Pragmatic Literary Criticism :: Literature Essays Literary Criticism

Pragmatic Literary Criticism Pragmatic criticism is concerned, first and foremost, with the ethical impact any literary text has upon an audience. Regardless of arts other merits or failings, the primary responsibility or function of art is social in character. Assessing, fulfilling, and shaping the needs, wants, and desires of an audience should be the first task of an artist. Art does not outlive in isolation it is a potent tool for individual as well as communal change. Though pragmatic critics believe that art houses the say-so for massive societal transformation, art is conspicuously ambivalent in its ability to promote good or evil. The critical project of pragmatic criticism is to yield a moral standard of quality for art. By establishing artistic boundaries based upon moral/ethical guidelines, art which enriches and entertains, inspires and instructs a reader with knowledge of truth and commodity will be preserved and celebrated, and art which does not will be judged in ferior, cautioned against, and (if necessary) destroyed. Moral outrage as well as logical argument suck in been the motivating forces behind pragmatic criticism throughout history. The tension created between this emotional and intellectual reaction to literature has created a wealth of criticism with vary 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 authority of art. He justifies his position by claiming that the power which poetry has of harming even so the good (and there are very few who are not harmed) is surely an awful thing (28). Because artists claim their imitations can speak to the true nature of things, circumventing the need for serious, calmly considered intellect ual inquiry, art should not be pursued as a valuable endeavor. Art widens the gap between truth and the area 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 irrational nature which has no discernment of greater and less, but thinks the same thing at one time great and at another small (27). Art manufactures moral ambiguity, and to Plato this is unacceptable. Because it is shoddy and essentially superficial, all art must be controlled and delegitmized for all time.