Imagined contexts can be a source of knowledge, a source of conceptual clarification, and a source of insight. Literature can thus provide both an occasion for, and the constitutive material of, philosophical
reflection. Philosophical thinking is undertaken, after all, in words, and
the heightened sensitivity to the exact usages of our words—particularly philosophically central words such as truth, reality, perception, knowledge, verification, certainty, illusion, understanding, falsehood—
can bring a clarity and a refreshed sense of the life that our words take on in fully-described contexts of usage. And in these imagined contexts we can also see more acutely and deeply into the meaning of words
about words—metaphor and figurative tropes, verbal coherence, intelligibility, implication, sense, reference, and indeed the word “meaning” itself. Moving from a philosophical issue into a literary world in which
the central concepts of that issue are in play can enrich our comprehension of those concepts and, in the strongest cases, substantively change the way we see them. And with that change, we will see the philosophical
problem itself differently as well.
Author(s): Garry Hagberg (ed.)
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 398
Part I Philosophical Thought and Literary
Interpretation: Interwoven Themes
1 The Possibility of the Philosophical Novel as a Genre
Michael H. Mitias
2 Narrative and the Value of Falsehood: An Approach to Fiction
David Gorman
3 Learning to Read: A Problem for Adam Smith and a Solution from Jane Austen
Lauren Kopajtic4 Philosophy and Literature in Jorge Luis Borges: ¿Aliados o Enemigos?
José Luis Fernández
Part II Life Through the Lens of Literature
5 Metaphors We Live, Worlds We Read
James Nikopoulos
6 Oneself as Character: Emplotment, Memory and Metaphor in Ricoeur, Bakhtin and Nabokov’s The Gift
Leonid Bilmes
7 Sherlockismus: Freud and the Romance of Detection
Stewart Justman
8 Extrahuman Transcendence in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray 175
Katie Fry
Part III Philosophical Saying, Literary Showing
9 A Nietzschean Wuthering Heights?
Charles Nussbaum
10 Wordsworth’s Literary Sublime
Katherine Elkins
11 Searching for Chad, He Found Himself: Peirce, Wittgenstein, Pragmatism, and the Case of Lambert Strether in Henry James’s The Ambassadors
Garry Hagberg
Part IV Seeing the Past, Inheriting Tragedy’s Wisdom
12 The Passing Away of the Past: The Transmutation of Modernism into Postmodernism
Rizwan Saeed Ahmed and Akhtar Aziz
13 Spiritual Idealism and Tragic Wisdom: An Essay on King Lear
Robert Baker
14 Sense and Conscience: Hunting for Certainty in Hamlet
Charlie Gustafson-Barrett
Index
