“Responses to fiction,
perhaps even the ones most worth having, tend
to have a subtlety and focus that is not captured by standard emotion terms and
that is lost in the overworked examples of pity, fear, and sadness. Though
appeals to the subtlety of responses is commonplace, it is unfortunately an
invitation to obscurantism. There’s no vocabulary to name responses; it’s
difficult if not impossible to describe them with the limited vocabulary one
does have unless one is a poet or agile critic oneself; one is forced into the
position of just repeating the words that elicited the response, hoping one’s
reader will respond the same way.”
—Susan
L. Feagin, Reading with Feeling: The
Aesthetics of Appreciation, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1966), 199.
