Appreciation and Feeling

Abstract

Questions about our emotional engagement with works of fiction have been the subject of a good deal of debate among philosophers in recent years. Susan Feagin's closely and carefully argued book Reading with Feeling represents a distinctive and significant contribution that debate. Its distinctiveness and significance lie not least in the fact that in this book Feagin is concerned not only with the possibility, nature, and rationality of our emotional responses works of fiction, as are so many of the recent contributors the debate, but also with the important roles that such responses play in our understanding, evaluation, and appreciation of literary As she states in her opening sentence, Having emotional and other responses a work of fictional literature is a very important part of appreciating it. And a few lines later, To appreciate a work is, in part, get the value out of it, and 'getting the value out of it' involves being affectively or emotionally moved. It is experience the work in certain ways; it involves reading 'with feeling' (p. 1). This is the governing thesis of Reading with Feeling. Feagin writes, don't take such claims as these be at all controversial. But it is precisely their 'obviousness' that is a symptom there is philosophical work (pp. 1-2). The philosophical work that she undertakes is first, in part one of the book, to explain how [affective responses works of literary fiction] are even possible, how they can arise in reading fiction. She begins by arguing in chapter one that appreciation is fundamentally an activity-and in particular a matter of successfully exercising a set of abilities-that is temporally extended and involves perceptual interaction with an external object (the work) and the interpretation of inscriptions. Hence, she argues in chapter two, the desire appreciate is not a desire that something be the case-that one comes understand a work, say, or evaluate it appropriately-but is rather a desire do something, and in particular engage with a work in certain ways. In chapter three she characterizes this engagement in terms of mental slides and shifts, and alterations in our sensitivities, arguing in chapters four and five that these play central roles in our empathetic, sympathetic, and other varieties of response Now, if such responses are an important part of what is involved in appreciating a work, as Feagin argues they are, then they must be open assessment in terms of rationality, relevance, appropriateness, and so on; the job of part two of the book is thus explain what such responses, and how they may be assessed. In chapter six, Feagin delineates different sorts of assessments of response in terms of relevance, appropriateness, and warrant. She goes on, in chapter seven, develop an account of how responses works of fiction are grounded in artistically or aesthetically significant features of those works. Her concern here is with what warrants our responding affectively fiction at all; in chapters eight through ten, she discusses type warrant: the ways in which we may be warranted in affectively responding a work of fiction in one way rather than another. In the final chapter, Feagin turns her attention the question of the value of appreciative engagement with literary This, she argues, lies in the fact that the practice of appreciation is one important way in which we can develop and maintain what she calls affective flexibility, a psychological capacity that both expands one's capacity for imaginative and emotional life and is also a precondition for emotional control (p. 255). From the reviewer's point of view, all this represents an embarrassment of riches, making selection unavoidable. In what follows, I have chosen focus on two aspects of Reading with Feeling: Feagin's general thesis concerning the role of response in appreciation, and her account of empathetic responses Needless say, there is much more in the book that invites and merits discussion than I have the space discuss here.