Literary Studies

Literary Studies
and the Philosophy

of Literature
New Interdisciplinary Directions
Edited by Andrea Selleri

and Philip Gaydon
Literary Studies and the Philosophy of Literature
Andrea Selleri Philip Gaydon
Editors
Literary Studies and

the Philosophy of
Literature
New Interdisciplinary Directions
Editors
Andrea Selleri Philip Gaydon
Department of English and Department of Philosophy
Comparative Literature University of Warwick
University of Warwick Coventry, United Kingdom
Coventry, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-33146-1ISBN 978-3-319-33147-8(eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33147-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016958287
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Acknowledgements
This book is a distant offshoot of the conference 21st-Century Theories of

Literature: Essence, Fiction and Value, which we organised at the University
of Warwick in March 2014. Our thanks go to Eileen John for her work
with us on that project, as well as to all participants. Financial support
for the conference was provided by the British Society of Aesthetics, the
American Society for Aesthetics, the Analysis Trust, and the University of
Warwicks Humanities Research Centre, International Office, Philosophy
Department and Institute for Advanced Studies.
We published some of our considerations stemming from the event
as 21st-Century Theories of Literature: A Critical Reflection on an
Interdisciplinary Event (2014) in Exchanges: The Warwick Research
Journal, 2:1, 174183 (web). We would like to thank Karen Simecek
and an anonymous reviewer for helping shape those thoughts. We then
jointly presented some of our results at the conference Transfusion and
Transformation: The Creative Potential of Interdisciplinary Knowledge
Exchange at the University of Durham.
Thanks also have to go to Michael Luntley for helping with those essays
which covered areas where our expertise was lacking.
Andrea Selleri would also like to thank his family and his partner for
their continued support. Phil Gaydon would like to thank the IATL
team for continuing to help shape his thoughts on interdisciplinary prac-
tice, Eileen John and Jackie Labbe for allowing him to finish this project
despite the fact his PhD still needs to be completed, and his family, friends,
and Sophie for being the ones who continue to support him through
everything.
v
Contents
1 Introduction1
Andrea Selleri and Philip Gaydon
Part I Interdisciplinary Interaction in Theory15
2 Criticism, Philosophy andtheDifferend17

Catherine Belsey
3 The Discipline ofLiterary Studies37

Stein Haugom Olsen
4 Analytic Philosophy ofLiterature: Problems andProspects65

Jukka Mikkonen
Part II Interdisciplinary Interaction in Practice81
5I Will Draw aMap ofWhat YouNever See: Cartographic

Metaphor inWittgensteins Philosophical Investigations83
Michael Rose-Steel
vii
viii Contents
6 The Pleasures ofSolipsism forWriters andPhilosophers103

Ery Shin
7To Tell What Happened asInvention: Literature and

Philosophy onLearning fromFiction123
Manuel Garca-Carpintero
Part IIIUsing the Philosophy of Literature in

Literary Studies149
8 Poetic Utterances: Attuning Poetry andPhilosophy151

Maximilian de Gaynesford
9What Difference (If Any) Is There Between Reading

asFiction andReading asNon-fiction?169
Derek Matravers
10The Opacity ofTestimony; or, What thePhilosophy

ofLiterature Can Tell Us About How toRead
Holocaust Narratives185
Samuel ODonoghue
Part IVUsing Literary Studies in the Philosophy

of Literature205
11Literary Examples inAnalytic Aesthetics: TheClaim

oftheEmpirical207
Andrea Selleri
12What Do WeDo withWords? Framing What Is at Stake

inDealing withLiterature225
Marianna Ginocchietti and Giulia Zanfabro
Contents ix
13Electronic Literature and Its Departure from the

Supremacy of the Author Function243
Heiko Zimmermann
Bibliography267
Index287
Contributors
Catherine Belseyis Professor Emeritus at Swansea University and Visiting

Professor in English at the University of Derby. Her books include Criticism
(2016), Critical Practice, Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction, Culture
and the Real and A Future for Criticism. She has also published books on
Shakespeare, Milton and love stories in Western culture.
Maximilian de Gaynesfordformerly Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, is
Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading. He is the author of I: The
Meaning of the First Person Term, Hilary Putnam and John McDowell, as well as
many articles on aesthetics, and philosophy of mind and language.
ManuelGarca-Carpintero has a PhD from the University of Barcelona, where
he has taught since 1984. He was a Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Studies
in the Humanities and has been appointed Visiting Professor at the University of
Lisbon. He has published papers on philosophical logic, the philosophy of lan-
guage, the philosophy of mind, and related epistemological and metaphysical
issues. Currently he is completing a book for OUP on the nature of speech acts,
assertion in particular, entitled Tell Me What You Know.
Marianna Ginocchiettihas recently completed a PhD in Philosophy at the
University of Trieste with a thesis titled Actions: A Plea for An Ordinary
Framework. Her main research interests lie in the areas of philosophy of action,
pragmatics and speech act theory.
SteinHaugomOlsen is at present Pro-Rector at stfold University College in
Norway. He has held chairs at the Universities of Oslo and Bergen in Norway and
at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He has written extensively on problems in the
xi
xii Contributors
philosophy of literature and literary aesthetics as well as a number of articles of

literary criticism. He is currently working on a book about the origin of literary
criticism as an academic discipline.
DerekMatravers is Professor of Philosophy at the Open University and a Senior
Member of Darwin College, Cambridge. He has published two books recently:
Introducing Philosophy of Art: Eight Case Studies and Fiction and Narrative. He is
also the author of Art and Emotion, as well as numerous articles on aesthetics, eth-
ics and the philosophy of mind.
JukkaMikkonen is a Post-doctoral Fellow at the School of Social Sciences and
Humanities, University of Tampere, Finland. He has published The Cognitive
Value of Philosophical Fiction and he has authored papers on philosophical fiction
and cognitive value in a number of collections and journals.
Samuel ODonoghueis currently completing a PhD in Hispanic Studies at
University College London. His thesis examines the influence of the French writer
Marcel Proust on contemporary Spanish memory fiction. His research in the fields
of comparative literature, Spanish literature and Holocaust testimony has appeared
in Modern Language Review, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Forum for Modern
Language Studies, Romance Studies and Journal of Iberian and Latin American
Studies.
Mike Rose-Steelis a PhD researcher at the University of Exeter, writing on
Wittgenstein, poetics and the limits of expression. His publications include The
Mysterious and the Marginal: The Incubation of Poetry Within and About the
Occult Writings of Sir John Grantner and Cartographical Thinking and the
Poetry of Kei Miller. His research is combined with his poetic practice in his
Paraphernalium, a collaborative pamphlet through Spindlebox, and site-specific
projects with the Exegesis writing collective. In 2015, he co-curated Wor(l)ds in
Collision, an exhibition of text-art accompanying the British Wittgenstein Society
annual conference.
Andrea Selleri is an Associate Fellow at the University of Warwick, where he
recently completed a PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies. His areas
of interest include nineteenth-century European literary culture, intellectual his-
tory more generally, and the philosophy of literature. His work on these matters
has appeared in the Philosophy and Literature, Review of English Studies, the
Journal of Literary Theory, Notes and Queries and Authorship. He is writing a book
on the idea of the author in nineteenth-century literary criticism.
Ery Shin is a Lecturer at Stanford Universitys Structured Liberal Education
Program. Among her areas of interest are modernism, queer-feminist criticism,
phenomenology, art history, and East Asian film. Her current book project thinks
through Gertrude Steins surrealist gestures against the backdrop of WWII and
Contributors xiii
her own Jewish-American heritage, while her individual essays can be found in
Texas Studies in Literature and Language and the Journal of Modern Literature.
Giulia Zanfabrohas recently completed a PhD in Literary Theory at the
University of Trieste with a thesis on childrens literature. She graduated at the
University of Trieste with a thesis on J. M. Coetzees fiction. Her areas of interest
include J. M. Coetzees fiction, feminist theories, gender studies, and childrens
literature.
HeikoZimmermann is a lecturer in English literature at the University of Trier.
His interests in scholarship include E.M. Forsters work, memory, remembrance
on Web 2.0 and hypertext theory. His recent publications include Performance
and Social Interaction: New Challenges for the Archiving of Digital Writing,
Diverging Strategies of Remembrance in Traditional and Web-2.0 On-Line
Projects and Autorschaft und digitale Literatur.
List of Figures
Fig. 13.1 A schematic TeCEU chart of a p-book 250

