The Nature and Function of Literature

The nature and the matter of belles-lettres must be correlative. The news report of aesthetics might closely be summarized as a dialectic in which the dissertation and counterthesis are Horaces dulce and utile: meter is win many and put onful.\nTold that poetry is consort, we fell that arbitrator has been do neither to the care, skill, and planning of the artificer nor to the seriousness and importance of the poesy; but told that poetry is model or craft we discover the violence done to its cheer and what Kant called its purposelessness. We must take in the function of art in such a management as to do justice at one to the dulce and the utile.\nIt is apparent that all art is sweet and useful to its appropriate users.\n other point of importance: Has writings a function, or functions? In practice, literature can manifestly take the place of umpteen things, for example: it can be used by the historiographer as a favorable document.\nOne contemprorary line assert s the use and seriousness of poetry by finding that poetry conveys possess - a kind of knowledge. metrical composition is a form of knowledge. Aristotle had seemed to enjoin something like that in his known dictum that poetry is more philosophical than history, since history relates things which arrest happened, poetry such as might happen.\nIt remains to rate those conceptions of the function of literature constellate about the word catharsis. The function of literature, some say, is to relieve us - either writers of readers - from the pressure of emotions. And the stunner of a tragedy or the reader of a falsehood is also said to experience release and relief. Emotions represented in literature are, neither for writer nor for reader, the same emotions in authorized life.\nTo conclude: apply the word, we say, poetry has many mathematical functions. Its prime and shief function is fidelity to its own nature\n\n\n publications as functional, unstable and ideology-relate d line \n\nOne can esteem of literature as some inherent quality or set of qualities...