Kuizhi (Lewis) Wang (Hertford) The Value of Authorial Connectedness'
Authorial connectedness, as John Holliday argues, is the reader’s experience or feeling of emotional intimacy to the author in reading a fictional piece. In this essay, I argue that this experience, as characterized by Holliday, lacks the kind of value or importance that makes it indispensable in the proper appreciation or understanding of a fictional piece. The paper is divided into two sections. In section one I consider a range of possible values this experience can have. It may be the case that this experience signifies certain aesthetically (or artistically) valuable quality; or, the fact that a piece is more likely to give rise to this experience in its readers itself may be something aesthetically valuable. This experience may also bear some moral values. Or it may be the case that having this experience is constitutive to a proper understanding of a piece. I argue, however, that all of the above attempts fail, and this experience is of no special value that makes it something we should pursue. In the second part I argue that the intentional pursuance of this experience may in fact be aesthetically harmful, since having this experience requires us to treat the author as, metaphorically put, the biological parent of a piece. And this requirement blocks another mode of interpretation, namely the mode described in Bartes’ famous The Death of the Author, which I argue to be indispensable to a full and proper understanding of a fiction.
James Matharu (New) (Un)Natural Violation: The Human Forms and Poe's `Spirit of Perverseness'
The paper is (very much) a work in progress, intended as part of a larger aesthetic and ethical investigation into the uncanny and the dreadful. I propose that certain uncanny objects are those whose expression is that of what was a human thing that has since bent or grown itself out of, and against, its human form. Imagining the coming to life of such objects is what lends certain fear to the experience of the uncanny: but to experience the uncanny is primarily to undergo a distinct sort of perception (or perceptual experience) of life-form violation. The violation is, however, understood as an integral part of what it is to be Human in another sense. That is, there are two notions of the human to be considered: (i) the human as the humane and mundane, against which uncanny being is contrasted; and (ii) the Human as that life-form which contains within itself both humanity (with a small ‘h’) and, naturally, the principle by which humanity is thrown off. This principle is not one of haphazard mutation or error but has a strict logic and reliance upon rational and sentimental understanding: ‘to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such’ (Edgar Allen Poe, ‘The Black Cat’). I draw on some remarks and ideas in Kant’s Critique of Teleological Judgment, Philippa Foot and Michael Thompson on natural-historical judgments, and principally the language and imagery of passages from Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ to articulate this vision of what the uncanny can be. I will end with some remarks about the importance of stylistic and literary form to such articulation (this has a broader bearing on issues about philosophical method).
