Mixed Feelings in Response to Art
Eileen John (Warwick University)

This paper focuses on mixed feelings in response to art – the phenomena of feeling in some way positive and negative about a work’s achievements. Should we aim to resolve such feelings, to reach an affective equilibrium in which conflict or divergence are lessened or eliminated? With belief, there is an imperative to eliminate conflict, but the same does not seem to be true for feeling. Here I suggest this is specifically not true for engagement with art. I discuss examples of literary criticism, from Virginia Woolf, Wayne Booth, and Alice Walker, that wrestle with mixed feelings in an illuminating way.

Eileen John is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, where she also co-directs the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts. Her research is primarily in aesthetics and philosophy of literature. She is interested in how we learn from art, in how literature in particular contributes to philosophical thought, and in a range of issues linking art and aesthetics to our ethical lives. Two recent papers are ‘Is Aesthetic Consistency Worth Having?’ (Estetika, 2023) and ‘Moral Learning from Art’ (in The Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Art, 2023).