Essays in Literary Aesthetics

The six essays of this book touch upon some of the key issues of philosophical aesthetics. The issues discussed by the author Ranjan K. Ghosh include the definition of art, the relevance of authorial intentions for interpretation, the nature of our emotional responses to art, and art’s moral significance. The essays are stand-alone pieces to a substantial degree and Ghosh shows very little effort to build bridges between them. The book leaves quite a scattered impression, even though some of the pieces are comparably weightier and better reflect Ghosh’s overall theoretical standpoint. From the essays emerges an aesthetic autonomism, according to which aesthetic value is autonomous with respect to other specimens of value that may be attributed to art, such as moral, political, and cognitive value. The form of autonomism Ghosh outlines is of a very strong sort; its central tenet is that ‘our understanding and appreciation of a work of art is independent of a reference to anything outside of it’ (43). Ghosh even goes so far as to claim that a certain degree of ‘decontextualizing’ is required to see the artwork in the right perspective, which goes against numerous contextualist positions in aesthetics from Danto to Levinson (44).1

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