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| | CONTEXT: Curtis White |
 | | The lowest common denominator question in relation to the Great Books debate, asked with a whining impatience by a mostly nonexistent public (which is to say the terminally "not interested" public, the severe and profoundly distracted public), is, "Are the Great Books great or not?" But this, of course, is a television question. |
 | | It is in part because of the vacuum created by the thoroughness of deconstruction's critique of aesthetic metaphysics that those of what Harold Bloom calls the School of Resentment have had the opportunity to de-aestheticize literary criticism and, worse yet, de aestheticize our expectations of literary texts. |
 | | Because, as Adorno in particular liked to point out, art needs criticism (which was really, for him, another word for philosophy) in order to complete the fullness of its social as well as its artistic intentions. |
| www.centerforbookculture.org /context/no7/white.html (2376 words) |
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