Abstract
No one can argue against the fact that the first thing that will keep the reader wanting to complete reading or to reread a literary text is the aesthetic experience that the work affords. This can be noticed when the perceiver faces any successful work of art. There is a sense of amusement and excitement (an aesthetic experience). This experience is emergent, formed as a result of the artistic value of the work. One of the elements comprising the artistic value is the moral dimension. Poems, and indeed any art work may hold moral value which will affect the experience of receiving them. The concept of moral value and its relation to aesthetic value in some art forms has been discussed by many scholars. This paper discusses the merit of Noel Carrol’s theory, moderate moralism. It then displays the moral virtues and defects of lyrics from two Bob Dylan’s songs, Masters of War and Neighbourhood Bully on the real readers’ aesthetic experience by using insights from moderate moralism, to establish the relationships between moral defects and virtues and their aesthetic value. Keywords: aesthetics; morality; Dylan; reader response; poetry
Highlights
The Victorian phrase, ‘the sister arts’ describes the interrelationship among music, painting and poetry but, can be extended to describe the interrelationship among all forms of art, since they share the same primary purpose which, is to afford the perceiver with an aesthetic experience
In Bob Dylan’s lyrics, Masters of War and Neighbourhood Bully, moral virtues and defects apparently affect the aesthetic experience of the real reader
It is obvious that the moral virtue and flaw have its impact on the aesthetic experience of the real reader of Bob Dylan’s lyrics, Masters of War and Neighbourhood Bully
Summary
The Victorian phrase, ‘the sister arts’ describes the interrelationship among music, painting and poetry but, can be extended to describe the interrelationship among all forms of art, since they share the same primary purpose which, is to afford the perceiver with an aesthetic experience. In the late twentieth century, Wolfgang Isere’s phenomenological theory proposed that instead of burying our heads in the text and scrutinising it, we should take a little step back so we can have a full picture of the expected encounter, which represents the experience that is promoted by its artistic value He states that “the literary work has two poles, which might be called the artistic and the aesthetic: the artistic refers to the text that is created by the author, and the aesthetic refers to the realisation [of that text] accomplished by the reader” The depth of the aesthetic experience can be increased or decreased by an artwork’s artistic elements, and how structure and content are represented Part of this is its moral vision or content, a theme which generated heated debate among the aesthetic theorists in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It will use methodology borrowed from Iser’s constructs of the implied reader and real reader which originate from his reader-response theory
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