic and aesthetic importance of application.
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Notes
Stein Haugom Olsen, The End of Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 11.
Cf. Lamarque’s words about his analysis of literary practice in an even later contribution: “It is not an empirical enquiry, perhaps more like a transcendental enquiry examining what must be case if it is possible for literature to count as an art form.” Peter Lamarque, “Wittgenstein, Literature, and the Idea of a Practice”, British Journal of Aesthetics 50 (2010), pp. 357–88, at p. 376.
Grammar was concerned with the correct use of language, and the more qualified study of grammar also included the reading and explicating of poetry, eloquence, and historical writing. “Litteratura” could, however, also refer to literary or grammatical knowledge or, just like “litterae”, to writing. See Eduard Wælfflin, “Litteratura”, in Archiv für lateinische Lexikographie und Grammatik …, ed. Eduard Wælfflin, vol. 5 (Leipzig: Verlag von B.G. Teubner, 1888), pp. 49–55, esp. pp. 50, 52, and 53.
The history of the term has been described in, among others, Renè Wellek, “What Is Literature?” in What Is Literature? ed. Paul Hernadi (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 16–23;
Robert Escarpit, “La Dèfinition du terme ‘littèrature’”, in Le littèraire et le social: Élèments pour une sociologie de la literature, ed. Robert Escarpit et al. (Paris: Flammarion, 1970), pp. 259–72;
Klaus Weimar, “Literatur”, in Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft: Neubearbeitung des Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, ed. Harald Fricke et al., vol. 2 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), pp. 443–48 (at pp. 444–45).
About historia litteraria see, e.g., Rainer Rosenberg, “Literaturge-schichtsschreibung”, in Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft: Neubearbeitung des Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, ed. Harald Fricke et al., vol. 2 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), pp. 458–63 (at pp. 459–60).
Cf. Wellek, pp. 19–20; Escarpit, pp. 265–66; Weimar, pp. 444–45; Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 191–92. Wellek dates the emergence of the concept to earlier than do Escarpit and Shiner, but may be thinking of a relatively isolated example. My reference to the half-century around 1800 is influenced by Shiner’s comprehensive study of the emergence of the idea of art (meaning “the arts”) in Western culture, where Shiner writes (p. 75) that there was a stage circa 1750–1800 that “definitely separated fine art from craft” and a stage circa 1800–1830 “during which the term ‘art’ came to signify an autonomous spiritual domain”.
The Nobel Prize regulations stipulate that “under the term ‘literature’ shall be comprised, not only belles-lettres, but also other writings which, by virtue of their form and method of presentation, possess literary value”. Quoted from Lars Gyllensten, The Nobel Prize in Literature, trans. Alan Blair (Stockholm: The Swedish Academy, 1987), p. 15.
The idea that poetry, fictional prose, and drama form the core of literary art is often formulated quite explicitly by scholars and critics. See, e.g., Renè Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, 3rd edn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), p. 25;
Richard Shusterman, The Object of Literary Criticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi; Würzburg: Kænigshausen und Neumann, 1984), pp. 36–37.
As the dictionary definitions — and also the investigation by Hintzenberg et al. — make clear, the everyday concept of literature has a strong evaluative component. It has often been argued that an evaluative concept of litera ture should also be used in critical and scholarly contexts; see, e.g., John M. Ellis, The Theory of Literary Criticism: A Logical Analysis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), p. 51;
W.W. Robson, The Definition of Literature and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 18; Lamarque and Olsen, p. 449. For a discussion of central and more peripheral literary genres, see Shusterman, pp. 36–37, and my Theory of Literary Discourse, pp. 219–38.
Stephen Priest, “Conceptual Analysis”, in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 2nd edn, ed. Ted Honderich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 154–5, at p. 154.
Robert Hanna, “Conceptual Analysis”, in Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 160.
See, e.g., Andrew Brennan, “Paradox of Analysis”, in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 2nd edn, ed. Ted Honderich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 678; Lamarque, The Philosophy of Literature, p. 39.
This well-known story is related and discussed in an instructive manner in Paul Thagard, Conceptual Revolutions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), chapter 3.
Gregory Currie, “Actual Art, Possible Art, and Art’s Definition”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68 (2010), pp. 235–41 (at p. 235).
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© 2012 Anders Pettersson
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Pettersson, A. (2012). The Concept of Literature. In: The Concept of Literary Application. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035424_10
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