What Makes a Good Book? Bonae 
literae in Twenty-First Century
Vladimir Gvozden
Department of Comparative Literature, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad, Zorana 
Đinđića 2, 21000 Novi Sad, Serbia
vladimir.gvozden@ff.uns.ac.rs
The first part of the article analyses the term bonae literae that leads us to the core of 
the problem of good book before the period of aesthetic separation that occurs at the 
end of the eighteenth century. Its second part attempts to demonstrate that even in 
the case of fragmented literary canon we often repeat the same “elitist” operation of 
power we criticize. Long before the emergence of modern literary studies organized 
through university departments and research institutes, properties of the good 
book were related to the evaluation of its rhetorical qualities, its dependence on 
poetic tradition and, above all, on its moral qualities. In twenty-first century there 
is no single criterion by which we can assess whether a book is good or not either 
in terms of its aesthetic or ethical properties. Thus, it seems that the answer to the 
question of good book would be as simple as it is paradoxical: there are good 
books and good books, old and new, classical and modern, good foreign and good 
domestic books, mostly written by great novelists and only few by great poets. In 
fact, the answer to the question of good book is problematic because it is difficult 
to find the clip that connects individual experience of the text and experience in 
general. Of course, the result is not disappearance of the concept of goodness (it 
still has certain content) but rather its vagueness. Therefore, caution is always 
needed in any generalizations, regardless of whether we generalize culturally or 
multiculturally. However, it appears that there still exists a small, almost invisible 
residuum of Erasmus’s view of bonae literae in the fragmented contemporary 
literary canon: belief in the idea that literature has a value in itself.
Keywords: literature and ethics / literary canon / literary evaluation / ethics and aesthetics 
/ aesthetic experience / subjectivity / freedom / metapolitics / modernity 
79
Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 40.2 (2017)
Long before the emergence of modern literary studies organized through 
university departments and research institutes, properties of the good 
book were related to the evaluation of its rhetorical qualities, its depen­
dence on poetic tradition and, above all, on its moral qualities. Recall, 
for example, Erasmus of Rotterdam’s favorite term bonae literae that 
leads us to the core of the problem of good book before the period of 
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80
aesthetic separation that occurs at the end of the eighteenth century, 
which says that the beautiful “pleases universally without concept”. In 
numerous letters, Erasmus celebrates bonae litterae, literally translated as 
good literature, because it inculcates in readers and students boni mores, 
good behavior, a certain standard of ethics followed by proper moral 
sentiment. The request is to learn Latin and Greek from the best texts of 
classical writers written both in prose and in verse freed from the burden 
of accumulated comments. However, it is known that “a real semantic 
nexus” (Marino 89) bonae literae is untranslatable because it designs the 
entire classical literature, science and education, as well as the Christian 
belief seen as a healthy and salutary knowledge. Johan Huizinga goes 
so far as to say that the bonae litterae is the common name of a good 
thing for which Erasmus and his supporters have fought opposed to 
conservatism of those who have ignored the same good thing. Besides 
this connection of the idea of good book within the intellectual and 
moral community, for our discussion it is important to emphasize that 
Erasmus argues for the essential contribution of bonae literae in the pro­
cess of purification of faith and its forms. This means that in early mod­
ern period a good book already has several goals, among which is the 
most important its contribution to the moral training of a Christian. 
Consequently, I could quite reliably assume that Erasmus knew what 
a good book is, or what good books are, although I could not translate 
the meaning of his understanding of bonae literae into a unified and 
generally applicable concept. It is important that the goodness of a book 
is not experiencing its fulfillment in the book itself, but outside of it, 
regardless of whether it is about creating privileged communities within 
wider Christianity or reaching the pure form of Christianity itself. The 
book is good in itself, but it is such only because it serves, thanks to the 
existence of a particular community, a better reading and understanding 
of the Scriptures, the best book, the book of all books.
