This book examines the relationship between philosophy and literature. It encompasses political philosophy, the philosophy of language, ethics, and the philosophy of mind. It also includes a section on philosophical interpretations of literature.
This volume offers analytically acute and culturally rich ways of understanding how it is that literature can illuminate philosophical topics and what kind of distinctive conceptual progress is thereby secured. Given the extremely widespread interest in how literature can assist in the search for meaning and truth, this volume will strike resonant chords far and wide.
Literature in the Light of Philosophy is essential reading for all scholars and researchers of aesthetics, especially those focusing on literary aesthetics. It is also ideal for literature scholars with an interest in the relationship between philosophy and literature.
1. Introduction: The Dawning of Philosophical Aspects in Literature.-
Part I: Literature and Political Reflection.-
2. The Richardsonian Republic.-
3. The Fall and the New Paradox of Liberalism.-
4. The Sovereign and the
Virtuoso: What Ibsens Hedda Gabler Tells Us about Autonomy.- Part II. The
Philosophy of Language within Literature.-
5. Exploring Indeterminacy: Jonas
Lüscher, Radical Interpretation, and Passing Theories of Love.-
6. Maisie
Farange as Final Arbiter: A Davidsonian Approach to Henry Jamess What
Maisie Knew.- 7. Free Indirect Discourse in Shakespeare.- Part III.
Literature, Ethics, and Moral Psychology.-
8. Crime, Character, and
Repentance in Dostoevsky and Dreiser: Varieties of Moral Purpose in Fictional
Literature.-
9. Is Virtue Stupid?.-
10. By My Own Hand: Why the Good Guys
Cannot Always Win.- Part IV. Philosophical Readings.-
11. The Significance of
Christoph Glucks Orphee et Eurydice in Albert Camus Plague.-
12. Seized by
Sensation, Learning by Heart: On Simone Weil's "Essay on the Notion of
Reading".-
13. Klara and the Reader: Artificial Subjectivity in Kazuo
Ishiguros Klara and the Sun.- Part V. Minds Depicted.-
14. Becoming
Post-Postmodern: The New Detective Esoteric Mystery.-
15. Top-Down Perception
in Proust and Aristotle.-
16. The Linguistic Mind: Arrival and Our Life
Within, and Across, Time.
Garry L. Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard College; his most recent book is Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood (2023).
