Structure Disclosed. Replete Moments and Aesthetic Experience in Reading Novels

ABSTRACT

Despite the huge interest in different philosophical questions surrounding literature, particularly analytic philosophers have had relatively little to say about literature’s specifically aesthetic character. Peter Kivy has developed this antiaesthetic tendency furthest, ultimately denying that the reading of prose literature has any deep aesthetic content. Building on Alan Goldman’s and John Dewey’s work on aesthetic experience, I argue that a key literary feature of novels I single out – what I term a replete moment – has the potential to trigger in readers significant aesthetic experiences. Along with revealing aesthetic aspects in reading that Kivy’s position does not cover, my account shows that contemplation of the overall structure of the novel is not the sole, more substantial form aesthetic experience can take in the case of reading, as Kivy’s formalistic literary aesthetics assumes. This conclusion is argued to be significant also for the general philosophical discussion on aesthetic experience. An analysis of a key passage in John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany is an important part of the view of literary aesthetic experience put forth.

KEYWORDS:

• Aesthetic experience
• aesthetic formalism
• Dewey
• literary reading
• Kivy
• novel

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See, in particular, the work of Noël Carroll (2001, 2002, 2012, 2015), Gary Iseminger (2004), Jerrold Levinson (2016), and Robert Stecker (2006, 2010). See also Matravers (2003), Irvin (2008), and Durà-Vilà (2016). For a comprehensive overview of the terrain of aesthetic experience, encompassing different and even opposing philosophical standpoints, see Shusterman and Tomlin (eds.) (2008).

2. For a very good overview of these issues, see Mikkonen (2013).

3. Carroll’s examples include, for example, the enveloping sublimity of Rothko’s paintings, Robert Morris’s installations, Michelangelo Antonioni’s films (2001, 51), ‘taking notice of the suggestive repetition of rectilinear forms in a Cubist painting,’ the A/B/A/B rhyme scheme in poetry (2002, 149, 163), attending carefully ‘to the intricate contrapuntal interplay’ in Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, and the point-of-view editing in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (2012, 166–167).

4. Goodman develops his idea of repleteness, which he considers to be one of the ‘symptoms of the aesthetic,’ for example in Goodman (1976, 229–230). See also Rafe McGregor’s (2015) discussion of ‘literary thickness.’

5. This terminology derives from Goldman (2013).

6. Carroll actually also notes that while ‘many aesthetic experiences are entered self-consciously,’ the phenomenological quality of many of them come closer to something like a grabbing, aesthetic experience in these cases forcing ‘themselves upon us, unexpectedly … ’ (2002, 155).

7. Dewey (1980, 308) writes ”criticism is a search for the properties of the object that may justify the direct reaction.”

8. For an examination of the role of gaps in reading for the overall literary experience, see Kivy (2006, 107–114).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Finnish Cultural Foundation.