Do these answers make sense today? At a first glance, it would seem 
not. After the enthronement of taste in the eighteenth century, this 
way of thinking about the good book was pushed into the background, 
because the assessment of book’s goodness has been increasingly based 
on subjective impressions and not on an objective value that Erasmus 
could easily find in the Scripture. It could even be argued that Erasmus 
was a Christian as well as the ancient Greek, because he connected the 
harmony with the higher order that exists outside us: a good book is 
a book that confirms the external harmony, i. e. a good book is an ex­
pression of the pre­existent harmony. On the classical view, the work 
is a microcosm that allows us to think that outside of work, in the 
Vladimir Gvozden:     What Makes a Good Book? Bonae literae in Twenty-First Century
81
macrocosm, there is an objective, essential standard of goodness. In 
modernity, such a criterion acquires meaning only by reference to sub­
jectivity as an expression of modern individuality: a unique style wants 
to be the creation of a world, a world in which the artist moves, a world 
which we undoubtedly are allowed to enter in order to understand it, 
or enjoy it. However, the world of the book is not presented to us as 
an a priori common world. The question of what makes a good book 
becomes the question of the existence of a unity without any transcen­
dent confirmation.
Even the aestheticians at the turn of the eighteenth century clearly 
pointed out how personal, or in fact intersubjective experience is im­
portant for judging art, but this experience is no longer accommodated 
in religion, but in a system of supposedly shared human values. From 
the very beginning aesthetics attracted authors of broad intellect and 
general knowledge, not specialists for literature, who therefore looked 
for connections by which the experience of the beautiful aligns with 
other mental faculties. Lord Shaftesbury tried and managed to impress 
as the seeker of wisdom and harmony, while at the same time claimed 
that wisdom cannot be attained by the intellect, but by a balanced and 
harmonious personality that is able to grasp the beauty and order of 
the world. Philocles from The Moralist believes that the idea of possess­
ing what we like is pure nonsense, trying to convince us that we actu­
ally possess different possibilities to achieve satisfaction. Thus, Philocles 
separates intellection of the beauty of a tree or the ocean from master­
ing it. According to Shaftesbury, the experience of beauty is devoid of 
utilitarianism, or the desire for possession.
For example, we are certainly able to contemplate the beauty of 
the ocean, though we cannot posses the ocean (Shaftesbury II 127). 
Of course, the idea of beauty liberated from the utilitarian urge will 
leave an irrevocable mark on the philosophical and later on a popular 
experience of beauty (and, a fortiori, on the concept of “good book”), 
although Shaftesbury as a practical man thought that “the admiration 
and love of order, harmony, and proportion, in whatever kind, is natu­
rally improving to the temper, advantageous to social affection, and 
highly assistant to virtue, which is itself no other than the love of order 
and beauty in society” (I 279). In short, Shaftesbury sees the experi­
ence of the beautiful as something that occurs within a broader totality 
that includes harmonious character, moral interest and human educa­
tion. Today this linkage of interested and disinterested experience of 
the beautiful may seem contradictory, but the aesthetic theory of the 
late seventeenth and early eighteenth century did not see any problem 
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in it. Consequently, Shaftesbury’s possible answer to the question of 
what makes a good book is related to the properties of a non­utilitarian 
contemplation of the beautiful, which helps the development of virtue, 
love of order and beauty in society, even if it is obvious that his society 
differs from Erasmus’s, Joyce’s or, say, Sebald’s. There is no doubt that 
ethics and aesthetics from the beginning make a strong but complex 
alliance, but this alliance is historically variable, which also inevitably 
changes the nature of our arguments about the relationships of litera­
ture and ethics.
For example, today the argument similar to Shaftesbury’s often 
serves to justify the activity of reading in the contemporary utilitarian 
world, or in our garden of Adonis, whose fruits grow rapidly, but also 
quickly wilt and die. If the world is quite pragmatic and market­orient­
ed, the act of reading literature is even more valuable, or ethical, because 
it leads us to the personal fullness offered by good books. Although this 
attitude sounds like a good advertisement for the study of literature 
in the contemporary world, it associates the traditional argument of 
aesthetic value and the notion of autonomy, freedom and (im)possible 
harmony of modern individualism. Categories like order and harmony, 
so significant for the aestheticians of the eighteenth century remain, in 
various forms, very influential today, but without pretensions to valid­
ity within the universal community. It is important to underline that 
this conception of literature is radically immanent, because its value is 
based on subjectivity: read to be different, read to be what you really 
are, read for the sake of an authentic experience, or simply – just read 
(without special reasons why, the great metaphor of bonae literae will 
implicitly take care of your reasons). After all, more than it addresses 
the transcendent value of aesthetic experience or understanding of the 
question of what makes a good book, the reference to harmony has a 
tinge of consistent ethical affirmation of the well­balanced individual. 
