The value of suspending values

Abstract

This article sets out to interrogate the notion of literary value by placing it within a broader discussion of literature’s relation to truth. It asks, in other words, if it is possible to evince the value of literature by assuming that literature is a carrier of certain truths. Institutions have in turn been called upon or even created to evaluate and demonstrate its value according to a series of criteria often based on the investigation of the relation author-work-audience. I argue that the dynamicity of literary values, their development and changeability, is related to the priority that one of the terms of the relation author-work-audience has enjoyed over the others at different historical times. I also argue that the emphasis on the link between literary values and strong truths (demonstrable truths) has produced disabling dichotomies and, perhaps more importantly, violated the nature of literature in relation to experience — phenomenological, ontological, metaphysical or aesthetic experience. This article introduces an alternative approach to literary value predicated not so much on strong truth as on weak truth. In this context reference will be made to the work of the Italian philosophers Mario Perniola and Gianni Vattimo.