Fig. 13.2 TeCEU chart of Turners She251
Fig. 13.3 TeCEU chart of Litts Slice252
Fig. 13.4 TeCEU chart of A Million Penguins252
xv
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
AndreaSelleri andPhilipGaydon
The aims of this book are to examine the current status of the interac-
tion between literary studies and the philosophy of literature, to articulate
some of its potentialities and difficulties, and implement a genuinely inter-
disciplinary dialogue between the two fields by featuring twelve essays on
shared issues written by scholars from both disciplines. The chapters have
been written with a cross-disciplinary audience in mind and in all cases
we and the authors have striven to make the contributions interesting,
understandable and relevant when viewed from the perspectives of those
working in either field. Neither we nor the contributors attempt to dis-
guise or ignore the difficulties that underlie writing for such a collection
and engaging in interdisciplinary dialogue; indeed, we highlight some of
them in this Introduction. Despite the difficulties, however, we thought it
worthwhile to try and achieve these aims, at least in part, because in our
own practice we have found the insights provided by committed engage-
ment with the other field useful in shedding new light on some of the
problems we have encountered in our work. Andrea Selleri found that the
A. Selleri (*)
Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies,
University of Warwick, Coventry, West Midlands, England
e-mail: Andrea.Selleri@warwick.ac.uk
P. Gaydon
IATL, University of Warwick, Coventry, West Midlands, England
The Author(s) 2016 1

A. Selleri, P. Gaydon (eds.), Literary Studies and the Philosophy
of Literature, DOI10.1007/978-3-319-33147-8_1
2 A. SELLERI AND P. GAYDON
discussions about intentionality undertaken in the philosophy of literature

helped him define the theoretical stakes of his historical work on the idea of
the author in nineteenth-century literary culture, and Philip Gaydon found
working in the University of Warwicks English and Comparative Literary
Studies department on childrens literature opened up his study of episte-
mological questions within the philosophy of literature in novel ways.
That the fields of philosophy of literature and literary studies can
potentially provide such insights into each other should not be a matter
for surprise. After all, at least some strands these two fields share an object
(literature), to some extent a methodology (at a minimum, an invest-
ment in proposing generalisable theses about literature), and a number
of crucial issues (such as how to define literature, how to determine the
value of our object of study, how we can learn from fiction, what the role
of the author is in understanding a literary work, and so on). Each of the
fields has given a range of answers to these questions, and their reciprocal
relevance is often clear to those who have achieved some level of acquain-
tance with both. We think that there should be a platform for an open dis-
cussion about the mutual usefulness of the two disciplines which equally
represents both and directly addresses the nature of and prerequisites for
interdisciplinary interaction. This is our attempt to help build one.
In contemporary Anglophone academia, literature is part and par-

cel of important strands of research in more than one discipline in the
humanities and social sciences. The study of literature lies at or near the
centre of the activities undertaken in departments of English and mod-
ern languages, and many other disciplines, such as sociology, linguistics,
psychology, philosophy and, of course, its sub-discipline the philoso-
phy of literature, are also concerned with it. There are journals (such as
Philosophy and Literature and New Literary History), a number of col-
lections (see below and notes 810), and some local initiatives (such as
the University of Warwicks Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature
and the Arts, and the online hub, Ordinary Language Philosophy and
Literary Studies) which attempt to merge some of these in meaningful
ways. However, this spread of disciplines, each with their own institutional
identity and historical genealogy, has resulted in widely divergent epis-
temologies, argumentative procedures, rhetorical styles, frames of refer-
ence, and conceptions of the aims of research when it comes to the study
INTRODUCTION 3
of literature. These differences are rarely addressed head on and have,

instead, become deeply entrenched and taken as given.
This is not a situation that is peculiar to the areas of study concerned
with literature and literary studies. Due to a rigidly compartmentalised
higher education framework, disciplines tend to be more willing to
judge other disciplines procedures and results than engage in such a
self-aware and collaborative process as interdisciplinary dialogue. As a
consequence, in contemporary universities and academic institutions,
it often appears as though only lip service is being paid to the idea of
interdisciplinarity and that those institutions remain cradles of disci-
plinarity.1 This may well be for understandable practical reasons: dis-
ciplines already have developed expert communities with agreed-upon
methods and standards of practice, the usefulness of which cannot be
overestimated if one of the aims of university education is the forma-
tion of a students professional identity and relevant knowledge basis;
choosing a discipline is a particular way of expressing what one takes to
be valuable about the world, and students are thus motivated to seek
homes for supporting their research and teaching passions in a disciplin-
ary base,2 and administrative efficiency is a powerful and valid motiva-
tor. As a consequence, it is unsurprising that the discipline remains
very much in control of academic appeal and reputation.3 However, the
institutionalisation, formalisation, and professionalisation of such dis-
ciplinary boundaries, which the disciplines relevant to the intersection
addressed in this collection are certainly not exempt from doing, often
lead to tension, mistrust, and reciprocal caricaturing and too little genu-
ine understanding. This negatively affects the conduct of knowledge
politics in higher education, and, in terms of career development, taking
time out for interdisciplinary projects can still be interpreted as some-
what counter-productive.4 It often takes a scholars unprompted desire
and self-motivated effort to broaden their scope beyond the confines
of their affiliationin this case, to understand what is at stake in study-
ing literature from within both literary studies and the philosophy of
literaturein order to see what this broadening of horizons could do
for their own practice. This is a task that we and the authors of this col-
lection have taken on as worthwhile.
Apart from the simple fact that work in the philosophy of literature
and work in literary studies take place in different departments, interdis-
ciplinary interaction between the title areas of this collection has been
fraught with difficulty due to the reciprocal mistrust that continues to
linger between analytic and Continental approaches to philosophy.5

The divide that interests us in this collection is disciplinary rather than
approach-based but it would be disingenuous to ignore this second
divide as it is responsible for many of the difficulties that beset reciprocal
understanding. While literary studies has historically been quick to incor-
porate some parts of Continental philosophy, such as Marxism and post-
structuralism within its purview, the same, with some exceptions, cannot
be said about its willingness to engage with philosophy in the analytic
and ordinary language traditions. As for the philosophy of literature,
while its line of descent is long and complex, its practice today seems to
be influenced primarily by just these two traditions.6 Perhaps the most
prominent example of the negative ideal that we want to avoid here,
one predicated on this very divide, is the confrontation between John
Searle and Jacques Derrida on whether and how context (including
intention) is constitutive of communication.7 Whatever the merits of the
respective positions, it is clear that neither combatant made any sustained
attempt to understand the others framework, relying instead on abra-
sive rhetoric and point-scoring which were replicated in the reception
of the exchange, which saw most commentators reasserting their loyalty
to their own without admitting that the other might have something
valuable to say. Here we do not wish to insist on the analytic-Continental
divide. Indeed, one of the aims of the collection is to weaken it in order
to focus instead on what the collections title disciplines can do for each
other.
Even putting aside the analytic-Continental divide and focusing upon
the two disciplines represented in this collection, however, the disciplin-
ary and institutional compartmentalisation noted above is very much
active. A brief survey of the scholarly literature devoted to philosophy
of literature and philosophy and literature up to this point reveals that
while there have been several monographs and essay collections, both
introductory and of the state-of-the-field variety, these volumes are all
clearly identifiable as being part of one discipline, almost always philoso-
phy. That is, while literature is their object, they are generally written
by philosophers for philosophers, with primarily philosophical concerns
and methodology.8 As concerns literary studies, although a number of
individual scholars have mobilised some of the insights provided by the
philosophy of literature (typically in the ordinary language tradition) for
the exploration of literary topics, there is even less material that might be
considered as attempting to bridge the two disciplines.9 There are a few
INTRODUCTION 5
volumes that have made notable attempts to explore one discipline from
the standpoint of the other.10 Up to this point, however, little has been
done to explicitly address what the two disciplines can do for each other,
and never, as far as we are aware, in a site of engagement that was itself
interdisciplinary, in the sense of including a balanced representation from
each field and keeping in mind the needs and expectations of both while
locating and addressing shared questions. This collection seeks to redress
this comparative neglect and to achieve interdisciplinary interaction that
is both fair to and stimulating for those working in and moving between
both fields.
The notion of achieving interdisciplinary interaction brings us to
another problem faced by those attempting to engage in it: despite
its prominence in funding applications and blue-sky discussions in
Anglophone higher education, interdisciplinarity is a term which is still
in a state of definitional flux and lacks a generally accepted, underpinning
goal.11 In order to overcome this issue, and so that we might spell out
in more concrete terms how we see this collection in relation to further
interdisciplinary study, we will lay out our working definition of interdis-
ciplinarity and situate it in relation to its sister terms of multidisciplinarity
and transdisciplinarity.
Multidisciplinarity is used mainly as a label for the coming together of
academics from various disciplines to consider a topic without any note-
worthy integration of those disciplines ideas or methodologies. For exam-
ple, a conference or collection may be organised around a broad theme
and contain contributions from scholars of multiple disciplines. Audience
members can thus gather a sense of what is currently being studied in
another field and how to positon their own work in relation to this, as well
as, often accidentally, having ideas stimulated through their exposure to
alternative ways of expressing or approaching the topic. Interdisciplinarity,
however, is seen to involve more of an active partnership between represen-
tatives and ultimately a synthesis of disciplinary knowledge.12 Proponents
of each discipline will attempt to engage with and understand each other
in order to further their collaborative inquiry into a topic. Each participant
should be able to identify in the process and/or result of the inquiry the
methodologies and concepts from their field and feel that these have been
fairly represented and utilised where appropriate. Interdisciplinary study is
usually undertaken in order to find a solution for or insight into a problem
too large or complex for a single discipline, thus, resulting in an outcome
more interesting than the sum of the parts.13 Interdisciplinarity has also
been interpreted as containing a normative element insofar as some of

