The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (review)

No one has ever been quite sure what art is good for—or what criticism is good for, either. Dissatisfied with analysis that insists "on situating works in relation to historical forces and sociopolitical interests," Altieri turns to affect for help with this ancient question of purpose. Neither philosophers nor people generally, he argues, value feelings, moods, emotions, and passions sufficiently for themselves; always there's a move to subordinate these to cognitive or ethical concerns. Art has an unparalleled ability to register the intricacy and significance of affects, and the worthiest project for criticism henceforth may to be to show how particular works render affective experience in all the subtlety of its developing.

Making his case for the virtue of being moved, Altieri is himself moving (in spite of a prose that often deadens where it should energize) and persuasive (as when he invokes Spinoza on the mind's "conative" drive to affirm its own powers of activity). But I remain a little doubtful about his effort to make "a difference in how people read," because his way of reading is already so familiar. When he writes of one lyric, "We cannot summarize this attitude by any one label—if we could there would have been little point in writing the poem," he might as well be quoting Cleanth Brooks's "Heresy of Paraphrase," first published in 1947. And Altieri's splendidly nuanced readings generally have the feel, if not the professed cognitive slant, of the New Criticism, which three quarters of a century after its birth still provides the tools used by critics at large and literature instructors at every level. Would that Altieri had said more about how his future for criticism works with criticism's lively past.