On Jan 14, 2009, at 9:23 PM, Peter Ward wrote:
> I'd recommend Orwell's "Writers and Leviathan"--as well as many
> other of his articles --in connection with this thread (http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/leviathan/english/e_wal
> ) --
>
> "I often have the feeling that even at the best of times literary
> criticism is fraudulent, since in the absence of any accepted
> standards
> whatever — any external reference which can give meaning to the
> statement that such and such a book is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ — every
> literary
> judgement consists in trumping up a set of rules to justify an
> instinctive preference. One's real reaction to a book, when one has a
> reaction at all, is usually ‘I like this book’ or ‘I don't like it’,
> and what follows is a rationalization. But ‘I like this book’ is
> not, I
> think, a non-literary reaction; the non-literary reaction is ‘This
> book
> is on my side, and therefore I must discover merits in it.’ Of course,
> when one praises a book for political reason one may be emotionally
> sincere, in the sense that one does feel strong approval of it, but
> also it often happens that party solidarity demands a plain lie."
There's something in Orwell that's so resolutely common sense and ordinary that it's really annoying.
Doug