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(2012) Literature, ethics, and aesthetics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
In recent neurological science, a helmet, made to stimulate neurological activity, was placed on the head of a woman with a sensory processing disorder in order to assist her own balancing capabilities. The helmet returned significant improvements; the woman could walk without wobbling and falling over. But the most astounding result was the way in which the woman continued to be able to walk without losing balance after the helmet had been removed; the brain had grown new pathways as a result of the external stimulation provided by the helmet.1 The thesis of this book envisages the aesthetic as such a helmet. In a stand-alone text for its period, Félix Guattari writes, "Poetry today might have more to teach us than economic science, the human sciences and psychoanalysis combined" (1996:21). This book takes this baton from Guattari and considers the aesthetic not as something that expresses the world but as something that enables social, cultural, and ethical intervention. No less than the activating function of the helmet upon the body, the aesthetic regime of signs affects the bodies it comes into contact with, making the aesthetic a politically, and thereby pertinent, line of inquiry.
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Full citation:
Achilles, S. (2012). Introduction: the literary function, in Literature, ethics, and aesthetics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1-15.
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