its proponents claim that it aims for a certain form of unified or holis-
tic understanding14 and signals a post-academic type of knowledge,15
a new mode of epistemic knowledge production,16 or a more radical
questioning of the nature of knowledge itself and our attempts to organize
and communicate it.17 However, while engaging in interdisciplinary study
may be interpreted as demonstrating such a reformist orientation,18 we
cast attempts to engage with or achieve these ends as belonging to the
realm of transdisciplinarity. The creation of new spaces for learners and
educators to exist and collaborate where disciplinary divisions can be
more radically subverted or even erased19 may well be the implied next
step of an interdisciplinary explorer, but it is not the goal of interdisciplin-
arity per se, at least as it is conceived of in this collection.
We thus define success in interdisciplinarity as the synthesis of disciplin-
ary knowledge and methods, the result of which is valuable insights or
answers to shared topics and questions. To achieve this, as Geertz argues,
there are preliminary requirements of accepting, understanding, and artic-
ulating in accessible formulations the differences between the disciplines
engaging in the study.20 Those engaging in a thus defined interdisciplin-
ary endeavour will also find that their exploits often require: a motivation
towards communicability, a willing and open-minded disposition when
encountering other perspectives, and a reflective and honest critical aware-
ness of oneself as a disciplinary being.
The first requirement, communicability, does not necessitate simplifi-
cation or that the terminology, standpoints, or standards of a discipline
be abandoned. Giving a talk or writing a paper for an interdisciplinary
academic audience is not the same as doing so for public engagement
purposes, for example, and we do not believe any of the chapters in this
collection compromise their academic integrity in that fashion. However,
it does require that one be willing to explain disciplinary-specific terms
and concepts, use accessible examples, and elucidate points that one
might not expect to have to do so with a familiar disciplinary crowd.
In short, for interdisciplinary discussion to occur, one must attempt to
construct mutually accessible and acceptable intellectual frameworks.21
A large part of our editorial work, in collaboration with the authors of
the chapters, has been ensuring that this situation could obtain. Not fully
engaging with this is to immediately erect a barrier to the others under-
standing and to unnecessarily and obstinately require the other to scale
it. We hope the reader, whatever their disciplinary affiliation, will find
INTRODUCTION 7
these chapters engaging and accessible, and can carry forward any resul-
tant ideas in new interdisciplinary directions because communicability
has been considered.
That being said, to require complete stylistic or terminologi-
cal homogeneity of the contributors would be to betray the nature of
interdisciplinarity insofar as it attempts to respect the differences of the
disciplines while synthesising ideas and approaches. As such, the reader
also has inherent responsibilities if successful interdisciplinary interaction
is to be achieved. Willingness to research texts, references, and terms will
be necessary at times, as will a determined and open-minded attempt to
extend ones horizons as to what it is to be a member of the discipline
one is trying to engage with. One cannot simply sightsee in foreign ter-
ritory when attempting interdisciplinarity; immersion in the discipline is
required, and full appreciation often means becoming familiar with vari-
ous canons, styles, and standpoints, as well as wrestling with that disci-
plines threshold concepts:
A threshold concept can be considered as akin to a portal, opening up a new

and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents
a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something
without which the learner cannot progress. As a consequence of compre-
hending a threshold concept there may thus be a transformed internal view
of subject matter, subject landscape, or even world view [] Such a trans-
formed view or landscape may represent how people think in a particular
discipline, or how they perceive, apprehend, or experience particular phe-
nomena within that discipline.22
Meyer and Land give examples of what they consider the threshold con-
cepts of particular disciplines to be: heat transfer in cooking, complex
numbers in mathematics, opportunity cost in economics, signification
in literary studies, and personhood in philosophy.23 While these are good
examples for Meyer and Lands purposes, access points to alternative
ways of thinking tend to differ from scholar to scholar and learner to
learner, if they can be isolated at all.24 As such, it is difficult to isolate where
these appear in the collection as they will likely be personal to the reader.
Instead, the reader will have to be alert to which concepts from the other
discipline are proving tricky to grasp or where their usage feels unfamiliar
and unwieldy. Such experiences may indicate that one has come across a
threshold concept and that further work and study in foreign territory are
required. That being said, after putting this collection together, we feel
we can identify two potential candidates: literature and knowledge. As

