Works of art only have meaning in so far as they have been produced solely by historical determinants. If Barthes proclaimed the death of the artist, then Hegel and Marx proclaim the death of the work itself for they subject art to the tyranny of the artist's own historically created nature. Brett forges a middle line between these two polarities. Perhaps a brief analogy might be helpful. Art is both particular and universal.
Art is, moreover, universal precisely because it is particular.
Like the greatest artists, we are all embedded in a particularity. It is a dynamic empathy for the particularity of the artist that renders his work universal. Accordingly, an implicit feature of Brett's approach is a belief in a common but indeterminate humanity and it is in this that one would be tempted to compare it with the title of Robert Lowell's most famous anthology of poems, for Faith and Doubt is, above all, a collection of 'life studies'. Literary works, says Brett, represent 'human experience in all its richness and complexity. In a similar way that Wittgenstein said that life gave words their currency, Brett argues that life gives art its currency.