Work of Art

I suppose that it has always been the case for the majority of us that the first test of a work of art or literature or music is how much pleasure it gives us, and we don't want to bother with analyzing why or how it has had such an emotional impact on us. It 's always good to know what your pleasures are in the positive sense - and not as easy as some people think - as opposed to only really knowing what you don't like and complaining about it, though presumably there's some kind of pleasure to be had from that too. But now that you've chosen to take a course on the novel, I'm afraid that evaluating literature on the basis of how you feel about a book won't count as an intelligent critical response to the work being studied. It is, however, useful to remind yourselves from time to time that we all fall for trash every now and again. For instance, you might actually enjoy listening to a catchy pop song, but you'd find it hard to explain in critical terms that it is good, or better than something else, just because it is enjoyable. So, you're here to sharpen up your critical knives, as it were, among other things of course.