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This paper contends that contemporary critical and theoretical approaches to literary interpretation, while valuable in their own right, have systematically disfigured and displaced the inherent aesthetic core of the literary text. Through an analysis of the hermeneutic proliferation that has characterised literary studies, particularly from the second half of the twentieth century, this paper argues that interpretation has increasingly become a mechanism of appropriation rather than a mode of engagement. Drawing upon theoretical frameworks from Derrida, Sontag, Rosenblatt, Iser, and Kolaiti, and utilising a culinary metaphor as an illustrative analogy, this paper examines how the organic wholeness of the literary work is lost through analytical dissection. The paper further explores the historical reception of Shakespeare’s plays, particularly King Lear, as a case study in the transformation of interpretive practices across centuries. Ultimately, this paper calls for a recovery of the aesthetic dimension of reading, advocating for an approach that prioritises lived experience, emotional engagement, and what Roman Jakobson termed “literariness” over mechanical signification and theoretical appropriation.
Dr. Ghulam Mohammad Khan, Sadaf Shafi. “Reclaiming the Aesthetic: A Case for Reading Literature as Literature.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 4, August 2026, pp. 599-617. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n4.36.
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