Critique of Taste

Galvano Della Volpe

Della Volpe, Galvano. Critique of Taste (1960, 1978), translated by Michael Caesar. London; New York: Verso, 1991.

Contents

Preface 11

I. Critique of the Poetic ‘Image’

1. Image versus Idea 15
2. The Poetic Discourse 20
3. History as Humus 24
4. Focal Point 25
5. Greek Poetry 26
6. The Divine Comedy 46
7. Goethe’s Faust 55
8. Eliot and Mayakovsky 68
9. Metaphor as Truth 82
10. The Literary Symbol 92

II. The Semantic Key to Poetry

11. Language and Speech 99
12. Some Lessons of Linguistics 102
13. Text and Context 111
14. Equivocal, Univocal and Polysemic 122
15. Sound and Meaning 148
16. Translatability 155

III. Laocoön 1960

17. The Semantic Dialectic 173
18. Other Sign Systems 201
19. Painting - Sculpture - Architecture 206
20. Music 215
21. Cinema 223
22. Legacy of Lessing 228

Appendices

1. Engels, Lenin and the Poetic of Socialist Realism 235

2. On the Concept of ‘Avantgarde’ 244

3. The Crucial Question of Architecture Today 246

4. Linguistics and Literary Criticism 249

A Note on Glossematics 263

Index of Names 268

Note

Coming across the link to Appendix 1 (which see) brought me back to Della Volpe. I haven’t read this work, but I must have read critiques of it last time I revisited the author. I am not conversant with his overall theoretical literary perspective, but it is evident from looking up specific authors and the surrounding arguments that Della Volpe intends to cover the aesthetic aspect of Marxist aesthetics shortchanged by a sociological focus, which is lso indispensable. All this is very interesting, but I find some of his claims dubious.

Outside of the appendix to be read, we find that Engels (and presumably Lenin) are more credible than Lukács and Plekhanov in their approach to literary works, showing up the latter two’s theoretical deficiencies. I got this just from looking up Engels, Ibsen, and Lukács in the text. — RD

Della Volpe, from Appendix 1:

In concrete terms, I am thinking of Proust’s Recherche, Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle as well as his short stories, and the quality of the poetic testimony to the crisis of the bourgeoisie represented by these works. Unlike Mayakovsky or Brecht, who judge the crisis to overcome it, these writers suffer it, and it is precisely because they only suffer the crisis of a civilization that they can be called decadent.

Galvano Della Volpe on logical positivism [conclusion]

Galvano Della Volpe on Henri Bergson

Galvano Della Volpe on E. V. Ilyenkov

Galvano Della Volpe on determinate abstraction & Evald Ilyenkov
by John Fraser

Galvano Della Volpe
by Mark W. Epstein
+ bibliography

“From Hegel to Marcuse”
by Lucio Colletti

Marxism & Totality & Gramsci & Della Volpe
by Ralph Dumain

Marx, Literature, and the Arts: Select Bibliography

Marxist Aesthetics: Anthologies in English

Evald Ilyenkov & Mikhail Lifshits:
Aesthetics, Symbolic Mediation, & the Ideal:
Selected Bibliography

James Joyce, History, Politics, & Marxism: A Bibliography

Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck & Other Works:
A Select, Annotated Bibliography