The Aesthetic Experience of the Literary Artwork: A Matter of Form and Content? (original) (raw)

Aesthetics and Literature: a Problematic Relation?

Philosophical Studies, 2007

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.

The Connection between Literature and Aesthetics - Is it problematic?

Most literary critics are reluctant to accept the relevance of aesthetics to literature. The aim of this paper is to show how aesthetics can be related to literature in terms of values, among other concepts. The aesthetic experience and the aesthetic value of literature have long been discussed and, as a result, there have been many divergent theories from philosophers in general and aestheticians in particular. In this paper I revisit P. Lamarque's objections to the connection between aesthetics and literature. I argue for and against these objections, referring to accounts written by several philosophers, among whom M.C. Beardsley, R. Stecker, N. Carroll and K. Walton. I claim that the connection between aesthetics and literature is possible of any literary genre is transformed into an experience which is mostly subjective, and generates aesthetic values which, on the other hand, are more objective and universal. As Lamarque claims, literary critics seem to emphasize more the instrumental values of literature rather than its more purely intrinsic values. Moreover, they are keeping away as much as possible from value judgements of any kind. All this seems to separate literature from aesthetics. There are common factors however, such as aesthetic pleasure, which are used by both aestheticians and literary critics. This is proof enough that literature holds a strong place in contemporary aesthetics. Most aestheticians regard literature, especially poetry, as one of the arts. However the most common issues that philosophers write about are the cognitive and ethical values of literature. Such debates lack the literary and hence the aesthetic aspect of literature. In fact, it is not so obvious that when philosophers write about literature, they are really engaged in aesthetics. This is the focus of this paper: does the concept of aesthetics of literature really connect aesthetics to literature? More precisely, which criteria make literary works suitable for aesthetic evaluation? The key to these questions lies in the aesthetic experience of pleasure.

The Fear of Aesthetics in Art and Literary Theory

New Literary History, 2017

Is a properly reformed notion of aesthetics now able to meet the accusations often levelled against it? This article examines three of the most common ways in which art and literary theorists have attacked aesthetics, along with counters to each of these. 1) that aesthetics is based around overly narrow conceptions of "art" and "the aesthetic" (or that aesthetics and formalism are synonymous). 2) that aesthetics is politically disengaged. 3) That aesthetics fails to engage with actual art objects and their histories.

Breaking the Barriers between Aesthetics and Theory in Literature

Up to few decades ago, aesthetics and theory were considered as two separate disciplines in the realm of literature. More recent studies have indicated that the experience and also the study of literature are breaking these existing boundaries by revealing the common factors present in both aesthetics and theory. Several literary theorists and aestheticians have emphasized this close relation which is woven within literature itself. John Gibson, Derek Attridge and Peter Lamarque are few of the theorists who argue in favour of such a relation. They contend that the perspectives of both aesthetics, as a branch of philosophy, and theory, do not exclude each other. Furthermore, they suggest that both aesthetics and theory can be complementary to each other and combine the philosophical concern with clarity, and the creativity which pertains to theory. The aim of this paper is to show how the study of literature can break the barriers between aesthetics and theory by combining them together in several ways, suggesting possible ties within the creation and the act of reading literature, with particular reference to fictitious narratives. In this paper I shall discuss firstly how ambiguity and imagination can have the potential to effect both literary aesthetics and literary theory offering different results. Secondly I shall focus on fictitious narratives from both the aesthetical and the theoretical points of view. I intend to emphasize the manner we view and discuss literature in the process of reading it. My literary discussion will include theories proposed by the literary philosophers Attridge, Lamarque and McGregor and how these theories can be combined through particular readings, thus breaking the barriers between aesthetics and theory in literature.

