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Catttt Posted 5 years ago
Grammar

Meaning of "interest"

Do the highlighted "interest"s in the following context mean "advantage"?


Context:

Ian Watt (1957) connects the emergence of the novel to the rise of a new reading public, something that could be understood from the point of view of the production of culture; that is, a new audience, a new market, created the conditions for the emergence of a new artistic form. But Watt goes much deeper in arguing that this audience had interests of its own, an interest in self-knowledge. The new art form, in other words, spoke to, had meaning for, an audience it helped to constitute, aside from any commercial interests an author or publisher might have had.

  

Top answer

catttt Do the highlighted "interest"s in the following context mean "advantage"? No. They are two different uses of the word, an infelicitous turn by the writer.

  • catttt Do the highlighted "interest"s in the following context mean "advantage"?
  • No.
  • They are two different uses of the word, an infelicitous turn by the writer.
  • You shouldn't do that if you're not going to make either a pun or a point with it.
  • The audience had interests, meaning things they hoped to gain from, and the writer proposes that one was attention to self-knowledge.
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2 Answers
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cattttDo the highlighted "interest"s in the following context mean "advantage"?

No. They are two different uses of the word, an infelicitous turn by the writer. You shouldn't do that if you're not going to make either a pun or a point with it. The audience had interests, meaning things they hoped to gain from, and the writer proposes that one was attention

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cattttDo the highlighted "interest"s in the following context mean "advantage"?

I doubt it.

In that context it could be anything on the scale from curiosity to motivation, but I'd put my money on something closer to curiosity.

CJ

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