Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 14:02:08 +0300 (EET DST)
From: Fredrik Hertzberg LIT <fhertzbe-AT-ra.abo.fi>
Subject: PLC: Re: Ethics/Aesthetics (was: Literary Saints)


On Mon, 14 Aug 2000 zatavu-AT-excite.com wrote:

> We read fiction because we want advice on how to conduct our lives? Dear
> God, I hope not! I certainly do not. I would personally recommend reading
> philosophy and perhaps certain aspects of psychology for that. Literary
> fiction should be used for advice on how to conduct our lives about as much
> as paintings or symphonies or sculptures should. Literature is first and
> foremost art. Any that coincidentally provides advice is an added bonus.

Very true. The bourgeois have taken all the fun out of literature, 
turning it (too) into a how to-guide. A nice quote on this: 

"...the point of literary history is not just that a selected sequence of 
works was created, nor that they are enduring or great (or deplorable or 
hideous), nor that they form part of a cultural fabric of that time or a 
tradition that extends to the present. All that is well and good, but 
aesthetically secondary. The point, that is, is not (not _just_) the 
transcendental or cultural or historical or ideological or psychoanalytic 
deduction of a work of art but how that work plays itself out; its 
performance, not (just) its interpretation. But as history is written by 
the victors, so art (as a matter of professional imperatives) is taught 
by the explainers.
  It need not be so, for we are professors and not deducers: our work is 
as much to promote as to dispel, to generate as much as document. I am 
not - I know it sounds as if I am - professing the virtue of art over the 
deadness of criticism, but rather the aversion of virtue that is a first 
principle of the arts and an inherent, if generally discredited, 
possibility for the humanities."
(Charles Bernstein, "A Blow Is Like an Instrument")

Fred


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