Understanding and ethics in Coleridge

description, evaluation and otherness

David P. Haney

pp. 119-135

in: Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford, Tim Woods (eds), The ethics in literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

Students of literature have always been concerned with the relationship between description and evaluation, which is perhaps why the distinction between "fact" and "value", the relation between what "is' and what "ought" to be, is a natural concern of literary critics who turn their attention to ethics. In the early part of this century the distinction appeared in the division of labour between scholars who described texts and critics who evaluated them.¹ Then we began to evaluate the merits of texts based on how well they could be described within a formalist and subsequently a deconstructive paradigm. Lately we have begun describing and evaluating with a vengeance: history has returned, descriptions have become "thick" and anecdotal — but just as authoritative — and evaluation has moved from the aesthetic to the political.

Cited authors

Coleridge Samuel Taylor