**IMHO, please consider consulting Edmond Burke's On The Sublime...
TC,
/Steve Cameron, NJ
On Sat, Aug 25, 2018, 12:08 Torgeir Fjeld <t.fjeld1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Right. Who said we couldn't measure the greatness of literature? Here's
one commentary:
"The problem with a question like "Can we measure greatness?" is that it
seems to assume that the word "great" is merely quantitative in nature. The
word "measure" comes from the Latin via the French. The root Latin word
(mensura) means something like "size or quantity as ascertained by
measuring." And apparently the French derivative (mesure) has the sense of
a limit or boundary.
In short, because the question seems to come loaded with assumptions that
ill fit it to be applied to anything qualitative, you in fact limit your
assessment of the qualitative thing being assessed by even asking it.
This creates problems when we are addressing something aesthetic, although
even aesthetic things have a quantitative aspect that can be measured. We
"measure" a poem, and music has "measure." But, since this is only one
aspect of these things, measuring them seems only to enable us to capture a
part of them, not the whole. There is the more elusive part of any
aesthetic thing which, it seems to me, cannot be encompassed by any
technique we might apply to it. And if it cannot be encompassed, it cannot
be measured."
Quoth Martin Cothran in
https://www.circeinstitute.org/blog/what-does-it-mean-book-be-great-conversation-wes-callihan-martin-cothran-andrew-kern
Yours sincerely, -t
