Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: Philosophy and the Novel directly engages with the ongoing debate in the philosophy of literature surrounding the issue of literary value. By placing focus on reader-experience, rather than formal qualities of texts, Alan H. Goldman manages to circumnavigate the notoriously tricky task of having to define precisely what literature is. He argues that what makes literature ‘literature’, and valuable as such, is its capacity to engage its readership in a particular kind of multifaceted cognitive activity. The central claim of this book is that this activity, ‘typically united indissolubly with perception, emotion, and imagination’ (7), constitutes a vital part of literary appreciation. Therefore, a true account of literary value must be broad enough to accommodate the full scope of cognitive benefits derivable from literary engagement. The author’s argument for this claim rests upon his theory that literary interpretation and appreciation are ‘indissolubly linked’ (22). The second chapter, ‘Interpreting Novels’, elegantly illuminates how intentionalist and meaning-focused accounts of interpretation, traditionally favoured by analytical philosophers, are too narrow. The former neglects the fact that authors can achieve more than they intended in their work, while the latter must deny that the same work can be interpreted as having various valid meanings. On the other hand, the institutional accounts endorsed by many literary critics, which assert that the only restrictions on interpretation ‘are those self-imposed by readers or interpretive communities’ (45), are too broad. Under such accounts, novels become susceptible to any interpretation and, therefore, meaningless.
Author: Maarten Steenhagen
Institution: University College London
Language: German
Topic: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Art
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2326143708