The aim of this book is to introduce the reader to the literary work and to an understanding of its cultural background and its specific features. In doing so, it refers to two main traditions: one of aesthetics and the theory of art and the other of literary theory. In this way, this book presents main topics, ideas, and representatives of aesthetics, theory, and interpretation of works of art. This book also offers a selection of essential excerpts from pivotal texts on the aesthetics and theory of the literary work, presenting basic topics and ideas in their historical context and development.
In order to appreciate the specificity of works of art and, especially, of literary works, the reader needs to know the reason we have works of art and what a work of art is and why we have had such objects as works of art in Western history. A critical attitude requires historical knowledge, as we can read in the chapter on Humanism. An understanding of current trends, theories, and contemporary schools needs a critical perspective and an historical awareness. This awareness is provided by the cultural, critical and historical background presented in these pages.
In Western culture what today is considered to be a literary work, and more generally a work of art, is the result of an historical tradition. It does not simply reflect the culture and society in which it has been created. In a certain way, it creates or determines at the same time the cultural and historical world. In order to understand it, we cannot avoid taking an historical approach. Critical theory, with its historical antecedents and its remarkable, recent developments, is the necessary tool for understanding the specificity of a work of art and its connection to culture and society. Students should learn to avoid generalizations and labels and to find the peculiarity of cultural and artistic phenomena.
The book is conceived as a general introduction and it is aimed at a reader who may have some knowledge of Western cultural background and wishes a real experience of art and the literary work. The best way to approach a work of art is to enjoy it. In order to enjoy a literary work, we have to consider its correct context and its specific artistic qualities. The stress placed on aesthetics, linguistics, and structure, is an attempt to present the literary work in its specific characteristics as a work of art, or in its “literariness,” as the Formalists said.
The book deals with the Western tradition of aesthetics, art, poetry as well as literary and critical theory. Compared to other similar books, it merges these fields and shows how they are connected and intertwined in the Western culture, and it shows how a huge part of Western culture is the result of this historical tradition. In this perspective, the book is also an introduction to the Western concept of work of art and the related debate, and it is a simple, compact and useful overview for students, scholars and readers belonging to a different tradition, who need a general introduction to main characteristics of Western culture. The aim of this book is that the reader appreciates the work of art. In order to do it, the reader needs to understand it in its specificity. This book attempts to give only a basic outline of the mentioned issues and debate on main topics. For detailed analysis, as well as for further interpretations and perspectives, the reader is directed to the studies which are listed in the bibliography below.
The reader will find in this book the most important and influential theories of art and literary works from Plato to the present day. I propose a choice of authors and theories based on certain criteria. First of all, I consider authors, topics and theories relevant to the contemporary debate, ideas we need to understand problems connected to present-day art and literature. In doing so I take into account authors and topics from the Western tradition in their chronological connection. The historical perspective proposed in these pages is fundamental. The essence of humanistic studies is the essential historicity of the human being. Such historical consciousness distinguished Humanism and the Renaissance when poets, artists and then philosophers and scholars recognized the normative values of classic tradition. In that period modern authors (poets and artists before philosophers) understood that in our past, we can find ideas, tools and examples to answer current questions and tackle contemporary problems. This attitude marked the beginning of the modern era. What is important is not tradition in itself but the use we make of tradition. At any rate, we need to know our past in order to create our future. Some authors presented in this essay could be considered minor authors but their writings can help us to understand a problem and to appreciate a work, or maybe they can give us adequate tools in order to understand the current artistic situation.
The field of aesthetics (in the first two thousand years we will deal above all with art theories and then with the discipline of aesthetic) is very broad, and I concentrate my attention on theories concerning the experience of the literary work and, then, on linguistic, literary and critical theory. It is important to understand how classic topics, problems and questions are transformed and tuned to a new, critical perspective, so that we can answer new questions posed by the actual experience of a work of art.
As far as the last decades are concerned, critical theory supplies strategies and critical tools for the interpretation and enjoyment of literary works of art. I consider critical theory, according to its original authors and to its original meaning,1 as a way to apply critical strategies to our everyday experience of culture and life. Art is an activity which defies the system imposed by the political power or, conversely, it can be a new, more insidious, and camouflaged instrument of power. The literary work offers a great field of investigation and an interesting and living opportunity for experiencing the force of art. Moreover, principles we learn in the field of literary theory are needed far beyond the boundaries of the traditional concept of literature, since we use them to understand and appreciate novels and poems as well as movies and video clips, comics and advertisements, narratives and TV shows. The strategies we learn in the history and theory of aesthetics are necessary in our everyday experience of the world of culture. Art has not only a cognitive value, but an emancipatory function as well. From such a perspective reflection on aesthetics and the theory of literary works requires more and more a critical consciousness and critical tools. It is important to recognize the strategies, forces and logic playing inside and behind the art work.
