Abstract
Application is a recurrent element of contemporary literary practice — the examples in Chapter 2 and the theoretical considerations in Chapters 3 to 7 and 9 should have proved that. But what if our existing literary practice is in fact unsound, at least on this specific point? Think of the use of language: much speech and writing in English is ungrammatical or otherwise incorrect. Are there not, analogously, norms for reading literature and not just reading habits? The present chapter takes up general questions about norms and values in order to address that kind of doubt about the permissibility of application, doubts which can be raised independently of the aesthetic argument and the textual-supremacy argument.
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Notes
Peter Singer, How Are We to Live? Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 223.
Richard Rorty, “Ethics without Principles” (1994), in Rorty’s Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999), pp. 72–90, at p. 73.
For a simple general overview of current ways of thinking about value see, e.g., James Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, 4th edn (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2003).
Jonathan Dancy has recently maintained that knowledge of basic moral facts is a priori but builds on a posteriori knowledge; see Dancy’s Ethics without Principles (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), pp. 146–8.
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 30–31. Much of the time, however, Smith wishes to speak not of the-value-of-a-text-as-perceived-by-an-individual but of the-value-of-a-text-as-perceived-by-the-whole-literary-community, which leads her to describe “its mutability and diversity” as “the most fundamental character of literary value” (ibid., p. 28). Smith’s book is standardly understood as propagating relativism, but in fact Smith often speaks — as in the last quote — as if values have actual existence but are in constant flux.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 283.
The phrase is taken from Richard Eldridge, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 153. Note that Eldridge, whose book will be commented on in the next section, does not himself speak in favour of strong objectivism.
Mark William Roche, Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 147. For other examples of Roche’s strong objectivism, see, e.g., pp. 10–11, 39, and 42 in his book.
In my non-technical discussion of rules and rule-following below, I do not distinguish between so-called constitutive rules, like the rules of chess, and so-called regulative rules, like the rules of the road. About constitutive and regulative rules, see, e.g., John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), esp. pp. 33–4.
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© 2012 Anders Pettersson
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Pettersson, A. (2012). Questions of Norms and Values. In: The Concept of Literary Application. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035424_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035424_11
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