obvious as these may seem, the former not only causes divides within this
collections two disciplines but is more often than not one of the terms
that opens gulfs between them, and the technicality and rich heritage
of debate surrounding the latter as it is understood in the analytically-
influenced philosophy of literature should not be underestimated.
Anyone involved in an interdisciplinary project must also recognise
their own status as a disciplinary being. As they try to immerse them-
selves in another realm, they must be equally aware of what they carry
with them in their exploration. As Ll and Norgaard argue, we must try
to locate and become critically aware of the embedded values, explanatory
frameworks, notions of adequate proof, perception of importance, and
other fundamental assumptions we have become accustomed to if we are
to act in the interdisciplinary sphere.25
We believe that the chapters in this collection, to different degrees and
in different ways, represent and aid interdisciplinary study. However, even
where the reader may disagree with our assessment, the collection as a
whole also attempts to prompt interdisciplinary thinking by engaging
with, and inviting the reader to similarly engage with, the above require-
ments. Indeed, it should be noted that if one participates in interdisci-
plinary forays with these requirements in mind, they can bear fruit even
if they fail to meet the full success criteria of synthesised knowledge and
valuable insights into a particular question or area. Even if these are not
fully achieved, and, what is more, even where it may be decided that inter-
disciplinarity is not the direction to take a particular question, the attempt
allows the gaining of new perspectives, acts as a beneficially unfamiliar,
if occasionally abrasive, whetstone upon which one can sharpen ones
theories, and creates space for a valuable revisiting of ones underlying
assumptions and motivations. While we may not agree that it is interdisci-
plinaritys greatest potential, we share Peter Sinnotts view that by engag-
ing in interdisciplinary study one does not just gain new perspectives on a
particular object of study but on ones own critical practices.26 We would
thus urge the reader not to discount the experience of trying to engage in
interdisciplinary thinking alongside (or even against) a chapter if they find
it unsatisfactory or challengeable, but to push forward in the direction of
using the experience in constructive ways that could bear further fruit in
the future.
*
INTRODUCTION 9
With these thoughts in mind, the book has been divided into four
parts, each highlighting one aspect of the interaction between the two
disciplines. Part 1, Interdisciplinary Interaction in Theory, is con-
cerned with further analysing the reasons for the relative lack of inter-
action up to this point, in the hope that they might be addressed in an
attempt to move forward, and imagining what shape interdisciplinarity
in this area might take in the future. In doing so, Part 1, alongside
this Introduction, provides the reader with a number of conceptions
of the nature and goals of the disciplines involved in this collection, as
well as possible threshold concepts such as literature, and the role of
examples and definitions. By the end of Part 1, the reader should be
able to form their own ideas on and identify disciplinary characteris-
tics at work, as well as construct an evaluative framework within which
they can assess the remaining chapters interdisciplinary success. In her
Criticism, Philosophy and the Differend, Catherine Belsey considers
whether the gap between the two disciplines is unbridgeable and con-
cludes on a note of cautious optimism. Stein Haugom Olsens The
Discipline of Literary Studies grounds the declining interest in literary
studies on the part of philosophers of literature on what he takes as the
former fields failure to constitute itself as an academic discipline. In
his Analytic Philosophy of Literature: Problems and Prospects, Jukka
Mikkonen surveys the state of his discipline and moves on to articulate
the shared issues around which interdisciplinarity with literary studies
may develop.
Part 2, Interdisciplinary Interaction in Practice, takes a more case-
study-based approach by including three chapters which take different
approaches to synthesising the two disciplines in order to attempt inter-
disciplinary exploration. Michael Rose-Steels I will draw a map of what
you never see: Cartographic Metaphor in Wittgensteins Philosophical
Investigations, demonstrates how an attention to traditionally literary con-
cerns such as metaphor, with an underlying perspective of the disciplines as
permeable, can yield new philosophical content from Wittgensteins later
work. Ery Shins The Pleasures of Solipsism for Writers and Philosophers
proposes a phenomenologically-inflected reading of Gertrude Steins
novel Ida, while arguing that literary-critical propounders of queer stud-
ies should take heed of phenomenology. In his To Tell What Happened as
Invention: Literature and Philosophy on Learning from Fiction, Manuel
Garca Carpintero provides a broad history and analysis of the contested
issue of assertion in fiction and assesses the results in line with a series of
literary works.
Part 3, Using the Philosophy of Literature in Literary Studies, articu-
lates more directly how literary studies could benefit from engaging with
the philosophy of literature. In his Poetic Utterances: Attuning Poetry
and Philosophy, Maximilian de Gaynesford actively addresses the divide
between philosophy (most notably, the analytic philosophy of language)
and poetry, and offers readings of a number of poems based on speech
act theory. Derek Matravers, What Difference (If Any) Is There Between
Reading as Fiction and Reading as Non-Fiction?, clarifies the philo-
sophical stakes of a crucial divide for literary studies, that between fiction
and non-fiction. Finally, in his The Opacity of Testimony; or, What the
Philosophy of Literature Can Tell Us about How to Read Holocaust
Narratives, Samuel ODonoghue brings philosophical literature on fic-
tionality to bear on the contested issue of truth in Holocaust narratives.
Part 4, Using Literary Studies in the Philosophy of Literature, takes
the complementary approach of exploring the benefits that philosophers
of literature might garner from a better acquaintance with literary stud-
ies. In chapter Literary Examples in Analytical Aesthetics: The Claim of
the Empirical, Andrea Selleri argues that the plausibility of philosophical
discussions involving literary examples would be improved by taking into
account literary studies traditional objectthe peculiarities of individual
works. In their chapter What Do We Do with Words? Framing What Is
at Stake in Dealing with Literature, Marianna Ginocchietti and Giulia
Zanfabro move from a reading of J.M. Cotzees fiction to argue that the
pertinent distinction in relevant areas of study is not between literature
and philosophy but between expository and non-expository prose. They
also seek to clarify the questions that philosophers of literature should be
addressing, given the assertion that literature stages what philosophy must
explain. In the final chapter, Heiko Zimmermann argues in Electronic
Literature and Its Departure from the Supremacy of the Author Function
that emerging practices in the field of digital literaturea field which is
rightly gaining greater academic attention as the technology of our age
irreversibly affects our reading and aesthetic experiencescalls for a
rethink of the traditional categories of the philosophy of literature, such
as authorship.
Ultimately, we have endeavoured to create a space ripe for interdisci-
plinary thought to occur and progress by engaging with both disciplines
equally, keeping interdisciplinarity at the forefront of the collection, and
INTRODUCTION 11
engaging thoroughly with the requirement of communicability. We also

hope that these chapters will provide the reader with an opportunity to
consider their own disciplinary standpoints and how they may appear to
other perspectives, and introduce them to potential threshold concepts.
If we have achieved this, then, with some input from a willing, open-
minded, and self-aware reader, this collection will open new interdisciplin-
ary directions for scholars from both fields.
Notes
1. Gasper, D. (2010) Interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in
P.Thomson & M.Walker (eds) The Routledge Doctoral Students
Companion (London: Routledge, 2010), p.53.
2. Aldrich, J. (2014) Interdisciplinarity: Its Role in a Discipline-based
Academy (New York: OUP), p.24.
3. Van Rann, A.F. J. (2000) The Interdisciplinary Nature of Science
in N. Stehr & P. Weingart (eds) Practicing Interdisciplinarity
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press), p.67.
4. For knowledge politics, see Becher, T. & Trowler, P. R. (2001)
Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the
Culture of Disciplines (Buckingham: Society for Research into
Higher Education and Open University Press); Ll, S. &
Norgaard, R.B. (2005) Practicing Interdisciplinarity, BioScience,
55:11, 96775; Schmidt, J. C. (2007) Knowledge Politics of
Interdisciplinarity: Specifying the Type of Interdisciplinarity in the
NSFs NBIC Scenario, Innovation, 20:4, 314.
5. Dasenbrock, R. W. (1989) Annotated Bibliography in R. W.
Dasenbrock, Redrawing the Lines: Analytic Philosophy, Deconstruction
and Literary Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press);
Gorman, D. (1990) From Small Beginnings: Literary Theorists
Encounter Analytic Philosophy, Poetics Today, 11:3, 64759; Moi,
T. (2009) They Practice their Trades in Different Worlds:
Concepts in Poststructuralism and Ordinary Language Philosophy,
New Literary History, 40:4, 80124; Micevic, N. (2011) The
Continental-Analytic Rift: A Guide for Travellers and Bridge-
Builders, Balkan J ournal of Philosophy, 3:1, 522.
6. Its complex history is drawn out by Peter Lamarque in his (2009)
The Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell) where he traces its
history back to Aristotles Poetics, then, apart from some passing
contemplations of literature, tragedy, and the moral life by Hume,

Hegel, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, he sees it as developing into
its contemporary form more through the critical essays of literary
figures such as Horace, Sidney, Shelley, Fielding, Wordsworth, and
Matthew Arnold. The Supplementary Reading section on
pp.278 gives a good overview of influential works in the forma-
tion of the field.
7. Derrida, J. (1988) Signature Event Context in Limited Inc.,
S. Weber & J. Mehlman (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press); Searle, J. (1977) Reiterating the Differences: A
Reply to Derrida, Glyph, 1, 202.
8. John, E. & Lopes, D.M. (eds) (2003) The Philosophy of Literature:
Contemporary and Classic Readings: An Anthology (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell); Rudrum, D. (ed.) (2006) Literature and Philosophy: A
Guide to Contemporary Debates (London: Palgrave Macmillan);
Hagberg, G. & Jost, W. (eds) (2006) A Companion to the Philosophy
of Literature (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell); Schroeder, S. (ed.) (2010)
Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell); Eldridge, R.
(ed.) (2013) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature
(Oxford: OUP).
9. Moi, T. (2006) Henry Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism (Oxford:
OUP); Landy, J. (2004) Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and
Knowledge in Proust (Oxford: OUP); Loesberg, J. (2005) A
Return to Aesthetics: Autonomy, Indifference, and Postmodernism
(Stanford: Stanford University Press); Swirski, P. (2010) Literature,
Analytically Speaking: Explorations in the Theory of Interpretation,
Analytic Aesthetics, and Evolution (Austin: University of Texas
Press); Landy, J. (2012) How to Do Things with Fictions (Oxford:
OUP).
10. Gorman, D. (1999) The Use and Abuse of Speech-Act Theory for
Criticism, Poetics Today, 20, 93119; Cascardi, A. (2014) The
Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Philosophy (Cambridge:
CUP); Currie, G. (2010) Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy
of Stories (Oxford: OUP); Olsen, S.H. & Pettersson, A. (eds) Why
Literary Studies? Raisons dtre of a Discipline (Oslo: Novus Press);
Eagleton, T. (2012) The Event of Literature (Yale: Yale University
Press).
11. Schmidt, J. (2008) Towards a Philosophy of Interdisciplinarity,
Poiesis Prax, 5, 5369; Hoffmann, M., Schmidt, J. & Neressian,
INTRODUCTION 13
N. (2013) Philosophy of and as Interdisciplinarity, Synthese, 190,

185764; Mansilla, V. & Duraisingh, E. (2007) Targeted
Assessment of Students Interdisciplinary Work: An Empirically
Grounded Framework Proposed, The Journal of Higher Education,
78:2, 21537; Frodeman, R. (2013) Sustainable Knowledge: A
Theory of Interdisciplinarity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
For a contrast between interdisciplinarity in British and US univer-
sities, see Aldrich, Interdisciplinarity, p.23.
12. Knight, D., Lattuca, L., Kimball, W. & Reason, R. (2013)

