Mr. Krutch and Ideal Values in Literature
| Autor: | Joseph Warren Beach |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 1938 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Ethics. 48:487-497 |
| ISSN: | 1539-297X 0014-1704 |
| DOI: | 10.1086/290022 |
| Popis: | MONG the most challenging of contemporary writers in America is Joseph Wood Krutch, editor, scholar, and author of many volumes of literary criticism. Mr. Krutch is not content with the vague impressionism of the average critic, who proceeds upon no formulated theory of art, and whose judgments are determined by an ill-assorted mass of sentiment and prejudice. He is, on the contrary, earnestly concerned to understand the principles on which his judgments are based. Again, as compared with the "new humanists" like Professor Foerster, he takes more serious account of the actual position of the contemporary mind, and is ready to accept as valid the results of scientific thought and the critical spirit of the times. He is relatively untainted with the narrowly aesthetic view of literary art as something entirely apart from ordinary human experience-unaffected by our moral sentiment and our other major concerns as human beings-a view that was dominant in criticism at the turn of the century but has been so thoroughly discredited by the humanist as well as in the writings of men like Professor Dewey and Professor I. A. Richards. Nor does he fall into Mr. Santayana's error of supposing that what the mind once accepted as truth, but has since discarded, can still be an effective stimulus to imaginative creation. There is little evidence, however, that Mr. Krutch has understood the psychology on which Dewey and Richards base their account of the place of art in human behavior. He has not grasped the idea of the aesthetic process as an organization, or systematization, of natural impulses. He seems to have no ink |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
|