ABSTRACT
There is no shortage of testimony, in the pages of daily and weekly publications, in reading groups and book clubs, in off-the-cuff comments, to literature’s unsettling, intoxicating, moving, delighting powers. A small number of philosophers and literary theorists have taken these powers seriously without, on the one hand, attempting to reduce them to a system or, on the other, taking refuge in vagueness and irrationalism. And there are some signs of an increasing willingness among those who study literature to address, as an issue of major importance, the question of aesthetic effect (as well as aesthetic affect), thus restarting a very old debate that had, for a time, almost fallen silent. I do not wish to begin, however, as many theoretical accounts of literature do, with the various philosophical projects that have largely determined our approach to these issues and the vocabulary we use, but rather with the observable phenomena themselves: the paradoxes inherent in the way we talk about literature, the pleasures and the potency that we experience in reading it.