Understanding Interdisciplinarity: Curricular and Organizational
Features of Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Programs, Innovative
Higher Education, 38:2, 144.
13. Brewer, G. (1999) The Challenges of Interdisciplinarity, Policy
Sciences, 32, 328. For further examples of these kinds of definitions
of, and distinctions between, multi- and interdisciplinarity, see
Krimsky, S. (2000) Perspectives from Social Scientists and
Humanists: Transdisciplinarity for Problems and Interstices of
Disciplines in M. Somerville and D. Rapport (eds)
Transdisciplinarity: Recreating Integrated Knowledge (Oxford:
EOLSS); Moran, J. (2002) Interdisciplinarity (New York:
Routledge); Mansilla and Duraising, Targeted Assessment;
Aldrich, Interdisciplinarity.
14. Knight etal., Understanding, 144.
15. Schmidt, Knowledge Politics, 314.
16. Schmidt, Towards a Philosophy, 55.
17. Moran, Interdisciplinarity, p.13.
18. Frodeman, Sustainable Knowledge, p.38.
19. Moran, Interdisciplinarity, p.14.
20. Cited in Becher and Trowler, Academic Tribes, p.205.
21. Gasper, Interdisciplinarity, 57.
22. Meyer, J. & Land, R. (2003) Threshold Concepts and Troublesome
Knowledge, Enhancing Teaching-Learning Environments in
Undergraduate Courses, 4, 1.
23. All examples from Meyer & Land, Threshold Concepts except per-
sonhood which is taken from Land, R., Meyer, J. & Baillie, C. (eds)
(2010) Threshold Concepts and Transformational Learning
(Rotterdam: Sense Publishers), p. ix. There is now a plethora of litera-
ture on threshold concepts and Meyer and Land have been prolific in
providing edited collections on the matter: see the collection just cited
as well as Meyer, J. & Land, R. (eds) (2006) Overcoming Barriers

to Student Understanding (New York: Routledge, 2006); Land,
R., Meyer, J. & Smith, J. (eds) (2008) Threshold Concepts Within
the Disciplines (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers) for starters.
24. See Booth, J. (2006) On the mastery of philosophical concepts in
Meyer & Land, Overcoming Barriers and Rowbottom, D. (2007)
Demystifying Threshold Concepts, Journal of Philosophy of
Education, 41:2, 26370 on whether and how a students grasp on
a threshold concept can be identified.
25. Ll & Norgaard, Practicing Interdisciplinarity.
26. Sinnott, P.Jr. (2013) Morality, Historical Narrative, and Problems
in New Formalism, Philosophy and Literature, 37:1, 259, emphasis
added.
PART 1
Interdisciplinary Interaction in
Theory
CHAPTER 2
Criticism, Philosophy andtheDifferend
CatherineBelsey
The Differend
We want help. My colleague in the office next door completely disagrees
with my reading of Shakespeares Hamlet. We are both critics, working in
an English department, and yet we cannot seem to see eye-to-eye on what
to make of this play. And we are not the first to disagree about it: no one
can ever quite settle for anyone elses reading of Hamlet. What is to be
done? Possibly, our dispute is not just about the work itself; instead, we are
approaching it from different directions, relying on incompatible general
principles, silently invoking distinct understandings of the reading process
and its motives. Perhaps if we could sort out these basic issues, we might
find shared ground or, at worst, see why we have to agree to disagree.
What we need is surely some illumination from analytic philosophy, with
its clear thinking and lucid grasp of ideas, a philosopher of literature to
clarify our founding assumptions, examine our presuppositions and disen-
tangle our methods, aims and concepts of evidence.
Or do we? My researches into the philosophy of literature, by no means
exhaustive, it is true, have left me confronting what looks remarkably like
a differend between criticism and philosophy. I should say at once that,
C. Belsey (*)
Cambridge, England
e-mail: c.belsey@btinternet.com

18 C. BELSEY
as a newcomer to the field, I may have missed distinctions and develop-

ments in the philosophy of literature; my assessment may be nave and
impressionistic. But, on a preliminary view, the gap between my reading
and my colleagues of a single work of fiction shrinks into insignificance by
comparison with the gulf that exists between critics and philosophers of
literature. Can the gulf be bridged?
Jean-Franois Lyotard defines the differend [diffrend] as a case of
conflict that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment
applicable to both arguments.1 If, as seems possible, some philosophers
in the Anglo-American tradition have now turned away from my argu-
ment, convinced by the name and the transliterated French term that
the proposition can have nothing to say to them, their unwillingness
to engage perfectly demonstrates the effect of a differend between two
ways of thinking about language, the world and our relation to it. But
let me appeal to them to follow the case a little further. Lyotards next
sentence insists that One sides legitimacy does not imply the others
lack of legitimacy.2 The problem is not that if people start from different
premises, one side must necessarily be wrong. Mistakes are, of course,
possible, but the differend goes deeper than mere errors of thinking.
The heterogeneity of the (two or more) positions means that there is no
single rule of judgement available to settle their differences. I encounter
the differend when I cannot find a way in, when the case is watertight
in its own terms, but I do not share those terms. That means I cannot
hope to refute the position by finding a flaw in the argument, offering
a counter-example or putting forward an objection. There is no shared
rule of judgement because the terms themselves are not common to
both positions.
Lyotards book is not a plea for a woolly relativism. On the contrary,
the question The Differend addresses is how it is possible, given that in
certain cases distinct ways of understanding the world are legitimate but
incommensurable with one another, to save the honor of thinking or, in
other words, to philosophise.3 This is not the place to follow him there
(the argument involves the Holocaust and the State of Israel). Instead,
my point in invoking the differend here is to assess how far it casts light
not merely on distinct readings of Hamlet but on the relations between
criticism and the philosophy of literature. My question is whether there
can be a convergence between critics and analytic philosophers, as well as
whether, by going back to basics, an imagined philosopher of literature
can help to clarify disputes within criticism. My fear is that the objectives
CRITICISM, PHILOSOPHY ANDTHEDIFFEREND 19
each discipline tends to take for granted are sufficiently heterogeneous to

render them incommensurable.
Literature
The first case in point must be the term literature itself. This seems to
be foundational for philosophers of literature; critics increasingly regard
it with distrust. As a graduate student, I diligently pursued definitions
of the word: literature distinguished that form of writing that defamil-
iarised the everyday, making the ordinary perceptible in new ways; lit-
erature valued style over content; it left meanings implicit; it was more
metaphoric than ordinary exchange. One by one, these efforts to isolate
literature on the basis of textual features collapsed under the weight
of obvious objections. The first criterion, defamiliarisation, worked
well for Imagist poetry but left out Victorian novels, which achieved
the impression of verisimilitude precisely by invoking the everyday in
its familiar form. As for the predominance of style over content, there
was more of that in political spin than in the works on the syllabus.
The best gossip relied on innuendo and left meanings implicit; ordi-
nary speech turned out to be densely metaphoric. Since then, there have
been other attempts to vindicate the term but most commentators have
conceded that literature cannot be defined by its own characteristics. In
consequence, the philosophy of literature is left with a range of broadly
circular propositions: literature is writing worthy to be called literature;
literature is writing the author puts forward as literature; literature is
what the institution of literature designates literature; literature is what-
ever people treat as literature.
The most dispiriting of these are the last two. The option of referring
the definition of the literary to current consensus or to the institution that
defines the literary leaves everything exactly where it was beforeand, in
its deference to the professoriate, or examination boards, or the Sunday
reviewers, or prize juries, or publishers marketing categories, does away
with any project for criticism as a developing and changing intellectual dis-
cipline. Even F.R. Leavis, who believed intensely in literature, wanted to
alter what the institution regarded as literature, as well as the conventional
practice of reading.
Acknowledging the problem of handing over the definition of literature
to such sources, Peter Lamarque offers instead a Wittgensteinian account
of the institution as analogous to a game of chess. Certain rules about
20 C. BELSEY
how to create and appreciate literature are shared by writers and read-
ers, so that To participate [in the institution] it is enough to know and
conform to the conventions.4 This strikes me as equally stifling, how-
ever, since it allows no space for dissent. The history of writing, especially
from the early twentieth century to the present, has been one of constant
challenge to the existing conventions about how to write and read, while
actual readers have struggled to keep up. Criticism advances, meanwhile,
by questioning the established rules of interpretation. Mansfield Park has
not altered much: readings of Mansfield Park have changed radically. The
philosophy derived from pragmatics seems to observe and describe a more
consensual, more static and more authoritarian world than the one that
criticism inhabits.
In all the attempts to base a definition on either the works or their
context, one common theme becomes evident: literature is not so much
a classification as a value judgement; literature is the good stuff. As a
branch of the philosophy of art, the philosophy of literature seems to
take for granted the imperative either to judge or to adopt the prevailing
judgement. But, a critic might ask, to judge by what criteria? Big themes,
high seriousness, fine style, the quality of felt life (whatever that is)?
Criteria come and go, and with them the works thought to meet them.
Miltons value goes up and down, Donnes generally goes up, Spensers
down. It is hard to find stable distinctions between timeless classics and
verbal artefacts that do not reach that high standard. Shakespeare was
once literatures repudiated shadow, popular culture, despised by such
literary purists as Ben Jonson but commercially successful. His stock
went up slightly in the Enlightenment: with the exception of Voltaire,
the period was prepared to find merit in his plays, while believing that
they required radical improvement by extensive rewriting. Now, restored
to his own words as far as they can be established, Shakespeare tops the
league table, while Jonson, far from timeless, is barely readable by anyone
but a specialist (although the plays can be made to work well on stage).
The judgements and the criteria implied by literature do not stay put,
and in order to cling to the category as it now stands, we should have
to say that a great many of our predecessors were wrong, while we are
noteven in the unlikely event that we all now agreed on the standards
and the short lists.
While philosophers of literature continue to take the term for granted,
criticism is therefore uneasy about literature. It seems to belong to an
older, cosier, monocultural world, where academics in book-lined studies