Consequently, it seems that when one says that this or that book is 
good for him or her, this functions both as an ethical projection and 
aesthetical judgment.
Of course, there is no single criterion by which we can assess wheth­
er a book is good or not, either in terms of its aesthetic or in terms of 
its ethical properties. It is clear that we will not evaluate in the same 
manner a novel, a collection of sonnets, tragedy or a narrative poem. 
Even when it comes to the genre of novel it is certain that we will apply 
variety of criteria in assessing the qualities of realist or modernist, detec­
tive, romance or postcolonial novel. Moreover, I suspect that for most 
readers today, unlike their known and unknown ancestors, it is easier 
Vladimir Gvozden:     What Makes a Good Book? Bonae literae in Twenty-First Century
83
to estimate the value of a novel than of a collection of poems. Thus, it 
seems that the answer of true literary ruminants would be as simple as it 
is paradoxical: there are good books and good books, old and new, clas­
sical and modern, good foreign and good domestic books mostly writ­
ten by great novelists and only few by great poets. In fact, the answer to 
the question of good book is problematic because it is difficult to find 
the link that connects individual experience of the text and experience 
in general. Of course, the result is not disappearance of the concept of 
goodness (it still has a certain content) but rather its vagueness.
The roots of such an understanding of good book lie in the trans­
formation that was very well documented by French nontraditional 
philosophers of the eighteenth century. In the famous Essay on Taste 
Montesquieu almost axiomatically diagnosed the problem of the for­
mation of taste by pointing out that sources of the beautiful, the good, 
the agreeable, are inside us (119). And to look for the reason for this 
means to seek the cause of the pleasure of our souls. The facts that I like 
summer and the goldenness of grain, that I am interested in the history 
or geography, or that I love intrigues and stories that do not begin ab 
ovo, or my melancholy, make me ultimately different from you and 
give me the right to say that Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War is a good 
book for me. But at the moment I am saying this to you I would like 
to affirm my possible resemblance with you. Otherwise, I would prefer 
to remain silent.
It is clear that the idea of a general judgment of a good book is 
based on a short circuit. The point is that when I say “this book is 
good,” it does not mean that at the same time I give a definition what a 
good book is either in ethical or in aesthetical terms. Actually, it seems 
that I mix ethics and aesthetics without determining what they are. 
My subjectivity considered that the characteristics of which I speak 
are indefinable. But when I say that a book is good, I still do not want 
to just say only that I like that book. Actually, I want to tell you that 
this book is beautiful, but that it also contains certain issues (including 
moral issues) that might be important not only for me but for you too. 
In fact, I want to tell you that the book I like also has something more, 
some features that go beyond the relation of which I speak. If there 
is, at least according to Gérard Genette, a subjective meta­aesthetician 
that always must see the field of representations that he or she creates 
about himself or herself (85), then our attention must be also directed 
to a kind of meta­ethical position characteristic of literary discourse’s 
morality and its notions of type, empathy, plurality, politicality, con­
crete universality, perfection etc. Thus it seems that I am entering the 
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field of subjectivist meta­ethics and/or meta­aesthetics which believes 
that our ethical and/or aesthetical sensibility work best when they are 
immersed in a specific context which might be offered by a (good) 
book. This component of meta inside my subjectivity thinks that its 
description is objective and that its act of assessment is correct, but it 
does not take into account the subjective manner in which it recog­
nizes a (good) book.
It is obvious that we need a hypothesis of generalization, we need 
to legitimize the linking of individual and general – be it humanity, 
common well­developed imagination, shared ideology, belonging to 
this or that imagined or real community. My assumption is based on 
the belief in the idea of a “higher” order, or instances of understanding 
that are fundamentally non­cognitive or at least they do not need to be 
explained every time when I speak about a good book. There are some 
analogies by which I judge, although they do not have the required 
objective value. Is this seemingly untenable position a necessary condi­
tion of my answer to the question of what makes a good book? Is the 
goodness of a good book just one inevitable working hypothesis?
