At 08:45 AM 10/28/00 +0200, you wrote:
>The question is philosophical more than political. What are the conceptual
>grounds for selecting a limited range of Renaissance literary texts and an
>even more limited range of non-literary texts which generally excludes
>texts reflecting upon the literary and aesthetic as secondary entities
>flowing from and into "cultural beliefs"?
I'm detecting a ruse here. Rather than trying to prompt a philosophical
discussion, this question demands a justification of the narrowed vision of
literary studies today. What I think is really meant by this is that the
particular narrow view we take today is the wrong narrow view, and instead
we ought to turn to look at something else, with an adjusted view no less
narrow. Furthermore I get the feeling, correct me if I'm wrong, that the
right narrow view is the one we used to have (philological interest in
sources and origins, new critical interest in aesthetic unity). So really
the beef here is that ideas and interests have changed, in the view of at
least one of us, for the worse.
The problem with gushing over the beauty of a text is that it substitutes
for analyzing how we come to learn to say that something is beautiful, to
"recognize" beauty. I am one of those who accepts the now entrenched
premise that individual aesthetic judgment is heavily influenced by
culture, such that a purely aesthetic examination of a text will basically
yield a confirmation of what the culture already, in a dominant way,
espouses. Now it's true I've learned to embrace this critical assumption
by the same mechanism that taught me how to read aesthetically in the first
place--i.e., by being indoctrinated to a dominant point of view. But my
suspicion of aesthetics is a newer education, and it is only dominant as a
doctrine within the coterie of our little profession. So I have a strong
sense that it is a worthwhile study because it offers an alternative to the
dominant view outside literary studies fields today. I get a strong
feeling, and perhaps I'm extensively in error on this and would be very
sorry if I were wrong, that Prof. Sharon-Zisser is more a representative of
the "outside" who embraces a much more usual cultural sense of literature
and aesthetics, and of the "true" value of studying texts, than the one
that dominates today (just barely) within the protected confines of the
profession. And I believe that if we turn back to examining the secondary
"literary and aesthetic" elements of our object, we may end up simply
sounding much more familiar to a broader general audience and much less
productive of useful information. It isn't that I believe there's nothing
original left to learn on the question of aesthetics or the "literary" as
Prof. Sharon-Zisser means it, I just don't believe that those who insist we
turn our attention back to it are honestly hopeful of discovering something
new there, something genuinely illuminating. I think instead their motive
is to foreclose what is currently underway because of its threat to their
self-oriented epistemologies.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|