Reading comprehension: On Aesthetics, beauty and the criteria for evaluating literary texts
What is aesthetics?
The term aesthetics was coined in 1735 by German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in Mediatazioni filosofiche su argomenti concernenti la poesia; this disciple of Leibniz was trying to link art to a sensitive knowledge between pure sensation and pure intellect. Until then, the word aesthetics had always meant "sensation." He shifted the meaning to taste or "sense" of beauty. In so doing, he gave the word a different significance, thereby inventing its modern usage.
The Bedford Glossary of Literary Terms defines the term as “the study of beauty in nature and the arts. As for German philosopher Martin Heidegger, he defined it in 1936 as the science of the sensitive and affective behavior of man and its determinants, the main one being the beautiful which may appear both in nature and art.
Aesthetics has always taken into account forms and has been referred to as the assessment of taste, that is for scholars such as Kant, the evaluation of beauty and the sublime. In arts, aesthetics analysis focuses on study of the craft, form, material and the techniques used to make an object beautiful. The philosophical approach to aesthetics poses questions relating to the nature or definition of beauty which means different things for different scholars.
What is beauty?
From ancient Greece to modern times, people have had different conceptions of beauty in particular and aesthetics in general. Socrates (c. 470 BCE—399BC in Athens) saw beauty as more than physical appearance, emphasizing its connection to goodness and truth. He suggested that true beauty leads the soul closer to the divine through the appreciation of ideal, eternal forms beyond physical objects.
Plato (428/427 BCE-348/347 BCE) associated beauty with the capacity to imitate and reproduce forms (mimesis). Mimesis derives from the idea that beautiful things are mere replicas of Beauty itself. He argued that the artist simply tries to give us a replica of the thing he is imitating, an exact replica with all of the concrete and individualizing detail of the original. In Plato’s view, the artist strives to be like a photocopy machine, producing exact copies of particular things, without even thinking about their essential nature.
For Aristotle, on the other hand, the art of imitation doesn’t consist in producing mindless copies of particular things in the world. Rather, it consists in being thoughtfully selective in focusing on these things. For example, in doing a painting of a bed, the artist doesn’t try to copy every detail; rather, he focuses on some of its features and ignores others. And since he is selective, the artist can show us the truth about particular things in the world and certain types of human beings. In Aristotle’s view, the art makes representations of reality not just mindless imitations or copies of it. Consequently, for Aristotle there are principles through which art is created and it is possible to measure beauty through its chief forms: order and symmetry and definiteness. As with all Greek writers, for Aristotle beauty, often has a purely ethical meaning, designating the highest moral quality. It is contrasted with the pleasant (fiôv) and the useful, with personal profit (càqièkifiov, avfMpkqov). A beautiful action is done for its own sake, so it has no other purpose.
Confucius believed that beauty is everywhere but cannot be seen by every eye. He said, “everything has beauty, but not everyone can see it.” In other words, he is suggesting that beauty is in the eye of the beholder! Everyone has a different perspective concerning beauty. Some might find this picture beautiful, and others will not. He presupposes also beauty relies on certain norms and the beholder must have knowledge of these norms.
Eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant used the term aesthetic in another sense, to refer to the effort to relate the material to the spiritual. Aesthetic objects, according to Kant, combine the two realms, simultaneously entailing tangibility and sanctity. This idea that the aesthetic is somehow a locus of universal or even divine truth — a realm where words are somehow not just arbitrary signifiers but rather revelatory signs with some special status — was debunked in the twentieth century, both by deconstructors like Paul de Man and Marxist critics like Terry Eagleton. In Aesthetic Ideology (1988) and The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), de Man and Eagleton, respectively, argued that the privileging of aesthetic language and the belief that it has transcendental significance are but manifestations of the prevailing Western ideology and, to use Eagleton’s paraphrase of de Man’s argument, “pernicious mystifications. »
Beginning in the late 1870s or period going from 1860 to 1880) as a response to Romanticism and continuing into the early part of the 20th century, Parnassianism surfaced as a poetry movement advocating “art for art’s sake.” Primarily opposed to Romanticism’s unbridled sensibility and unrestrained poetic forms, Parnassianism heralded artistic control, polish, elegance, objectivity, and impassiveness.
