Abstract
beauty as a value in art has fallen into disfavor. This seems especially true for the literary arts. A work can be interesting, passionate, brilliant, but “beauty” as a word of praise has been turned over to fashion designers, home decorators. Yet it isn’t enough to want to write a story or novel or poem; the writer must also want to make something beautiful—even though that might mean making it ugly. Think of it this way: it is a requirement of art that a work add up to more than the sum of its parts. This isn’t true, for instance, of journalism. So we have the sum plus X. That X may have a number of different components, but one of its components must be beauty.
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Notes
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© 2003 Stephen Dobyns
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Dobyns, S. (2003). The Problem of Beauty and the Requirements of Art. In: Best Words, Best Order. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73116-9_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73116-9_16
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