Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- 1 ‘Perpetually moralists’ … ‘in a large sense’
- 2 ‘How to live’ and ‘how to live’
- 3 Agents and lives: making moral sense of people
- 4 ‘Doing good to others’: some reflections on Daniel Deronda
- 5 Moral thinking in The Mill on the Floss
- 6 Finding congenial matter: Pope and the art of life
- 7 Literary judgment: making moral sense of poems
- 8 Afterword: some limits of philosophy?
- Notes
- Index
7 - Literary judgment: making moral sense of poems
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- 1 ‘Perpetually moralists’ … ‘in a large sense’
- 2 ‘How to live’ and ‘how to live’
- 3 Agents and lives: making moral sense of people
- 4 ‘Doing good to others’: some reflections on Daniel Deronda
- 5 Moral thinking in The Mill on the Floss
- 6 Finding congenial matter: Pope and the art of life
- 7 Literary judgment: making moral sense of poems
- 8 Afterword: some limits of philosophy?
- Notes
- Index
Summary
In the traditional institution of literature and literary criticism, the practice of judgment has always been central and always been seen as central, even though the preferred kind of judgment has varied from age to age, critic to critic. However, it has been, and still is, commonly supposed that judging a poem (by which I mean a novel, or play, or any work of imaginative literature) must consist in ascribing certain evaluative aesthetic predicates to the poem: unity, complexity, originality, emotional force, realism, formal perfection and the like. A judgment is supposed to be a reasoned verdict on the poem: the poem is good or bad inasmuch as it has these or those qualities. Criticism is taken to be an account of the poem's good-making and its bad-making qualities; so that critical judgment is distinguished from interpretation, which is taken to be only an account of the poem's meaning, and from description, which is taken to be a value-free account of all its qualities, and from history, which is taken to be only an account of its objective temporal contexts. Furthermore, the purpose of criticism is supposedly to express approval (or censure) of the poem and to recommend it to the approval (or censure) of others, and in doing so to rank it within the canon of poems that have been approved and recommended by most competent judges over a long period – poems that have stood the test of time and can therefore be regarded as classics.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Agents and Lives , pp. 223 - 252Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993