were entitled to pontificate on what merited their attention. There are
still valiant rear-guard attempts to rescue the distinctiveness of the literary.
Harold Bloom was greeted rapturously outside the academy but less so
inside it when he defended The Western Canon in 1994. Trying in 2012 to
find a bridge between aesthetics and criticism, Terry Eagleton conceded
the historical relativity of literature as a term of value, but argued that
we can still talk about what most people regard as literature now. His
book recognises that we cannot require all instances of literature to pos-
sess all the characteristics people ascribe to the category but he appeals
to Wittgensteins family resemblances to argue that any specific case
includes some of those on the list. The familiar value judgements remain
in place: literature in his account is another mode of cognition, implying
a moral outlook; it stands with art, if in incidental comments, as reward-
ing, precious, and possessed of value and significance, by contrast with
what he identifies as threadbare and meretricious.5
Debates about what constitutes literature have very rarely illuminated
the works themselves. Perhaps critics are just not good at that sort of
thing are not, in other words, philosophers. Two generations ago, lit-
erature in its Leavisite incarnation proved deeply divisive. Followers of
Leavis defended their narrow literary canon with a quasi-religious fervour
as evidence of their personal discrimination and maturity. Because the sen-
sitivity of the critic was on the line, disputes over such contested instances
as Dickens or Hardy could destroy friendships and split departments. I
personally do not use the word literature these days, since it seems to have
outlived any usefulness I can discern.
I should at this point make clear that, while I speak as a critic and a
member of an English department, I cannot speak for people in English
departments in general. We are as disunited in our concerns and convic-
tions as any discipline, perhaps more so, to the point where our debates in
the past generation have made headlines in some quarters. In that context,
many of my colleagues would bridle at any suggestion that what I say
represents their views. But if literature lingers in the titles of departments
and examinations, if many critics still speak of it out of habit, only those
who continue to believe it is their job to inculcate good taste make delib-
erate use of the word. The rest of us recognise with some dismay that, if
it divides departments, literature also restricts our activities by dividing
the cultural field in advance between what is held to be worth reading and
22 C. BELSEY
what is not, separating poetry from verse or literary novels from genre
fiction.
Meanwhile, the attention of most critics has wandered into what are for
us more interesting fields. One feature of fiction (not a defining one!) is
its propensity to find a way of naming what other kinds of writing do not,
including the hopes and fears, the wishes and anxieties, of a generation
or a society. If in this light I want to analyse the story of Bluebeard, the
poems of Christina Rossetti or the plays of Martin McDonagh as cultural
documents, consideration of whether these works qualify as literature is
at best irrelevant and at worst an obstacle to discussion. Alternatively,
an interest in the strategies of storytelling might lead me to Charlotte
M. Yonge as well as Charlotte Bront, or to M. R. James as readily as
Henry James.
What follows from this? Released from the burden of constant measure-
ment and appraisal, critics are free to considervariouslyperformances,
concrete poems, parodies, the sensation novel, crime fiction, epic poetry,
fairy tales, tragedy, the sonnet tradition and the Gothic; we are entitled
to trace differing perceptions of love and death, revenge and friendship at
distinct historical moments. If we opted to compare the tale of Bluebeard
and, say, Jane Eyre, it would not be in order to assess their relative merits.
Philosophers of art and literature, on the other hand, appear at their least
philosophical when they contemplate the possibility of relinquishing eval-
uation. According to one account, It is simply unintelligible to eschew
value judgements and suppose that just any work is equal to any other.6 It
should be obvious that critics who eschew value judgements abandon the
phrase equal to with them. If value is not an issue, equality of value is not
an issue either. But it seems that philosophers find unintelligible a pro-
cedure taken from outside the familiar world of aesthetics, which centres
on judgement. Here is Roger Scruton on the issue: the slack-minded, he
argues, embrace the surrender of value judgements because:
It seems to emancipate people from the burden of culture, telling them

that all those venerable masterpieces can be ignored with impunity, that TV
soaps are as good as Shakespeare and Radiohead the equal of Brahms, since
nothing is better than anything and all claims to aesthetic value are void.7
What anxiety is indicated by those quotation marks round as good as?

