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"Lamarque, Peter"
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Literary Form and Ethical Content
The paper offers a qualified endorsement of Terry Eagleton’s striking claim that “a work’s moral outlook … may be secreted as much in its form as its content”. A number of points are raised in defence of the claim: an argument for the inseparability, under certain conditions, of form and content in a literary work; an idea of moral content, not as derived moral principle, but as inward-facing interpretation grounded in an ethical vocabulary; the possibility of internal and external perspectives on fictional characters; and an emphasis on emotions expressed in, rather than caused by, narrative. Three literary examples are explored, to show how vocabulary, syntax, implicature, and tone, contribute to the emergence of moral salience. A consequence drawn is that the ethical stance readers take to a scene or incident is partially shaped by the narrative modes of its presentation. The overall perspective of the paper is that of aesthetic autonomism: the view that the aesthetic value of a work of literature is distinct from, and not reducible to, any instrumental moral values (positive or negative) attributed to the work.
Journal Article
In Memoriam: Ananta Charan Sukla
Sukla was a polymathic author, scholar and editor who showed extraordinary energy and vision, not only in creating and sustaining an international journal, the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics (JCLA), but in numerous scholarly projects of his own, covering literature, philosophy and aesthetics, always with a rich, well-informed, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary flair. The contents of the journal attest to this enlightened conception, free from theoretical orthodoxy, dogma, or ideology, and encouraging a broad sweep of interests, international in scope, hospitable to a diversity of approaches. In lesser hands an edited volume on the theme 'Fiction and Art' might restrict itself to some limited aspects of fictional representation in, say, literature, possibly painting.
Journal Article
On Not Being Too Formalistic About Aesthetic Value
I hope to show how we might resist a certain kind of formalism in talking about aesthetic value: in particular, given my own interests, when talking about the aesthetic value of literary works, poetry, say, or the novel. It is a sensitive topic for me because I have sometimes been charged with being a formalist in my writing about literature: a charge that seems to arise out of my rejection of truth as one of the core values of literature.1 But I don’t see myself as a formalist—in any recognizable sense of the term—but I do think that literary works exhibit aesthetic values.
Journal Article
The Uselessness of Art
Lamarque attempts to build a case on behalf of the uselessness of art that rests partially on a reworked notion of art for art's sake. The first thing to note is that art for art's sakes makes no mention of the aesthetic.
Journal Article
Aesthetics and Literature: A Problematic Relation?
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.
Journal Article
On the Distance between Literary Narratives and Real-Life Narratives
It is a truth universally acknowledged that great works of literature have an impact on people's lives. Well known literary characters— Oedipus, Hamlet, Faustus, Don Quixote—acquire iconic or mythic status and their stories, in more or less detail, are revered and recalled often in contexts far beyond the strictly literary. At the level of national literatures, familiar characters and plots are assimilated into a wider cultural consciousness and help define national stereotypes and norms of behaviour. In the English speaking world, Shakespeare's plays or the novels of Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Dickens, and Trollope, provide imaginative material that reverberates in people's lives every bit as much as do the great historical figures, like Julius Caesar, Elizabeth I, Horatio Nelson, or Winston Churchill. What is striking is how often fictional characters from the literary tradition—like the well-loved Elizabeth Bennett, Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist, Pip, Tess of the d'Ubervilles—enter readers' lives at a highly personal level. They become, as Martha Nussbaum puts it, our ‘friends’, and for many readers the lives of these characters become closely entwined with their own. Happy and unhappy incidents in the fictional worlds are held up against similar incidents in the real lives of readers and such readers take inspiration from the courage, ingenuity, or good fortune of their fictional heroines and heroes. Nowhere is it more true that life imitates art.
Journal Article