Structure Disclosed. Replete Moments and Aesthetic Experience in Reading Novels

International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2019

Despite the huge interest in different philosophical questions surrounding literature, particularly analytic philosophers have had relatively little to say about literature's specifically aesthetic character. Peter Kivy has developed this antiaesthetic tendency furthest, ultimately denying that the reading of prose literature has any deep aesthetic content. Building on Alan Goldman's and John Dewey's work on aesthetic experience, I argue that a key literary feature of novels I single out-what I term a replete moment-has the potential to trigger in readers significant aesthetic experiences. Along with revealing aesthetic aspects in reading that Kivy's position does not cover, my account shows that contemplation of the overall structure of the novel is not the sole, more substantial form aesthetic experience can take in the case of reading, as Kivy's formalistic literary aesthetics assumes. This conclusion is argued to be significant also for the general philosophical discussion on aesthetic experience. An analysis of a key passage in John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany is an important part of the view of literary aesthetic experience put forth.

The Aesthetics of Material Textuality

My home library contains physical books ranging from contemporary paperback bestsellers to rare, hardcover library-sale finds; electronic texts accessed via the web, or saved as image files, and viewed on computer, Kindle, and/or tablet; and finally, periodicals including newspapers, magazines, and academic journals. My point in detailing the breadth of this collection, aside from a certain collector's vanity, is to ask what this diversity of reading material means for the reading experience. What qualities do I look for when I pick up a book, or any kind of "readable" object? What experience do I expect from the object in question, and similarly, can different objects produce different experiences? Answering these questions requires treatment of the relationship between literary aesthetics and textual materiality. This paper asserts that literature's aesthetic qualities are not produced by literary form or referential content alone, and asks how this assertion might impact our understanding of aesthetic experiences: how they are prompted, felt, and made interpretable by certain practices of reading. In pursuing this line of thought, I appropriate vocabularies developed in bibliography and platform studies to argue that literary aesthetics should be theorized as an emergent product of the interaction between elements of textual hardware and software. The paper thus analyzes shifts in aesthetics from internalist to externalist models, which invite discussion of the ways in which aesthetic experiences are mediated by aesthetic categories, here understood as the product of physical "framing." It argues for extending formalist readings to include textual materiality, and finally pursues the significance of this argument for disciplinary boundaries, articulating a "return to aesthetics" approach in literary analysis that pushes back on tendencies to use aesthetics as a boundary marker between the concerns of literary formalism and those of cultural studies, book history, and textual criticism.

The Criticism of Artistic Aesthetics of Literary Texts

The subject of this study is a suggestion for the analysis of literary analysis. Its aim is the implication of the methodological methods based on the objective data in the literary criticism in order to avoid any biased criticism. In this combinative method, first by analyzing texts in structural linguistics, language foregrounding in texts is compiled in order to achieve objective, qualitative and convincing data for the analysis of the principles, and then with analysis and classification, investigation on highlighting language, the presence of the elements of artistic beauty like unity, harmony, proportion, conformity, symmetry, discipline and dynamism will be displayed and discovered in the text. In this way artistic beauty whose principle is common in all the arts is investigated as well in literary texts in order to display the other aspects of the beauty in the literary text

Undecidable Literary Interpretations and Aesthetic Literary Value

Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 2022

Literature has been philosophically understood as a practice in the last thirty years, which involves "modes of utterance" and stances, not intrinsic textual properties. Thus, the place for semantics in philosophical inquiry has clearly diminished. Literary aesthetic appreciation has shifted its focus from aesthetic realism, based on the study of textual features, to ways of reading. Peter Lamarque's concept of narrative opacity is a clear example of this shift. According to the philosophy of literature, literature, like any other art form, does not compel us to engage realistically with it. Against this trend, this paper argues for the distinction between two kinds of opacity, defending textual opacity as a necessary condition for literary opacity. In this sense, examples in literary criticism properly illustrate not a peripheral role of meaning in literary appreciation, but arbitrariness in interpretation, which involves semantic concerns. So the assumed interest in the specifi c ways in which literature embeds meaning in fi ctional narrative works.