Could it be an unacknowledged recognition, deep down, that the phrase
does not make any sense in the context? While I have myself pleaded
for serious analysis of the pleasure people derive from stories, plays and
poems,8 I might as well admit that I have no very clear idea of what is
meant by aesthetic value (all the definitions seem to be circular). But
no critic I know has given up on Titian, Shakespeare or Brahms. On the
other hand, the authoritarianism implied by venerable masterpieces, not
to mention the grim consequences awaiting those who mistakenly suppose
they can ignore them with impunity, might not do justice to our main
motive for enjoying them or, indeed, for reflecting on their work.
What in the reactions of these philosophers looks to us like a failure
(or refusal?) to see the point indicates that something important must be
at stake. Would I be right in supposing that the philosophy of literature
could not survive without the idea of literature as a distinguishable cat-
egory? If so, we have identified a differend between the disciplines. My
claim is not that criticism is or ought to be value-free. That would be to
stay within the same framework, debating the founding principles of the
philosophy of literature. On the contrary, we probably all make value
judgements all the time. I certainly prefer Shakespeare to soap opera. But
I do not make that fact the object of or even a major issue in the work I
do as a critic. Any writing might be worth critical attention, depending
on the project.
In this respect, then, the aims of criticism and philosophy seem irrec-
oncilable. Philosophers of literature concern themselves with literature.
Critics did once, when the job of criticism was to appraise, appreciate and
evaluate. That task is now largely confined to reviewers, who give con-
sumer advice: this novel is worth buying, that show is worth paying for.
Academic critics have gradually lost interest in measuring the value of the
material we want to discuss and now that possible common ground with
philosophy is gone. Philosophers of literature do what they do and it is
(no doubt) legitimate; critics do what they do and it is equally legitimate.
But it is difficult to see how philosophers wedded to literature could help
critics indifferent to it clarify their project.
Definitions
Philosophers define. That is one of the many things they are good at; defi-
nitions guarantee their clear thinking and capacity to disentangle common
confusions. Critics, on the other hand, or some of us, at least, regard defi-
nitions with suspicion. It is not just that we are so wrapped up in particular
works that we resist generalisations. Nor is it only that in the material we
24 C. BELSEY
work on things are rarely cut and dried. That is true, but not the whole
truth. Definitions circumscribe; they impose boundaries; they include by
excluding. Definitions of literature, varied as they are, while they embrace
non-fictional writing where they find aesthetic merit, exclude whatever is
non-literary, commonly exemplified by comic books, jokes or formula fic-
tion. If we bracket the questions whether graphic novels can be works of
art, or whether jokes in William Congreves plays or Jane Austens novels
are best thought about in isolation from jokes in popular circulation at the
time, the problem for us is that we want to be able to hesitate; we prefer to
be entitled to put an exploratory toe across boundaries, taking an interest
in what definitions set aside.
The definition of literature preserves the rarity of literature. In a paral-
lel instance, on the title page of Notes towards the Definition of Culture,
T.S. Eliot takes an unusual step when he footnotes his own title, quot-
ing the Oxford English Dictionary. The note, printed on the title page
itself, reads, DEFINITION: 1. The setting of bounds; limitation (rare)
1483. Eliots purpose was to rescue society from the calamitous effects of
the 1944 Education Act, which stood to dilute the rarity of an inherited
culture by conferring it on the children of the poor, who could not be
trusted with its transmission. He therefore opted for a rare, inherited defi-
nition of definition in a bid to keep culture rareby definition. And yet
the meaning he cites is not entirely obsolete after all. What clarifies, brings
out the distinctiveness of a term, makes it stand forth sharp and clear,
also limits its range, restricts its coverage, relegates and excludes. When it
came to listing examples of culture as that which makes life worth living,
however, Eliot included Derby Day and Wensleydale cheese alongside
Victorian churches and the music of Elgar.9 A critic to his fingertips, he
could not quite settle for an exclusive definition of culture. In the event,
he displaced to the first two words of his title an anxiety about the defini-
tiveness he wanted to claim for his view: these were no more, after all, than
Notes towards the restriction of culture to the elite.
In the absence of a collective but non-judgemental noun for the works
critics study, I fall back on fiction. It is far from perfect but it has some
advantages. For one, the term is not prescriptive. Fiction offers a space
where anything can happen, where the laws of nature and the principles
of logic can be overturned for the duration. When there are rules of com-
position, they are also made to be broken; conventions of writing and
reading establish themselves, only to be challenged in due course. Above
all, a critic can apply the term without sharply defined limits, without fenc-
ing off a clearly demarcated area. This does not imply that fiction has no
bounds at all, or that the word has no meaning, or that it means whatever
I say it means. Instead, the point is more modest: an element of fiction
may enter into what is generally seen as fictions defining alternative, the
representation of fact or actuality.
From a critical perspective, the very inadequacy of fiction throws into
relief, as literature does not, the existence of any number of borderline
cases where the philosophical eagerness to classify can obscure fine dis-
tinctions. For example, philosophers of literature commonly rely on the
intention to pretend, or to induce an audience to recognise pretence, as
a defining characteristic of fiction.10 In the view of Peter Lamarque and
Stein Haugom Olsen, the category of fiction would not include narratives
that were perceived as historical reports or divine revelations of distant
worlds.11 So if Homer (or Homer) and his audience believed that The
Iliad was not make-believe but history in verse, or history idealised and
elaborated, any assumption that fiction is a perennial, distinguishable and
self-contained category comes into question. Most cultures have stories; it
is not so clear that they all isolate a class of stories they take to be entirely
made up.
There can be no doubt that The Iliad is amenable to critical analysis,
even if it has also provided rich source material for the conjectural social
history of a pre-literate Greece. Criticism approaches such works with rel-
ish. In another instance, to most of its earliest readers, Paradise Lost was
not self-evidently either fiction or non-fiction: Eves conversations with
Satan, or Adams with Raphael, were inventions but not the theology that
structures the epic, their disobedience as the cause of death and exile from
Eden. Shakespeares history plays are part chronicle. Fiction as the philos-
ophy of literature identifies it, fiction as a pure, circumscribed ideal, seems
to confine itself largely to a late Western development, the novel, and its
progeny, the short story.
But this goes to the heart of the differend between the two disciplines.
Philosophers of literature treat borderline cases as obstacles to the project
of identifying the pure, ideal type of fiction itself. Lamarque and Olsen,
for example, see such quasi-fictional genres as the Icelandic sagas and
medieval saints lives as no more than historical way stations, incapable of
shedding light on the paradigm. Myths, meanwhile, are not properly fic-
tion either, unless they are retold with the fictive intent.12 Critics, on the
26 C. BELSEY
other hand, opt to work in the repudiated liminal spaces. Even within the
limited class philosophers acknowledge as fiction, borderlines are crossed
in practice. The London that Dickens portrays is and is not identical to
the city where he worked. I fear that sentence would not pass muster with
philosophers of literature but I shall let it stand as a critical proposition,
even so. Dickenss London is and is not fictional. In other words, there
are differences, as well as resemblances, between London in the 1850s
and London in Little Dorrit. This is not accidental. A particular mode of
writing draws the verisimilitude that characterises it from reference to an
actuality it also transmutes by incorporating it into the novel. The critical
assumption that borderline instances are integral to the category of fiction,
and the corresponding suspicion of definitions, mark the projects of criti-
cism and philosophy as incommensurable.
If elements of non-fiction, or supposed non-fiction, exist in fiction, the
converse also becomes a possibility. Among the materials critics might
analyse, the classic essay ruminates in a space somewhere between life and
letters, biography includes a necessary element of conjecture, and in his-
tory, while certain facts are documented, inventive insight links them in
an explanatory narrative. What is probable or possible necessarily enters
into the presentation of what is known. Memoirs and diaries may be per-
formances, displaying an improved (or perhaps deprecated) self to the
reader, even if the supposed reader is no more than the same self in later
years. A letter might well take into account what its addressee wants to
hear. The press, meanwhile, does not only report events; it commonly
selects, juxtaposes and evaluates them. I can read a newspaper to find out
what happened; I can also read a newspaper to see how its presentation of
what happened incites certain reactions on the part of the reader: praise or
blame, approval or indignation.
Critics live with questions that cannot be resolved. Is lyric poetry fic-
tion or non-fiction? In other words, is the I who features in the work
the same as the I who writes it? We accept a distinction in prose. Alan
Bennett notably differentiates the writer from the Alan Bennett who does
the living in the explicitly part-fictional Lady in the Van. His ironic muse
Miss Shepherd was based on an actual woman. But were Shakespeares
Dark Lady or Marvells Coy Mistress? And whether they were real or ficti-
tious, should we assume that the poems about them give access to actual
states of mind? In a period when bright young men circulated witty love
poems among themselves, surely it is nave to assume such performances
offer a transcription of their feelings? And in a later epoch given over to
much more expressive conventions, does Dorothy Wordsworths record

that her brother went for a walk and saw daffodils place his poem outside
the realm of fiction? Or does it come back in because he imagined an army
of them dancing?
Definitions raise the stakes: they confront us with a choice of all or
nothing. Where they hold that to qualify as fiction, a work must be
intended and read as fiction, philosophers of literature are impelled to
deny the element of fiction in predominantly non-fictional genres, or
to insist that supposed non-fictional works require different practices of
reading.13 Since there has been some confusion on this head, I should
perhaps make clear that am not suggesting that history is all pretence,
or even partially make-believe, that the press always ignores the truth,
or still less that all writing is fiction. Nor am I defending creative chaos
where anything goes, or the logic of rough approximation in place of
rigour. Instead, criticism supplants opposition with difference. In place
of a great and decisive divide between fiction and non-fiction, critics
acknowledge a range of specifiable distinctions. I can call the material
of criticism fiction as long as I do not regard fiction as a separable, pure,
self-contained category. For critics, a reluctance to define is an advan-
tage; it opens new genres to critical attention; it allows us to work in the
margins between fiction and non-fiction, without ignoring the differ-
ences between them.
But could it not be objected that without allowing the term fiction its
meaning, I could not discuss the border country between fiction and non-
fiction? Yes, indeed. But my problem with definitions is not that words
have meanings, even if denotations are less stable than a synchronic philos-
ophy longs to believe. It is, in sum, the exclusion or relegation of whatever
fails to meet an ideal standard of purity. Criticism cannot afford to confine
itself to the ideality of pure fiction; instead, it confronts instances of actual
writing that may be to varying degrees fictional, whether by design or in
execution.
Opacity
So far, the projects of criticism and the philosophy of literature appear
incommensurable. Philosophers take for granted that literature is a separa-
ble and valued category while many critics are content to leave evaluation
behind; philosophers define and seek generalities where critics look for
fine gradations of difference. In Lyotards terms, the two positions, each
28 C. BELSEY
legitimate in its own terms, represent a case of the differend. Between the
two there is silence or, worse, caricature.
And yet I glimpse the beginnings of a possibility of shared ground in
Lamarques proposal that what he calls literary fictions are opaque. His
case is first that there is nothing behind such writing, no world separable
from its representation in the story:
In the literary fictional case, the events and characters that make up the
content are constituted by their modes of presentation in the narrative. Their
identity is determined by the narrative itself such that they are not merely
contingently but essentially connected to the descriptions that character-
ise them. Rather than supposing that narrative descriptions are a window
through which an independently existing (fictional) world is observed, with
the implication that the very same world might be presented (and thus
observed) in other ways, from different perspectives, we must accept that
there is no such transparent glass only an opaque glass, painted, as it were,
with figures seen not through it but in it.14
There are no events to which such writing gives access, no characters and
no emotions on the other side of the glass. In literary fiction, in other
words, the writing itself makes sense without reference to something out-
side it, whether real or invented.
The difference between fiction in general and literary fiction depends,
Lamarque argues, on whether it is possible to convey the same content
in different vocabulary, to replace the words of the narrative with an
alternative version that would still be the same story. On a broad read-
ingfor the outline of the plot, saytwo distinct records can relay the
same events, he maintains, but, in cases where readers judge that the fine
writing demands an equally fine-grained response, no substitutes will do.
What distinguishes literary fiction from mere narrative is the reading con-
ventions indicated by the writer as appropriately brought to bear on each
of them. Lamarques proposal is thus exceptionally modest. He insists
that we can still choose to read transparently for the facts of the narrative;
he holds that the constitution of the story by the presentation itself is
confined to literary works. And he retains a vocabulary that in due course
leaves the narrative descriptions behind in favour of the thoughts and
imaginings they prompt. In this respect, criticism and philosophy remain
heterogeneous practices.
But opacity is a start. Most critics would subscribe to a much stronger

