LITERARY TASTE

INTENTIONAL DEFINITIONS

- Critical judgment, discernment, or appreciation

 Pertains to the reader
- Should be PALATABLE
- Manner or aesthetic quality indicative of such discernment or appreciation
 Pertains to the work itself
 Is it tasteful?

PAZ LATORENA

- Accomplished female writer in English (pre-war era)

 Most writers wrote in English bc of Americans
- 19 January 1908 – 19 October 1953
- Born in Boac, Marinduque
- Graduated bachelor’s in 1930 – UST
- CAREER
 Taught at UST after PhD (graduated sobreseliente)
 Known as a short story writer (most popular work: A small key)
 Columnist at Philippines Herald (newspaper) bc of mentor, Paz Marquez Benitez
 Poetry pseudonym: Mina Lys – when Paz writes poetry, she is more loose and open when it
comes to love
o Mina – “golden crown”, desire
o Lys – lucis in Latin (to loosen, to dissolve)
- Desired and Other Stories
 Collection of her short fiction
 Published by UST in 2000, 47 years after she died
- A Small Key
 Deemed 3rd best by Jose Garcia Villa

EDUCATING THE LITERARY TASTE

HOMBRE DE GUSTO

- Baltazar Gracian
 Hombre de gusto means a tactful & proper person (knows how to control themselves with
other people’s reactions), sensitive to others’ feelings and personalities
 Spanish thinker and moralist, 17th century
- Jean de La Bruyere
 Hombre de gusto centered on good taste and bad taste in art
 French moralist and philosopher
- Joseph Addison
  Hombre de gusto means LITERARY TASTE, which is the discernment (good judgment) and
appreciation (recognition and enjoyment of the good qualities) of fundamentally excellent
literature – taken from his daily publication, The Spectator
 British intellectual
 In another essay, he defined it as the opposite. He said that it discerns the beauties of
literature but also tackles the imperfections of the piece of literature.
 Says that you should find pleasure in smth good and covet smth bad
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
 English poet and critic
 Tackles Addison’s definition and says that while it is rational to find pleasure in the good and
covet the bad, it just proves that taste is subjective which can make you biased.
- John Ruskin
 English art critic
 Differentiated literary criticism vs literary taste which made everything clear
 LITERARY CRITICISM: the formal action of an intellect which searches for perfections and
imperfections by applying universally accepted standards to a literary composition (ex: the
HP vs Narnia situation)
 LITERARY TASTE: the instant, almost instinctive preferring of one literature to another, for
no apparent reason except that the first is more proper to human nature
- Paz Latorena
 To have literary taste is to have a feeling and inclination for what is beautiful in literature
and to dislike and reject what is vulgar and tawdry (showy but has no depth) in it.
 If you aren’t properly educated in developing your taste, you’ll find yourself having pleasure
in reading, but you wont have a collection of books worth reading. You’ll be reading books
that provide nothing else except pleasure.
- Sir Joshua Reynolds
 English painter
 TASTE CAN BE TAUGHT thru good models and ideal examples.
 The appreciation of authors and their works is important because they can chisel/refine
tastes. So that when you go out into the world and you read whatever you want, pleasure of
the spirit can be achieved. This can be achieved by reading books that are fruitful and ones
that have values associated with good literature.

PAZ LATORENA’S CRITERIA FOR JUDGING

- Intellectual value of literature

 To enrich mental life
 No need for the profound – doesn’t have to be life changing
 Must provide at least some truth (that is neither completely ascribed by the details of
physical existence nor entirely given to dream. In other words, it shouldn’t be too realistic,
but it shouldn’t be too fictitious either. We can observe that when reading fiction because
we can still relate to their situations so there’s still a touch of reality to it. On the other hand,
if we get something too physical, it’s too science. It’s a textbook. It must be a
COMPOUNDED EXPERIENCE.
- Emotional value of literature
 Appeal to emotions (pleasant and unpleasant)
 Good literature takes the unpleasant and painful from life and makes us feel something
pleasurable from it.
 Writers are drawn to unpleasant and painful scenarios in life.
 Ex: the protagonist is suffering in his journey but he is strong and determined. Because of
this, the reader feels pity and sympathy, which leads the reader to be ENNOBLED (to lend
greater dignity, to become better human beings because of the emotions we feel)
 We have to embrace our emotions because it’s what makes us human. It’s what animals and
plants cannot fathom.
- Ethical value of literature
 The purpose and aim of the writer should have positive influence
 “Great writers have presented vice as attractive but they have also presented the ashes into
which that attractiveness turns, if we yield to its lure.” So although they glorify vices, their
main purpose is still to encourage people to stay away from them because consequences
will be met.
 Ex: Sherlock Holmes’ drug addiction (heroine) and Watson’s warnings to him