ABSTRACT
The most influential result was the development of a value calculus that sought out internal points of resistance or subversion in works that conveyed insupportable values. There were risks involved; like any interpretive protocol, this one could become formulaic. Concomitant with this is a focus away from how matters are settled at the last minute and toward the ways they unreel and unravel, regardless of closure and unity. Aesthetic play trumps ideological form, including the form of the ideology of the aesthetic. The suspicion under which the work-concept currently labors is partly well-earned; historically, the concept has too often been a cover for escapism or the tyranny of taste. But the point is to consult the work, not to idolize it. The intersection of critical power and aesthetic appeal in Cosi arises in the equivocation between psychological realism and farcical artifice as the lovers — half automatons, half all too human — find themselves shuffled and reshuffled.
