![]() ![]() ![]() But this is a false antipathy, or a misplaced one really my students and I share the most important values, and our visions of a desirable world, and even of the place of art within it, overlap far more than they diverge. Such responses can sometimes place me in what seems an antipathetic relationship to my students as they fail to respond as I wish they would to books that I love. These responses sometimes seem to me an index of an anxiety I see more and more in my students, in my friends and myself, a kind of paranoia about our own moral status, a desire to demonstrate our personal righteousness in our response to art. When I work with students now, graduate or undergraduate, their primary mode of engagement with a text often seems to be a particular kind of moral judgment, as though before they can see anything else in stories or poems they have to sort them into piles of the righteous and the problematic. The idea that artists should make what they feel compelled to make, regardless of such considerations, that in fact art should be protected from responsibilities of this kind, seems part and parcel of a discredited Romantic model of the artist as exempt from workaday morality, licensed by genius to act badly, or at least to disregard the claims of others. We have a sense that the most important questions we can ask about a work of art are whether and to what extent it furthers extra-artistic aims, to what extent it serves a world outside itself. Within the small world of people who care about literature and art, the culture is as moralistic as it has ever been in my lifetime: witness our polemics about who has the right to what subject matter, our conviction that art has a duty to right representational wrongs, that poems or novels or films can be guilty of a violence that seems ever less metaphorical against an audience construed as ever more vulnerable. As often happens when competing positions have claims to truth, the pendulum of consensus swings between them, and the pendulum has swung quite far, in recent years, toward the pole of responsibility and holding art to account. Not just to mean, but to be meaningful-to be useful for, and so maybe responsible to, other realms of life: our sense of community, say, or politics, our moral relations. Here’s a way of putting the problem: on one hand we want art to be free, and on the other we want it to mean. ![]()
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