A premise of New Criticism, viz. that we should stick to the content or features of the work itself, rather than pay heed to any biographical, historical, or sociological context, is difficult to do and may exclude much of what gives a work its meaning and value. Art doesn't exist in a vacuum and may even reach out and have implications far beyond the circumstances that gave rise to it or in which it is situated.

There are two things: what you feel and what you know about art.

1- What you feel:

Disinterested (Kant) means that there is no purpose, no need, no use in beauty.

- The aesthetic experience of beauty is subjective and detached: not useful, not functional, not utilitarian. Is not connected in the way the object serves a purpose.

All art is completely useless (Oscar Wilde)

To have an aesthetic experience one has to understand the language of the work of art.

(you cannot love a French book when you don't understand the language, you could read a translation - but can paintings or sculptures be 'translated'?)

- Beauty is not only in art : aesthetic beauty is in nature first of all!

- An object can have an aesthetic purpose, but therefore it is not necessary a work of art. (design)

2- What you know:

Works of art are not only aesthetic, they are historical also.

They have a certain context, a reception history, a cultural signification.

As art-object they have a price - as any object has, an economic value.

And they are made by artists, often known by name.

Derrida calls this "paregnon" - the world framing the picture.

Aesthetics and history form the bipolarity of a work of art (Brandi)

Karl Pfeifer

while contextual interpretation can direct the interpreter to a closer approximation of the text's intended meaning, relying on these external factors is apt to generate fallacious readings and close interpretation to a final fixed meaning, which opposes the end of all interpretation.

Billal Yahiaoui

It is not obvious that context can be divorced from the text without altering the identity of the literary work. Are you familiar with the short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" by Jorge Luis Borges?

http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/borges-quixote.html

or

http://www.danieltubau.com/museo/Borges_PierreMenardAutordelQuijote_eng.pdf

Karl Pfeifer

Thank you for having recommended this short fiction for me for I wasn’t familiar with it. I have just finished reading it and enjoyed it thoroughly. Yet I still believe that a context can be divorced from the text and it must be actually in most of times to decipher the text. I think maintaining the interpretive nature of literature and philosophy is more important than what you called as “altering the identity of a literary work”. Preserving the literary identity will only limit the scope of analysis. Nevertheless, words do never exhaust the infinite possibilities of their meaning, even with the implication of a context. I have conducted a thesis on the matter where I tackled the issue of the Intentional Fallacy that had been generated and deeply rooted within the scholarship of Hermann Hesse. You may be interested to take a look Thesis A Freudian-Lacanian Reading of Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf

Billal Yahiaoui

The problem is that words have different meanings at different times and places, so those contexts need to be taken into account. When Samuel Johnson wrote "Our guides told us that the horses could not travel all day without rest or meat", he was not suggesting that the horses were carnivorous.