Secondly, in this book I give special importance to aesthetic tradition and categories. Western aesthetics proposes a particular attitude towards the work of art, creating a specific experience of art in general and a new need for reflection on art. Before we consider single works of art, it is essential to understand the specificity of the experience of art in its historically-conditioned tradition. Thanks to Plato the experience of beauty is the first step to knowledge; thanks to Baumgarten beauty is a sensitive experience of a lower level of knowledge; thanks to Kant the experience of beauty has to do with knowledge, morality and our outmost and oversensitive nature; thanks to Schopenhauer art has to do with the experience of the irrational essence of reality; thanks to Heidegger, poetry is the foundation of being, and so on. Beauty, art and poetry are related to something which is beyond our senses and which we cannot name but of which we can have an experience, namely in the work of art. This is the way Western art and literature became what they are. We cannot understand the specificity of a literary work if we do not consider its specificity as a work of art. It is a part of its essence. To deny that means to be unaware of that peculiarity and of Western tradition. This is the reason I decided to integrate aesthetics and literary theory – in order to offer a comprehensive, complete and critical view of Western tradition.
This book is not a systematic and complete historical survey but it presents some pivotal ideas or traditions which characterize the experience of art and the literary work. These include the birth and transformation of the idea of beauty; the idea of poetry; the status of the literary work; the effect of literary theory on philosophical thought and, conversely, the consequences of philosophical thought on the literary work; reflection on creative practice as a constitutive moment of poetry, hence self-reflection of the work on itself, the connection between theory and creation, the problem of interpretation, the problem of imitation… Poetry seems to be more and more a reflection on poetics, on functions, and on the possibilities of poetry. Since the Romantic period artists and critics have elaborated this attitude and today it has become the condition of modern poetic creation.
In these pages I will present the experience of a work of art and more precisely of a literary work, as an existential experience. What is at stake here is not just an understanding of the literary work and its strategies of meaning but it is an understanding of our life and the world and how the literary work can influence, mediate or determine an understanding of our existence and our world. It may sound strange but this existential experience is based on traditional forms, language, structures, signs, discourses, poetic mechanisms, and rhetorical and technical aspects which seem to constitute the exteriority of the literary work and not part of our inner and personal experience of life. This is a very specific trait characteristic of the literary work.
Following the development of aesthetics and the recent reflection on literary theories, linguistics, and critical theory, we will see that the literary work, as well as the work of art in general, is always, as Gadamer remarked, an object of interpretation. In this way the work becomes the place of a real experience, which is always an experience of the inner life of the work, of its peculiar reality and of its specific truth. We should not forget that the aesthetic experience is not just a part of philosophy (that is to say of our understanding of the world with its systems of meanings and values) but it is our understanding of the world (with its meanings and values) in the experience of a single work. Interpretation is the decisive moment in the experience of the literary work. The postmodern assertion that we have interpretations rather than works asserts the power and possibilities of art and not its limits.
I wish to give some practical advice to the reader of these pages. The reader should always consider and remember that:
The historical perspective presented in this work aims to offer some basic issues and ideas which are a part of the Western conception of beauty, art and literary works. Such ideas are a constitutive part of the current Western debate on culture, art, and literature. They do not exhaust the debate on beauty, art and literary works, but they are the condition of any aesthetic approach to these issues.
Our ideas about art, beauty and literary works are not only our individual and personal ideas, but they come from a long tradition. Knowledge of ideas of the past supplies us with essential conceptual tools for understanding our everyday experience of beauty, art, and literature.
Our understanding of the contemporary debate is conditioned by our knowledge of the past. An understanding of Plato’s and Aristotle’s ideas about art and beauty is necessary for an understanding of our ideas about art and beauty, the relationship between beauty and truth, and the relationship between artistic imitation and deception. To understand Heidegger’s conception of a “work of art” means to understand a current trend in contemporary art and the close relationship between avant-garde artists and philosophers in the last century.
The point is not to decide if Plato or Heidegger was right or wrong when they wrote about art and truth. For us, it is important to find the philosophical categories and conceptual tools in order to understand a problem, to set the problem within the right context and to consider it from the right perspective. We are no longer in Plato’s or in Kant’s age, but we owe them for our philosophical categories and conceptual patterns, which we use when we speak of beauty and of art, even if we are not aware of it.
Knowledge of the ideas of the great philosophers, thinkers, artists and critics of the past is intended to develop our critical skills, so that we can understand questions concerning our actual experience of the works of art and current trends of our culture.
I am grateful to Michael Crabtree of Chulalongkorn University for his help.
Note
See Chapter 25.