engleski

Who's to Say What's Literature: Battles for Intellectual Dominance among Literary Scholars, Critics and Philosophers

Theoretical discussions surrounding our literary practice reveal a constant antagonism between different schools over definition, values and functions of literature. While some insist on ‘literary art for literary art’s sake’, others see literature primarily at the service of ethical education, cultural criticism or spread of knowledge. As disagreements abound over proper norms of evaluation and appreciation of literary works, literary writers themselves stand conflicted with respect to artistic rules most definitive of their profession. Things are no different within philosophical takes on literature. Analytic philosophy of literature has, to a great extent, developed in opposition to several other disciplines, most notably literary theory, as a reaction to what was interpreted as instrumentalization of literature and a neglect of its aesthetic appeal and artistic merit. For the most part, philosophers stand united in claiming that literature is an art-form in its own right, but they fall apart when it comes to explaining the source of this status and the overall literary values. Against the background of such seemingly irresolvable and persuasive conflicts among scholars, I examine whether reconciliation might come in the form of cognitive aesthetics. An approach that combines critical sharpness and analytic efforts of philosophy with explorations of psychological, neurological, evolutionary and biological underpinnings of our artistic behaviours, cognitive aesthetics seems particularly well equipped to resolve contentions put on spotlight by Hume and Kant, and still much debated, such as those regarding the subjectivity and objectivity of aesthetic judgments, or individual taste and its relation to appreciation of art. My aim is to explore the extent to which points of disagreements between various literary scholars might be mitigated via the insights provided by cognitive aesthetics of literature.

Literary practice, literary theory, literary aesthetics, cognitive aesthetics

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