Aptness

Abstract

This entry attempts to explain what the mechanisms that govern the experience, familiar to every reader of literary works, of a particular aesthetic frisson elicited by a small passage in a work or even a single sentence. After presenting a handful of very general ways of understanding the category of aptness, the author moves to consider the subject of the possible shades of meaning it can take on depending on whether we treat it as an immanent trait of a given literary utterance or as a quality that takes form only during the process of the work’s reception.