Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force of Imaginative Ideals

What does our literary past offer the present? Using his grasp of the full range of contemporary philosophical and literary stances, Charles Altieri in Canons and Consequences? offers a fascinating dialogue between cultures which should influence how we understand the purposes of literary education.

This book takes the debate about the canon as a crucial test case for how competing perspectives in literary theory approach the subject of values. Altieri belives that the dominant poststructural perspectives are severely flawed by their inability to project or assess idealizations. He tries to define alternative principles for making value judgments, and he finds these principles within the traditional texts and discourses preserved by a high literary canon.

Charles Altieri is professor of English at the University of Washington. He is the author of Act and Quality: A Theory of Literary Meaning and Humanistic Understanding; Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry; and Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry.