Literature and Understanding investigates the cognitive gain from literature by focussing on a reader’s close analysis of a literary text. It examines the meaning of ‘literature’, outlines the most prominent positions in the literary cognitivism debate, explores the practice of close reading from a philosophical perspective, provides a fresh account of what we mean by ‘understanding’ and in so doing opens up a new area of research in the philosophy of literature.
This book provides a different reply to the challenge that we can’t learn anything worthwhile from reading literary fiction. It makes the innovative case that reading literary fiction as literature rather than as fiction stimulates five relevant senses of understanding. The book uses examples of irony, metaphor, play with perspective and ambiguity to illustrate this contention. Before arguing that these five senses of understanding bridge the gap between our understanding of a literary text and our understanding of the world beyond that text.
The book will be of great interest for researchers, scholars and post-graduate students in the fields of aesthetics, literary theory, literature in education and pedagogy.
Author(s): J. W. Phelan
Series: Literature and Education
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 182
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgements
1 Literary fiction as a subgenre of both literature and fiction
Fiction
Literature
Literary fiction
2 Literary cognitivism, anti-cognitivism and non-cognitivism
Literary cognitivism
Literary anti-cognitivism
Literary non-cognitivism
The literariness of literary cognitivism
3 Understanding others from understanding literary fiction
Understanding human thought and action
Five senses of ‘understanding’
Close analysis and interpretation
The charge of elitism
The charge of subjectivity
4 The cognitive gain from reading literary fiction as literature
Irony
Particularity and precision
Particularity
Precision
Metaphor
Perspective
Ambiguity
Repetition
Aesthetic effectiveness
Close analysis and intellectual virtue
5 How understanding literary fiction relates to the world beyond literary fiction
The standard account of checking literary fiction against the world
Concession to the standard account
Objections to the standard account
My thesis as an alternative model
Truth-tracking vs truth-trailing relations
Concluding remarks
Appendix: The affliction
Bibliography
Index
