-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of 123hop at comcast.net Sent: Monday, March 07, 2011 12:51 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Digression on "Lieterature" etc. was Does "Economics"have a Subject?
----- Original Message ----- From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and a freshman theme simply do not exhibit enough distinctive properties to allow us to claim that one is literature and the other is not. Neither does there exist any acceptable set of criteria by means of which one can say that Beethoven's Second Symphony is a work of art and a wadded up piece of paper is not. Hence neither "literature" nor "works of art" constitute a definable object of a definable discipline.
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Funny though, when you sing a song to a baby as young as two months, you get this absolutely riveted attention and delight that you do not get if you crumple a piece of paper.
When my daughter was four, we went to a local bookstore, where they were performing Winter's Tale in a corner of the store. As we passed by, she stopped to watch and would not be moved until the play was finished. I don't think someone crumbling paper would have held her attention for two hours.
As a matter of fact I have seen infants do the equivalent of playing with a wadded up piece of paper for hours.
But that is utterly irrelevant for a sophisticate claim about the history of adult human behavior. I think the _history_ of the emergence of the social relations which generated the concept of "work of art" might illuminating, but one can't even begin thinking that history until the social nature of "work of art" is recognized. It's been too long since I read the relevant work for this, but if I remember correctly in the late 17th and early 18th centuries there were serious debates in Italy, France, & England over gardens as works of art. That debate was probably part of the pre-history of the invention of works of art, hough the term, so far as I know, was not used then. Similarly, the unexpected title of Pope's Essay on **Criticism** [instead of "Poetry"] might also be part of the history. "Critic" was more a term of abuse than a designation of a 'profession" at that time, and exploring the equations (see Empson) in that word as well as in wit gives the poem its thrust. (Michael Smith might help me here: As I remember Dryden used "gust" rather than "taste" to describe response to poetry, but he may have used "taste.") The word figures importantly in Pope's essay. Also the fact that modern languages & literatuaresd did not become academic subjects until the end of the 19th-c, and the displacement of classical by modern literature may be part of the emergence of "literature" with the force it has now.
The most rigorous attempt to give the word "literature" some precision is Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, and the abject failure of that attempt (though the book has its own non-theoretical virtues) is perhaps a sign of the futility of the attempt.
If you start at all seriously to analyze a specific wadded up piece of paper (on the premise that the wadding was deliberate), you will very quickly find yourself using the same vocabulary as would be used for Beethoven, Browning, and Picasso. If that wad is not a work of art, then nothing is.
A final point. The musical response of a baby is irrelevant for a number of reasons, but preeminently because it involves evaluation. You can't talk about good literature until you have first established the category of literature independently of evaluation.
Carrol