choice of one work over another.”^45 Hence premise 2b is false as a description
of all critical activity, and the conclusion, 3, is not mandatory. Elucidatory
criticism can be directed at artistic beauty or value, at something that has
attracted or moved us inchoately and that we wish to come to know better.
As Margaret Iversen and Stephen Melville have argued, we are free at least
sometimes to reject the thought that“‘art’[is] more or less directly available
as an object of knowledge”^46 and instead to explore critically and imagina-
tively the formal arrangements and presentational densities that may–or
may not–progressively disclose themselves as the source of our involvement
with a work.
Rita Felski similarly defends the importance of an imaginative hermen-
eutics that is specifically engaged with textual densities while also seeking a
way between“theological”conceptions of the text as object of worship alone
and“suspicious”conceptions of the text as instrument of ideology alone. She
proposes“a alternative to either strong claims for literary otherness or the
whittling down of texts to the bare bones of political and ideological func-
tions.”^47 We should learn both to suspect the textandto listen to it, to
analyze it with objective distanceandto attach to it, to criticize it,andto
love it.^48 The reason for this is that the literary text itself expresses both a
kind of constitutive incompleteness about knowing how to live well con-
cretely and specifically, in detail and over time,anda coping with or coming
to terms with that incompleteness. Together with the text, we should“relin-
quish the modern dogma that our lives should become thoroughly disen-
chanted,”^49 thus opening up ourselves to the affective and evaluative
dimensions of absorption in texts (and in life) while also remaining alert
and critical. The very experiences of recognition, enchantment, knowledge,
and shock^50 that life can provoke are registered and articulated in significant
literary works, where these works also shy from claiming too much settled
knowledge about the roles of these experiences in life. Our interpretive
attentions to the work should be both as imaginatively involved and tentative
as our attentions to such experiences in life. They can track“the torturous(^45) Ibid., p. 42.
(^46) Margaret Iversen and Stephen Melville,Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures(Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 152.
(^47) Rita Felski,Uses of Literature(Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), p. 7.
(^48) Ibid., p. 22. (^49) Ibid., p. 76.
(^50) Felski discusses the experience of the literary work under these four main headings.
162 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art