Before considering the situation of Parnassian poetry – and perhaps its underestimated dominance – it is useful to recall the basic origins and themes for which le Parnasse came to be known. As the words Parnasse and Parnassus suggest, the poetry grouped into the three volumes of Le Parnasse contemporain: recueil de vers nouveaux inhabited Mount Parnassus, mythological home of the Muses and, more generally, of poetry. With this return to mythology came a neoclassical turn away from their own era: roughly 1860 to 1880. They similarly rejected the social utility of poetry that had come to characterize the 1830s and that had perhaps seen its symbolic apotheosis in 1848.
Several scholars around the world share the view that art should be beautiful but it also should have social utility. WEB Dubois, for instance says that the apostle of Beauty is the apostle of Truth and Right, not by choice but by inner and outer compulsion. Free he is but his freedom is ever bounded by Truth and Justice. Thus, all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. Toni Morrison also believed that art should be beautiful but, like Aristotle, she thinks that it must be utilitarian as well for even if it does not provide solutions, it should open doors and make people think. Aesthetics may thus consider the relationship between beauty and other values, such as truth. The study of aesthetics also involves inquiry into the nature of artistic creation and audience appreciation.
What is literary aesthetics?
Aesthetics, in literature, is the inclusion of references to artistic elements or expressions within a textual work. Literary aesthetics is the study of beauty and the general esthetic value of literary works. Scholars have a different take on how beauty is measured in literature. Whereas some put in parallel aesthetics and perception of the senses, others assess it based on form and content. They thus give an important place to literary analysis; that is, the examination and evaluation of a literary work.
Literary criticism involves requires a certain degree of literary culture and knowledge to apprehend the beauty of a text, as Confucius and Rifatterre sugest. According to Rifaterre, writers self-consciously overcode their texts; therefore, the reader must have a certain level of linguistic knowledge equal to that of the author to be able to decode his text. It's not perception, then, that enables us to spot stylistic effects, but rather the reader must apprehend the meaning of the stylistic effects: "We understand that, under these conditions, overcoding is only overcoding for a reader whose Linguistic particularities are in a relationship of similarity with those of the author." Why, then, call on perception to identify stylistic effects when so little attention is paid to actual perceptions of the utterance?" (Hardy Alain-René. Théorie et méthode stylistiques de M. Riffaterre. In: Langue française, n°3, 1969. La stylistique. pp. 90-96).
If we take into account that a literary text is intentionally crafted and designed by an author to look beautiful, a good critic should take into the writer’s objectives and the tools he uses to achieve beauty (language, style, characterization, setting, genre, genre, subgenre, narration, structure). When people analyze literature, they consider how the author uses literary techniques to create meaning. Readers first critically read the text and examine elements such as figurative language, syntax, diction, and structure. In other words, critics have to try to decode the discourses of texts.
Another question raised in the study of beauty is if criteria for evaluating literatures across the globe should be universal.
A need for a differentiated approach to the aesthetics of texts:
Literatures of formerly dominated people or dependent territories tend to lack autonomy. They are evaluated and subordinated to certain ongoing practices in the dominant power’s country. Not only are they not very visible, but also, they draw their legitimacy from the literature of the dominant group or power. American literature suffered from this overshadowing by British literature before it gained a local flavor and autonomy.
Similarly, African literature is assessed according to French or British paradigms. This is problematic because African authors, just like their African-American counterparts, encode their texts with particular signs that a Eurocentric approach cannot decrypt. As a matter of fact, since the 1920s, authors have drawn inspiration from their folklore to mold their narratives, thus giving them a cultural imprint. They have utilized the culture, history that they taught them to despise as an aesthetic motif.
An approach that does not take into account the specificities of their literature in addition to general criteria of evaluation of literary texts will fail to fully understand its aesthetics. If for example, an African author replicates the features of the griot’s oral text in a novel’s narration, the critic who has no clue about the features of such a performance cannot assess adequately the beauty of the text. Similarly, a critic who has no clue about the blues, cannot be sensitive to the beautiful craft of a blues narrative.