engleski

Attention, Beauty, and Literary Aesthetics

Aestheticians across the board have been urging art-lovers to pay attention in order to get the most rewarding aesthetic experience and discover artwork’s artistic value. Within literary aesthetics, the pay attention norm was most dominantly developed by Lamarque and Olsen, who argued that one should approach a literary work with the expectation of its value, and proceed in exploration of the work by adopting a literary stance ; i.e. searching for those of its elements that reward such expectations. My aim in this paper is not to argue against such views or to deny the relevance of paying attention for the richness of one’s experience of a work of art. Rather, I want to explore the possibility in which we pay attention to a work not because such a directive is heteronomously imposed upon us but because the work itself invites us to attend to it in light of the sense of beauty it invokes in us. In such cases, I argue, one is autonomously motivated to pay attention and this in turn enables one to grasp those of its features that trigger the sense of beauty and to discover artistic value of the work. I start by analysing different accounts of attention, to show why attention-based approach to art fails to explain some of the central aspects of our artistic experiences. I then develop my account by relying on contemporary research into beauty and by reworking some of Kant’s views on fine art which, in conclusion, I bring in support of my claim regarding the centrality of beauty for the aesthetic experience. I end by providing a modified account of the role of attention in aesthetic experience of literary art and in grasping the work’s artistic value.

attention, beauty, literary aesthetics

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