Approaches to Study

1. Approaches to Study Dr. Stephen Ogden LIBS 7023

2. Polemic and Literature • The problem of Art – • The environment of Art is Beauty • How can polemic be beautiful? • What separates a novel from a non-fiction work? • Is it just plot, characters, setting – i.e. elements of fiction – or does art have a entirely different quiddity: quality, element, nature? • Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination

3. Approaches to Study Polemical • Greek, “Polemos” = “War” • OED: Polemic: a strong verbal or written attack on a person, opinion, doctrine, etc. • Polemic is one type of rhetoric: put in plain English, intended to defeat an enemy with words. As a bellicose form of writing, the object is Victory, not Truth. • Polemic, as an aspect of writing, is a techne: and so is able to be learned by method.

4. Polemic: absolutist language Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation “Can we even conceive of a project more intellectually forlorn than [Christianity]?” “How can any educated person think this anything but a hilarious, terrifying, and unconscionable waste of time?”

5. Animal Cruelty: Lab Experiments

6. Animal Cruelty: Lab Experiments

7. Approaches to Study • Polemic • Absolute • Final • Certainty • Implied Intolerance • Dialectic • Relative –the second idea is a partner • Developing • Doubt • Implied humility: (“two sides to a story”) • Possible unknowns • Possible errors

8. Lionel Trilling • Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination. • The quality of Imagination separates art from didactic (“teaching”) or discursive (“reasoning”) writing. • Literature – novels, drama, poetry -- is in the realm of Art, and art has its own nature and function. • Imagination creates a virtual experience of an abstract idea – a world with no God, for example – which reveals potential actual effects of ideas.

9. Polemic and Literature, con’t Dialogic novel • An artistic method – a means of applying literary imagination – which puts ideas in equal dialectic within a novel through use of character, dialogue, and even setting. • Heteroglossia—”multiplicity of voices” • The reader makes his or her own decision about the strongest or most appealing idea • Anti-authoritarian • Allows Free Will to the reader.

10. Polemic and Literature, con’t • To a dialogical understanding of fiction, Polemic is inartistic: i.e. the more obviously and insistently a novel teaches, or even preaches, the less artistic it is. • Didactic: designed to teach or preach. • An artistic question—balance needed between “instructing” and “delighting” • Questions are: • freedom of the reader • Reliability of the text.

11. Principles of Literary Criticism: C.T. Winchester (1912) • Art Criticism: “the intelligent appreciation of any work of art and a just estimate of its worth and rank.” • Taste: “the power to appreciate (or faculty of appreciation) the æsthetic qualities of any work of art.” • Literary Criticism: “concerned only with the art of literature, but general nature of criticism is the same whether the subject be literature, painting, sculpture, music.”