Why Do Good Critics Like Bad Books?
Wednesday, 30 April 2025, 16:00-18:00
Senate House, Room 349
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Good critics like bad literature. The infamous Amanda McKittrick Ros counted the likes of Aldous Huxley, Mark Twain, and CS Lewis among her admirers. D.B. Wyndam Lewis’s and Charles Lee’s anthology of bad verse remains in print, nearly a century after its original publication, and has been highly praised by authors and critics as distinguished as Harold Bloom and Vita Sackville-West. Good critics don’t like any old work of bad literature, however. The sort of bad literature good critics enjoy is well-described by Dyck and Johnson’s (2017) conception of good-bad art, whereby an artwork becomes enjoyable in virtue of the artistic flaws ensued by the artist’s failed artistic intentions. These works are enjoyed because of their artistic flaws rather than in spite of them. Their enjoyment therefore presents a prima facie contradiction to a commonsensical claim about good critics, whereby they take pleasure in artistic merits, and displeasure in artistic flaws. My present aim is to make sense of this apparent contradiction while accounting for the genuine aesthetic pleasure critics take in such works. My discussion draws from the recent philosophical debate around good-bad art and film, especially as found in Dyck and Johnson (2017), Tooming (2020), and Strohl (2023). I argue, contra Dyck and Johnson, that the value found in good-bad works of literature should be considered as literary (and therefore artistic) rather than aesthetic. In addition to this, I propose that we can shed light on the pleasure that critics take in such works of art through the examination of a parallel puzzle which arises in narrative works of art: the pleasure taken in the dark hero.
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Following NHS guidance, all attendees are strongly encouraged to be vaccinated (including boosters) against Covid-19, unless medically exempt. Our group is diverse; please continue to be considerate of those who wear face coverings and those who don’t. Thank you.