What a generous interview! Re: what academia has done with literature, I really appreciate this: “my work was about how art can have certain beneficial social effects. But not if you put it on the spot. So in letting that political readings of art get too rampant, they lost social trust.”
Makes me think of Tolstoy: "In these schools art is taught! But art is the transmission to others of a special feeling experienced by the artist. How can this be taught in schools?
No school can evoke feeling in a man...The one thing these schools can teach is how to transmit feelings experienced by other artists in the way those other artists transmitted them....
[But] In literary art people are taught how, without having anything they wish to say, to write a many-paged composition on a theme about which they have never thought, and, moreover, to write it so that it should resemble the work of an author admitted to be celebrated."
What a generous interview! Re: what academia has done with literature, I really appreciate this: “my work was about how art can have certain beneficial social effects. But not if you put it on the spot. So in letting that political readings of art get too rampant, they lost social trust.”
Makes me think of Tolstoy: "In these schools art is taught! But art is the transmission to others of a special feeling experienced by the artist. How can this be taught in schools?
No school can evoke feeling in a man...The one thing these schools can teach is how to transmit feelings experienced by other artists in the way those other artists transmitted them....
[But] In literary art people are taught how, without having anything they wish to say, to write a many-paged composition on a theme about which they have never thought, and, moreover, to write it so that it should resemble the work of an author admitted to be celebrated."
Great interview, I've just asked my local library buy a copy of John's book!
Yay!