A sense, not an idea
Like most polemics, this article is a bit lacking in balance, but it's one I can unabashedly get behind:
Literary criticism no longer aims to appreciate aesthetics — to study how human beings respond to art. Do you get dizzy when you look at a Turner painting of a storm at sea? Do certain buildings make you feel insignificant while others make you feel just the right size? Without understanding that intensely physical reaction, scholarship about the arts can no longer enlarge the soul.
I think there's definitely room for the hermeneutic approach (as Waters puts it), for various political and ideological avenues of thinking about art. But if we adopt those approaches totally and start leaving out aesthetics, we're in trouble. This is actually one of the big reasons I switched to Philosophy from English; as much as I think the post-Colonialist viewpoint is an important one to devote some time to, I refuse to study English only from that viewpoint, and that seemed to be what the English program wanted. We spent all of our time on politics and ideologies, and none of it on art. Less meaning, more feeling, please (but not all feeling, of course - that would be just as silly).
Literary criticism no longer aims to appreciate aesthetics — to study how human beings respond to art. Do you get dizzy when you look at a Turner painting of a storm at sea? Do certain buildings make you feel insignificant while others make you feel just the right size? Without understanding that intensely physical reaction, scholarship about the arts can no longer enlarge the soul.
I think there's definitely room for the hermeneutic approach (as Waters puts it), for various political and ideological avenues of thinking about art. But if we adopt those approaches totally and start leaving out aesthetics, we're in trouble. This is actually one of the big reasons I switched to Philosophy from English; as much as I think the post-Colonialist viewpoint is an important one to devote some time to, I refuse to study English only from that viewpoint, and that seemed to be what the English program wanted. We spent all of our time on politics and ideologies, and none of it on art. Less meaning, more feeling, please (but not all feeling, of course - that would be just as silly).
