Pragmatic Literary Criticism :: Literature Essays Literary Criticism

Pragmatic literary Criticism Pragmatic blame is concerned, first and foremost, with the ethical impact each literary text has upon an consultation. Regardless of arts other merits or failings, the primary obligation or function of art is social in temper. Assessing, fulfilling, and shaping the needs, wants, and desires of an audience should be the first task of an artist. Art does non exist in isolation it is a potent tool for individual as wholesome as communal change. Though practical critics believe that art houses the electric potential for massive societal transformation, art is conspicuously ambivalent in its competency to promote ethical or evil. The critical project of pragmatic critical review is to establish a moral standard of quality for art. By establishing dainty boundaries based upon moral/ethical guidelines, art which enriches and entertains, inspires and instructs a reader with noesis of true statement and goodness will be preserved and celebrated, and art which does not will be judged inferior, cautioned against, and (if necessary) destroyed. Moral outrage as well as logical disputation have been the motivating forces behind pragmatic criticism throughout history. The tension created between this emotional and intellectual reaction to publications has created a wealth of criticism with varying degrees of success. Ironically, much like arts capacity to inspire diligence or decadence in a reader, pragmatic criticism encompasses both redemptive and destructive qualities. Plato provides a foundational and absolute argument for pragmatic criticism. Excluding poetry from his ideal Republic, Plato attempts to completely undermine the power and empowerment of art. He justifies his position by claiming that the power which poetry has of harming even the good (and there are very few who are not harmed) is for certain an awful liaison (28). Because artists claim their imitations can speak to the true nature of things, circumvent ing the need for serious, calmly considered intellectual inquiry, art should not be chased as a valuable endeavor. Art widens the gap between fair play and the world of appearances, ironically by claiming to breach it. The artist promotes false images of truth and goodness by appealing to basic human passions, indulging the unreasonable nature which has no discernment of greater and less, but thinks the same thing at one time great and at another menial (27). Art manufactures moral ambiguity, and to Plato this is unacceptable. Because it is deceptive and essentially superficial, all art must be controlled and delegitmized for all time.