Abstract
In Chapter 1, I mentioned two arguments against the aesthetic relevance of application, namely, the textual-supremacy argument and the aesthetic argument, and the time has now come to discuss these in depth. The discussion takes up five chapters — the rest of the book, more or less — and touches upon many different aspects of literary theory. The textual-supremacy argument, according to which only elements contained in the text itself are proper objects of literary response, is addressed in Chapter 8. The present chapter and Chapters 9 to 11 are devoted to the aesthetic argument, an argument whose force is derived from the conviction that literary response should be concerned exclusively with the aesthetic qualities of the text.
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Notes
Robert Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: An Introduction (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005), p. 90.
Cf., e.g., Edmund T. Rolls, Emotion Explained (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 66: “Emotions can be produced by primary reinforcers. (Primary reinforcers are unlearned reinforcers, that is they are innately reinforcing.) Other, previously neutral, stimuli, such as the sight of an object, can by association learning with a primary reinforcer come to be a secondary (or learned) reinforcer, which can also produce an emotional response.” Rolls includes “Beauty, e.g. symmetry” in a tentative list of primary reinforcers (ibid., p. 18).
George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory (1896) (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), p. 120.
Jerrold Levinson, Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 50.
Linda Barwick and Allan Marett, “Introduction”, in The Essence of Singing and the Substance of Song: Recent Responses to the Aboriginal Performing Arts and Other Essays in Honour of Catherine Ellis, ed. Linda Barwick, Allan Marett, and Guy Tunstill (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1995), pp. 1–10; here, p. 4.
Jan Mukařovský, “L’Art comme fait sèmiologique”, in Actes du huitième congrès international de philosophie à Prague 2–7 [s]eptembre 1934 (Prague: Comitè d’organisation du congrès, 1936), pp. 1065–72 (at p. 1068).
Jan Mukařovský, “Two Studies of Poetic Designation: Poetic Designation and the Aesthetic Function of Language” (1936, 1938), in Mukařovský’s The World and Verbal Art: Selected Essays by Jan Mukarovsky, trans. and ed. John Burbank and Peter Steiner (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 65–73; see esp. pp. 67–69. I have characterized Mukařovský’s views somewhat more fully in my Verbal Art, pp. 286–89.
Jakobson, p. 356. I discuss Jakobson’s views and refer to other interpretations of it in A Theory of Literary Discourse (Lund: Lund University Press; Bromley: Chartwell-Bratt, 1990), pp. 74–6. It is worth pointing out that Jakobson’s ideas on this point go back to the 1920s (and should have influenced Mukařovský’s). In his Russian Formalism, Victor Erlich documents their presence already in Jakobson’s Recent Russian Poetry (Novejšaja russkaja poezija, 1921) and points to a presumable influence from Jakobson in Boris Tomaševskij, who maintains, in his Theory of Literature (Teorija literatury, 1925), that the communicative function is pushed into the background in literature, where linguistic structures acquire autonomous value.
See Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History — Doctrine (The Hague: Mouton, 1955), p. 156.
Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 74.
Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 29.
Wolfgang Iser, Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre: Perspektiven literarischer Anthropologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 35;
Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology, trans. David Henry Wilson and Wolfgang Iser (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 11.
Philosophical pragmatics (particularly the theories of Austin, Searle, and Grice; cf. Chapter 9, note 3) were behind this change of perspective, which was entirely manifest by the early 1980s, for example, in linguistic textbooks like Geoffrey N. Leech, Principles of Pragmatics (London and New York: Longman, 1983)
and Stephen C. Levinson, Pragmatics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
The view also has many well-qualified opponents within literary studies. See, e.g., Wendell V. Harris’s two books Interpretive Acts: In Search of Meaning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) and Literary Meaning: Reclaiming the Study of Literature (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996).
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© 2012 Anders Pettersson
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Pettersson, A. (2012). The Aesthetic Approach to Literature. In: The Concept of Literary Application. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035424_7
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