id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
cord-023118-dwh70u29	Devereaux, Mary	Moral Judgments and Works of Art: The Case of Narrative Literature	2004-01-30		.txt	text/plain	5977	350	62	In the final example, we see McGinn making judgments that can easily be read as directed at Nabokov, the real-life author, and his fictional creation, the character Humbert Humbert. We can approach the question about what we are doing when we direct our moral attention to the literary work itself, by asking what it is to read a novel. The historical author of the novel, The Grass is Singing, is the real-life person, Doris Lessing; what I am calling the posited author is, in contrast, an interpretive construct, "a fiction." Its function is to allow us to read the text in a certain way, that is, under the concept of literary purposiveness. Now Posner is surely right that moral judgments that take as their object the work's realworld author or its effects may, and in some cases will, turn our attention away from the stylistic and structural matters central to the value of literature.	./cache/cord-023118-dwh70u29.txt	./txt/cord-023118-dwh70u29.txt