On the Banality of Literary Truths

The propositional theory of literary truth says that the purpose of literary works is to express propositions. One objection to this theory is that the propositions that can be extracted from literary works are too banal to constitute the purpose of those works. This paper defends the propositional theory against this objection

Leonard Meyer. Style and Music: Theory, History and Ideology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. xi, 376 pages. Studies in the Criticism and Theory of Music.

Leonard Meyer's splendid new book, Style and Music: Theory, History and Ideology, provides a rich feast of food for musical thought and (inevitably) for musical controversy. Theorists will, of course, be drawn to the author's nuts-and-bolts functional analyses of the various musical passages he discusses in making his argument; and music historians, doubtless, will find much to stimulate them, as well as to argue about, in his historical characterization of the Classical and Romantic periods in music and of their relevant social, political, and philosophical backgrounds. But philosophers of art like myself will surely fasten upon Meyer's bold attempt to connect the pure musical parameters of syntax and structure to the reigning ideologies with which they co-exist. Nor, I think, will it be out of place to concentrate on this attempt in the present review essay; for it is the major theme and argument of Meyer's book. I call the attempt to connect music and ideology "bold" because-and I think Meyer would agree-this is one of the most difficult and contentious things to make out in the "philosophy of music." In my view, it is one of the two master problems of the discipline, the other, to which it is obviously related, being the problem of making out exactly what the nature is, in the first place, of the aesthetic satisfaction we take in absolute music, given that such music seems, at least on the surface, bereft of semantic or representational content, and, yet, has come to occupy a place in the pantheon no less prominent than that accorded the semantic and representational arts

Aesthetics and literature : a problematic relation?

The paper argues that there is a proper place for literature within aesthetics but that care must be taken in identifying just what the relation is. In characterising aesthetic pleasure associated with literature it is all too easy to fall into reductive accounts, for example, of literature as merely "fine writing". Belleslettrist or formalistic accounts of literature are rejected, as are two other kinds of reduction, to pure meaning properties and to a kind of narrative realism. The idea is developed that literature-both poetry and prose fiction-invites its own distinctive kind of aesthetic appreciation which far from being at odds with critical practice, in fact chimes well with it