Nancy Huntting, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

This issue of The Right Of is a magnificent showing of how we can learn from art to be more fully ourselves and more fully alive! You’ll be thrilled, for instance, to learn about the technique of novelists Charles Dickens and Henry James—how their art can have us see the people we know and don’t know with greater depth, fullness, accuracy. “Novels, Justice, & Emphasis” is the title of this urgent masterpiece, the newest issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing Eli Siegel’s immensely stirring, critically great 1971 lecture Imagination Has Emphasis. Emphasis is the feeling or presenting of something as standing out. “All the arts,” Mr. Siegel said, “are concerned with emphasis.” He used as text G.K. Chesterton’s work of 1906, Charles Dickens, because, while “it says things that often miss,…it brought in a new note in criticism: unrestrained, universal exuberance.”

Emphasis has to do with the largest matter in every person’s life: how much do I want things to affect me, move me? How much do I want the things, happenings, people of this world to be alive with meaning in my mind? Emphasis, then, has to do with what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the deepest desire of everyone: to like the world on an honest basis. And the meeting of reality limply, unemphatically, the dimming and flattening of what one meets, is part of what Aesthetic Realism has identified as the most hurtful thing in the human self: contempt. Contempt is the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.”

There Can Be Unjust Emphasis

As I described in our last issue, contempt can also take the form of a false emphasis, even cruel emphasis, and there is much of that around. One can emphatically go after having one’s own way, without asking whether one’s “way” is accurate and just. One can lie emphatically: thrust forth and insist on something UNTRUE. And false emphasis is always accompanied by an ugly muting: an attempt to stifle facts that don’t go along with one’s desire….Read more