this was a very interesting read. i never knew about intersubjectivity. i actually told my partner about this concept, and he said that, to put it crudely, it's like a sheeple opinion. something exists (like money) because a group of people agrees it exists. i'm also curious about what keeps iconic stories like macbeth so popular (who knew there were so many shakespeare-influenced titles lol). this might be a silly question, but i wonder, doesn't tradition play a significant role in why certain works span generation?
for example, with shakespeare's work, maybe it's not necessarily some objective "beautiful" quality that attracts so many people to him, but rather the fact that studying shakespeare has become tradition, almost ubiquitous in the english curriculum. once something becomes ingrained in educational systems and cultural tradition, it perpetuates itself. students are required to read it, become familiar with it, then future writers reference it because it's part of this shared cultural vocabulary, which in turn reinforces its status.
so what role does tradition play in beauty? or more specifically, how do we distinguish between a work being genuinely beautiful vs. a work being popular because of tradition? i hope that makes sense! i would love to hear your thoughts!
Thank you for the thoughtful comment (and apologies for taking so long to respond!).
Your second paragraph does a good job capturing the idea of intersubjectivity. You are correct that a large part of Shakespeare's enduring influence is because he is a central figure in "the canon." Shakespeare's influence also greatly benefited from the reach and power of the British empire in the centuries after he wrote, which spread Anglo culture and the English language around the world. Once established, this influence can perpetuate itself, as you say.
But, my argument in this essay is that there might be a another layer to creative work, something that runs deeper than canons and influence. That great works of art survive, in part, because they capture something aesthetically "real." But it's very hard to untangle if a work has enduring cultural resonance because of intersubjective forces (canonicity) or because there is something fundamentally enduring about the work itself. One way of teasing this out (which I mention in the essay) is translation. If a work jumps across its existing cultural and linguistic milieu and resonates strongly somewhere else, does that not indicate there's something there? Dostoevsky and Poe are interesting examples, because they both seem like odd and surprising choices for canonization in retrospect. If you were around when they were writing, it’s highly unlikely that you would have said, “those guys will be read for hundreds of years.” Yet here we are, over a hundred years later, and readers continually find that their writing resonates.
this was a very interesting read. i never knew about intersubjectivity. i actually told my partner about this concept, and he said that, to put it crudely, it's like a sheeple opinion. something exists (like money) because a group of people agrees it exists. i'm also curious about what keeps iconic stories like macbeth so popular (who knew there were so many shakespeare-influenced titles lol). this might be a silly question, but i wonder, doesn't tradition play a significant role in why certain works span generation?
for example, with shakespeare's work, maybe it's not necessarily some objective "beautiful" quality that attracts so many people to him, but rather the fact that studying shakespeare has become tradition, almost ubiquitous in the english curriculum. once something becomes ingrained in educational systems and cultural tradition, it perpetuates itself. students are required to read it, become familiar with it, then future writers reference it because it's part of this shared cultural vocabulary, which in turn reinforces its status.
so what role does tradition play in beauty? or more specifically, how do we distinguish between a work being genuinely beautiful vs. a work being popular because of tradition? i hope that makes sense! i would love to hear your thoughts!
Thank you for the thoughtful comment (and apologies for taking so long to respond!).
Your second paragraph does a good job capturing the idea of intersubjectivity. You are correct that a large part of Shakespeare's enduring influence is because he is a central figure in "the canon." Shakespeare's influence also greatly benefited from the reach and power of the British empire in the centuries after he wrote, which spread Anglo culture and the English language around the world. Once established, this influence can perpetuate itself, as you say.
But, my argument in this essay is that there might be a another layer to creative work, something that runs deeper than canons and influence. That great works of art survive, in part, because they capture something aesthetically "real." But it's very hard to untangle if a work has enduring cultural resonance because of intersubjective forces (canonicity) or because there is something fundamentally enduring about the work itself. One way of teasing this out (which I mention in the essay) is translation. If a work jumps across its existing cultural and linguistic milieu and resonates strongly somewhere else, does that not indicate there's something there? Dostoevsky and Poe are interesting examples, because they both seem like odd and surprising choices for canonization in retrospect. If you were around when they were writing, it’s highly unlikely that you would have said, “those guys will be read for hundreds of years.” Yet here we are, over a hundred years later, and readers continually find that their writing resonates.