Over at The Reading Experience, Daniel Green has been going deep on John Dewey’s Art and Experience:
The function of criticism is the reeducation of perception of works of art; it is an auxiliary in the process, a difficult process, of learning to see and hear….The moral function of art itself is to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, perfect the power to perceive. The critic’s office is to further this work, performed by the object of art.
This is one of the things I love about good literary blogs–the way in which the proprietors can interrupt their regularly scheduled programming, such as it is, to delve as deeply as they wish into whatever topic they’re interested in at the moment. Maud Newton, of course, has gone deep repeatedly on Mark Twain, and Scott Esposito has been plunging his audience first into Your Face Tomorrow and now into The Tale of Genji. Very good.