Interior Birds (Part IV): After the Meditations: The Philosophical Sense of Criticism

Abstract

This is the last installment, in a fourt part series of articles, where I intend to present and discuss the development of the ideas of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset about literary criticism, conceived as an intellectual activity of particular philosophical interest. The importance that literature assumes in Ortegan thought and style is already a subject thoroughly discussed; the study of his work as a literary critic and his views on literary criticism is also not a novel issue; so my proposal is not simply to repeat the paths of works already well done, but to present, from a critical reading of the works of Ortega, a particular view about the development –at different times of his intellectual career– of his conceptions of the activity of the critic, with the intention to discuss the timeliness and relevance of the ideas of the philosopher for contemporary literary debate. In this last installment, we will see how the thinker proposes, in a contradictory way to the prescriptions of the hegemonic literary theory in the last century, that it is necessary to open «to aesthetics the doors of its academic prison».