Unlike Erasmus, who could count on the objectivity of bonae lit-
erae, which is based on its connection with the Bible as best book, the 
best book for us is, at best, doomed to be only a working hypothesis. In 
fact I would say that the answer to the question of what makes a good 
book is still tied to the existence of the supposed but never achieved 
existence of the best book. Like in Erasmus, the best book arises in 
relation to a good book (about which I speak), as the hypothesis that 
gives itself the task to determine the conditions under which a book 
can be a good book. In this respect, as in the case of Erasmus but with 
different consequences, the best book looks like an attempt of deduc­
tion of a priori intuitions that universally condition the perception of 
a good book.
The basic idea of talking about the good book is that the object is 
“inert.” However, this inertia belongs to my reception of the text, to 
the belief in the continued presence of values, in a sort of canon, but 
also to the belief in the working hypothesis that a book that is good 
maybe sometimes, through the experiences of others, will become the 
best book. For example, if my experience of a good book is matter of 
the heart or spirit, as was thought by Pascal, Rousseau, Gombrowicz 
and many others, then the heart and spirit must become the subject of 
my knowledge, not the good book, which leads me into the short cir­
cuit, because my superior instance is rather vague and non­literary. Or, 
let us consider one contemporary example: if I am saying that a book 
Vladimir Gvozden:     What Makes a Good Book? Bonae literae in Twenty-First Century
85
is good from the postcolonial perspective, obviously my experience of 
its goodness is matter of its political or even ethical virtues according 
to recently developed attitude that colonialism was wrong. Then, the 
subject of my knowledge again finds itself in a short circuit, because 
the goodness of a good book is again something outside the book, 
which I try to universalize in the name of its particularity. However, 
it does mean that when I tell you that a book is good, I cannot escape 
the assumption that I canonize my spirit (“heart,” “politics” or “eth­
ics”) as a representation of understanding of the universal and eternal 
value (the best book), and so in a manner that this representation my 
spirit creates about itself and its judgment takes into account this field 
of self­representation seriously (meta­aesthetically, meta­ethically). 
Since there is a short circuit, speaking about the good book cannot 
be grounded, but can only move in the sphere of working hypotheses. 
Thus, it seems that the reasons – spiritual, political, ethical – that lie 
beyond the good book itself remain resistant until today, although it 
is hard to canonize them in a single notion of understanding related 
to the universal value.
Therefore, caution is always needed in any generalizations, regard­
less of whether we generalize culturally or multiculturally. Namely, the 
good book as a work of framing cannot take the place of the imaginary 
best book, i.e. it cannot attain the pure value of the sign or signifying 
effects of the best book. In a certain sense, familiar to the German 
Romanticism, it is always on its way to the absolute. The answer to the 
question of what makes a good book is based on the assumption that 
is exhibited in a curious and unexpected way by deconstructivist Paul 
de Man:
Therefore I have a tendency to put upon texts an inherent authority, which is 
stronger, I think, than Derrida is willing to put on them. I assume, as a work­
ing hypothesis (as a working hypothesis, because I know better than that), that 
the text knows in an absolute way what it’s doing. I know this is not the case, 
but it is a necessary working hypothesis that Rousseau knows at any time what 
he is doing and as such there is no need to deconstruct Rousseau (Rosso 118).
Once again, the good book is made out of the assumption that it knows 
what is the best book, because it has a basis of its functioning. Thus, 
as proposed by Adam Zachary Newton, we might talk about ethics of 
literature only in the alternative sense that “signifies recursive, contin­
gent, and interactive dramas of encounter and recognition” (12). Thus 
it seems to me that the idea, expressed among others by Northrop Frye, 
that every act of evaluation is simply “one more document in the his­
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tory of taste” (Booth 384) is an oversimplification both of the concept 
of taste and the place of literature. In the words of Terry Eagleton, as 
long as “art was extricated from the material practices, social relations 
and ideological meanings in which it is always caught up, and raised 
to the status of a solitary fetish” (19), false elitism will be a dominant 
position from which we pose the question of taste in literature. Thus 
it appears that even in the case of fragmented literary canon (feminist, 
postcolonial, multicultural…) we often repeat the same “elitist” opera­
tion of power we criticize.
However, from the same point we can go in a differrent direction. 
