Reading Questions for Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying" and Victor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique"

1. What is art's role in relation to nature according to Wilde? What are nature's insufficiencies?

2. Explain the function of the dialogue's frame drama. Does it partake in or mock the Platonic evocation of reality that Derrida writes about in his critique of Phaedrus?

3. What role does whim play in this world? Fact?

4. How does Wilde's rhetoric (through Vivian) satirize Victorian rationalism? What is the implied Victorian position on aesthetic hedonism?

5. "The only real people are the people who never existed" (975). How does this witticism critique literary realism and naturalism? How does it constitute a philosophical stance on the ideas of being and truth?

6. Why does Vivian reject the "popular cry" of the time to "return to Life and Nature" (977)? What is Nature in this context (977-78, 986)?

7. How does Wilde support Vivian's contention that the liar was "the true founder of social intercourse" and is "the very basis of civilised society" (981)?

8. What is the relationship between Truth and Style (981)?

9. Why cannot art express "the temper of its age" (987)?

10. What does Wilde mean when he has Vivian exclaim, "The whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people" (988)? Can you generalize from this remark in a philosophically useful way?

11. How does Potebnya see the poetic image relate to that which the image clarifies (6)? What is the precondition of art in this ideology?

12. Where does the audience's or the reader's response enter into the definition of art for Shklovsky? How does such response subvert the idea of a necessary intention as art's precondition? Would E. D. Hirsch agree or disagree with Shklovsky?

13. What is the law of the economy of creative effort? How does it relate to Freud's principle of condensation?

14. How does habitual repetition transform perception? How does it produce important instances of forgetting?

15. What is algebrization?

16. How can a thing be "in front of us" and yet be invisible according to Shklovsky? What does this teach us about visibility? About presence?

17. What is defamiliarization?

18. If, as Shklovsky posits, "an image is not a permanent referent" (18), then what is it instead?

19. What is the difference between vision and knowing?

20. How is the language of poetry different from other language? How does poetic language condition our consciousness and determine the way we think? Is this determination a change or a precondition of thought?