According to Jacques Rancière, romantic conception of literature is a 
striking example of the axiom of equality characteristic of the modern 
era (The Politics 26–27). The premise of there no longer being a strict 
division into genres and styles that follows the lines of the social hier­
archy characteristic for ethical regime now operates on the assumption 
that everyone talks to everyone, that every form of discourse, in prin­
ciple, is available to all. Rancière relies on the continuity between indi­
viduals in the political equality and equality of materials and themes in 
the aesthetic (The Politics 81). If we accept this, then we quickly come 
to the conclusion that the problem of the good book is actually a politi­
cal problem. According to Rancière, who appears to be fond of the de­
scribed short circuit of the good book, modern literature is democratic 
because it talks about things in a prosaic style that is indifferent to what 
is being processed. Indeed, everything could be the proper subject of 
literature. It seems that we can also agree with late Jacques Derrida who 
has affirmed writing as an unconditional right to say everything and/or 
the right not to speak at all – and to ask any deconstructive questions 
that are imposed by the subjects of human being and his sovereignty 
(Derrida 28; see also Robson 88–101).
Philosophical aesthetics has grown from a failure of the rationalist 
tradition of the eighteenth century to comprehend the immediacy of 
the sensory relationship of the subject with the world that makes up 
part of the aesthetic pleasure (aesthesis). The primacy of the empiri­
cal leads Rancière to what he calls the scene of aesthetic regime, or to 
artistic events that are, like any scientific abstraction, constituted them­
selves into historically developed distinctive languages. He maintains 
the principle of Kantian transcendental understanding that replaces 
dogmatism of the truth with the search for the conditions of possibility 
(Rancière, The Politics 50). Opposite to Lyotard (via Kant), according 
to whom the specific task of modern art is to witness the impotence of 
mind when faced with the unthinkable, Rancière goes in the direction 
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of an­archic deconstruction of the regimes of art’s perception. Art is 
vague, and it is its main virtue. Or, for our purposes here, the goodness 
of a good book is its vagueness, which is its main virtue. As already 
shown, this virtue actually argues for something larger than itself. It 
is, of course, freedom, which is still one possible condition of a good 
book. Rancière’s work reflects something that Manfred Frank noticed 
about the Kant’s “third Critique”:
Even when I do not produce an aesthetic product, but enjoy one, I still 
must use my freedom. For nothing sensuously visible and reconstructable in 
thought is sufficient to impress the character of the aesthetic on an object of 
nature [i.e. the understanding cannot produce aesthetic judgments]. I must, 
in order to become aware of the freedom represented in the object, use my own 
freedom (Frank 158; quoted in Bowie 57).
Aesthetic product thus becomes a utopian ethical symbol of attained 
freedom: this symbol enables us to see or hear a picture of how the 
world would be like if freedom were realized in it. We can see it in this 
way because of that aspect of self­consciousness whose basis cannot 
be articulated in concepts, if concepts are understood in the Kantian 
sense, as the rules for identification of objects (Bowie 57). The main 
feature of literature is its availability, and the purpose of reading lit­
erature is that gifted students, autodidacts and finally all those who are 
not destined to read this or that text became able to adapt its words to 
create their own text (Watts 114). However, we must warn that bonae 
literae, of course taken metaphorically, gives reasons to the people who 
are inclined to hear them: “[I]f we cannot be harmed by fiction, then 
we cannot be improved. Fictions, to repeat, preach only to the con­
verted” (Landy 74). Literature can only happen inside an ethical life of 
certain kind that is often quite innocently called “literary field.” Bonae 
literae lives for the people that belong to a certain presupposition. This 
means that the idea that literature trains ethical sensibility always has 
certain limits.
Moreover, according to Rancière, aesthetics from the beginning has 
its own politics (“The thinking” 8). This does not make him happy and 
he calls that metapolitics (often termed dubiously as “ethics” or “moral­
ity”) to indicate the deceptive doing of politics outside the limits of poli­
tics. The aim of metapolitics is to exclude its subjects from politics or to 
elevate them above the political; some would even say that ethical criti­
cism has been always searching for metapolitical status. If the main task 
of ethics is to give valid reasons why something is good or not, then we 
might ask, for example, a postcolonial literary critic can he or she justify 
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the ethical reasons outside the secluded space of institution of literature. 
And where exactly? But if the presumption of the institution of litera­
ture is a must then how he or she can reasonably defend the difference 
of his or her approach to the literature or to the “outside” world. This 
is another reason why we need to rethink the legitimacy of this kind of 
ethics of literature: let us remind that academic scholars do not have the 
monopoly on answering the question what should be; real moral posi­
tion cannot be drawn from the literary studies because the good book is 
always just a working hypothesis, which inevitably separates our experi­
ence of the book from the experience of, say, a refugee camp.
Thus, it seems to me that our secret desire for metapolitics and im­
munization from contemporary politics might explain why “in the last 
few decades ethical criticism has again become respectable, indeed widely 
so, ranging from the left to right politically and from traditional to avant­
garde aesthetically” (Booth 384). Feminism, postcolonial criticism, “cul­
tural” criticism, religious probings, re­emerging nationalism and spiri­
tuality have their own versions of bonae literae. There is nothing new if 
we say that their attitudes to the good remain synthetic and not analytic. 
Thus, it seems that the reasons – spiritual, political, ethical etc. – that lie 
beyond the good book remain resistant until today, although it is diffi­
cult to canonize them in a single notion of understanding related to the 
universal ethical value (or values). In the Kantian framework, the state­
ment “this book is good” is not just an expression of feelings but more 
like a recommendation or even an order. Then we must re­think whom 
we are addressing (or commanding) when we speak about literature. It 
appears, here, that there still exists a small, almost invisible residuum 
of Erasmus’s view of bonae literae: belief in the idea that literature has a 
value in itself. There is no doubt we share conviction that literary writing 
may still reveal something “deep,” “meaningful” in regard to the rela­
tionship between language and the modern world, and also about the 
relationship between knowledge and cultural practices. Is the nature of 
this conviction ethical or aesthetical, or is it again difficult to disentan­
gle them? Thus it seems that the bonae still has a certain content, albeit 
vague, wrong if metapolitical, and more acceptable if it longs for a radi­
cally egalitarian literature that will not attempt to solidify a unique and 
single sense of its own, but a way to deal with the tragedies of the century 
without forgetting to add some spicy humor, irony, parody and comedy 
to it. Since literature can even exist without a constant and dull repetition 
of the list of self­defeating consequences (of the crisis, the disintegration, 
fragmentation, anomie, gelatinization, loss of freedom, etc.), one who 
poses the question of the relationship of ethics and literature should be 
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89
more interested in a space where writing comes into collision with what 
enables it, thanks to which it writes.
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Kaj je dobra knjiga? Bonae literae v 
enaindvajsetem stoletju
Ključne besede: literatura in etika / literarni kanon / literarno vrednotenje / etika in 
estetika / estetsko izkustvo / subjektivnost / svoboda / metapolitika / moderna
Prvi del članka podaja analizo pojma bonae literae, ki nas povede v srž pro­
blema dobre knjige pred časom estetske separacije, ki se pojavi ob koncu 18. 
stoletja. Drugi del poskuša prikazati, da celo v primeru fragmentiranega lite­
rarnega kanona pogosto ponavljamo »elitistično« operacijo moči, ki jo kriti­
ziramo. Dolgo pred nastankom sodobne literarne vede, ki je organizirana v 
univerzitetnih oddelkih in raziskovalnih inštitutih, so se lastnosti dobre knjige 
nanašale na vrednotenje njenih retoričnih kvalitet, navezav na poetično tradi­
cijo in predvsem na moralne odlike. V 21. stoletju ni enotnega kriterija, po 
katerem bi lahko presojali, ali je knjiga dobra ali ne, niti v estetskem niti v 
etičnem smislu. Tako se zdi, da bi odgovor na vprašanje dobre knjige lahko bil 
tako preprost kakor tudi protisloven: obstajajo dobre knjige in dobre knjige, 
stare in nove, klasične in moderne, dobre domače in dobre tuje knjige, ki so 
jih večino napisali veliki romanopisci in manjšino veliki pesniki. Odgovor na 
vprašanje dobre knjige je problematičen, ker je težko odkriti, kaj povezuje 
individualno izkušnjo z besedilom in izkušnje nasploh. Seveda rezultat ni iz­
ginotje koncepta dobre knjige (še vedno ima nek pomen), temveč predvsem 
njegova nedoločenost. Zato je vedno potrebna previdnost pri generalizacijah, 
ne oziraje se na to, ali generaliziramo kulturno ali multikulturno. Zdi se, da še 
vedno obstaja majhen, skoraj neviden ostanek Erazmovega pojmovanja bonae 
literae v sodobnem fragmentiranem literarnem kanonu: verjetje v idejo, da 
ima literatura vrednost sama po sebi.
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK 82.0:17