form of this view. Fiction is primarily non-referential. It does not report
or record something that has its existence elsewhere; instead, it invents
and constructs. If it encourages us to respond in particular ways, it does
so by the words that compose it and not by transcribing some feeling or
occurrence that already exists in some other form. What seems so vivid to
the readercharacters, events, settingsis generated by the words of the
text, their meanings, denotative and connotative, in the sequence given
in the work. The world created in this way has no independent existence
either in actuality or in the head of the writer or reader. This applies to
Dickenss London and Jane Austens Bath as firmly as it does to Thomas
Mores Utopia or Jonathan Swifts Lilliput. London and Bath bring with
them associations from other sources but are also subject to modification
or amplification by the narrative, while Utopia and Lilliput are brought
into being entirely by the text itself.
The implication for us is that our material is the text, not imagination,
not pictures in our minds, not thoughts or other psychological impon-
derables, but the arrangement of words that makes up the work. This
holds for any supposed prior concept on the part of the writer. We have
our biographers but even the most dedicated of life-writers would not, I
think, allow a conjectural intention to determine the one and only one
admissible meaning of the work. Even in the relatively rare cases where
an author declares a design or a purpose, this necessarily takes the form of
other wordsand perhaps a sentence or two at that. Other words are not
identical to the words of the text, least of all to the patterned formality of
a sonnet, say, or to several hundred pages of narrative, where any intention
to convey an idea is already divided from itself by the simultaneous inten-
tion of conforming to (or defying) the generic conventions of the sonnet
or the novel. Conversely, a non-verbal intention (what would that be in
such a context?) could not count on finding its exact and perfect match in
words. Even if a prior concept existed as a sequence of images, say, its rep-
resentation in words would turn it into something else. Meanings are not
reducible to intention; they are not always singular; they are not always
subject to conscious control; they are public and so not at the disposal of
the writer, any more than the reader.
Nor is our material any thoughts or imaginings the work prompts in
the reader. Even if invisible mental entities were not beyond access, mean-
30 C. BELSEY
ings are not detachable in the way thoughts or imaginings might seem to
be. There are no silent, intuited meanings independent of their signifiers;
meanings do not pose before the interrogating eye and when we try to
contemplate them, we find we are looking at the signifiers, while any sup-
posed ideality behind or beyond the materiality of that signifying practice
is bound to elude our grasp.15
Meanings not only allow for opacity, they presuppose it, because they
reside in the words of the text. Readers mayand willthink and imagine
as they choose, but critics are bound by the text and the range of possible
meanings inscribed there. We are well advised to be aware of historical
and cultural context, as well as the constraints this imposes on form; we
should be alert to intertextual allusions in so far as they contribute to
meaning. But this is only to say that, in the last analysis, our understand-
ing of the work is an understanding of the properties of the work, which
are not inaccessible mental states but are there for all to see, consider and
debate.16
To be as clear as I can, since my impression has been that disputes on
these matters are full of straw targets, none of this implies that works of
fiction do not prompt reflection. Nor, since this account of what critics
believe seems to be a perpetual hazard, does it indicate that a text can
mean anything anyone likes. On the contrary. At the same time, critics
would soon be out of a job if their material was subject to oneand only
oneinterpretation guaranteed by either the writer or the reader, actual
or implied. Our responsibility is to assess what readings a text can legiti-
mately be made to bear and to recognise that our hypotheses will be sub-
ject in turn to critical assessment.
Representation
Lamarques own discussion does not go anything like this far. But he
argues compellingly that, at least in literary fiction, it is the represen-
tation, not something other, or coming from elsewhere, that generates
the readers understanding. Form is not separable from content; there is
no detachable story or theme independent of those words in their given
order, tense, mood, rhythm, connotations, allusiveness, those sentences,
colloquial or formal, structured in that way, paratactic or interwoven as
they may be.
Representation, in short, is what we interpret. I am fortified in my con-
viction that philosophers of literature might be ready to inch towards the
critical view of opacity by the argument Derek Matravers puts forward in

Fiction and Narrative. Matravers shares the view that the requirement for
understanding a representation is familiarity with the language in which
it is formulated. Imagination is not involved: I simply hear the sentence,
and, understanding English, acquire a new belief. That is to say, as I
see it, that the new belief comes from following the words and not from
some separate location or distinct process in the mind of the speaker or
the hearer. And Matravers expands the field of analysis in an important
direction by arguing cogently that this is true of all narrative: The tradi-
tional distinction, between representations that are fiction and representa-
tions that are non-fiction, is entirely unhelpful.17 Narrative occurs in the
[possible] absence of the referent; it is able to provide information about
events in other places or at other times; whether or not the record presents
itself as fictional, the actual world is not [need not be] present in either
case. If it were, Matravers points out, what takes place would generally be
confrontation, not representation.18
How does this relate to the puzzle that, even when we know the story
is fabricated, it can absorb the reader or generate intense feelingsof pity
and fear, delight or dismay? Words can bring about emotions whether what
they depict is presented as factual or fictitious: signifiers do not by them-
selves distinguish between reality and illusion. In one case, we are moved
by the story of Edith Cavell, in another by Anna Karenina. Indeed, to
the degree that words signify in the absence of the referent, they err on
the side of illusion. Words, we commonly say, stand in for things: when we
cannot produce the thing, we name it, summon it into the conversation
as if it were present. That as if is crucial, of course: no one is fooled into
supposing that the thing is made present. In that respect, narrative repli-
cates all verbal activity: like any instance of language in practice, narrative
permits a response in the absence of the entities discussed. A lively depic-
tion of a huge fire-breathing reptile invites a reaction of fear and revulsion.
If I describe dragons, I do not (cannot) bring them into the room, but
that does not prevent the possibility of generating a frisson, even while
it permits the option of debating their role in The Faerie Queene. A vivid
description of the effects of the rack or the ducking stool might equally
invite distress as an element in a discussion of repression by force.
What we respond to in fiction, if we do, is the meanings of the words.
The topless towers of Ilium are glorious, even if current reconstructions
of Bronze Age Troy show a handful of two-storey buildings with flat roofs.
My self am hell/And in the lowest deep a lower deep/Still threatening
32 C. BELSEY
to devour me opens wide.19 Satans cry of unfathomable despair is no

less moving when we do not believe in hell or Satan. The words offer to
excite emotion and we can find ourselves caught up in the supposition of
presence they construct. This way of regarding language as a cause, rather
than an effect or an instrument of something else, offers a starting point
for resolving that old conundrum why tragedy gives pleasure.
If words can do so much work in and outside fiction, critics have a
case for treating all representation as opaque, opting to direct attention
to the signifier rather than the referent. Just to forestall misunderstanding
one more time, that is not to say there is no referential role for language,
or nothing outside discourse, or no real world. But the habit of attend-
ing to languageto the opacity of language, looking at what Lamarque
calls the paint on the glass, instead of through itequips good citizens
to bring their judgement to bear on the blandishments of rhetoric, party
maxims, advertising copy and the popular press, not to mention fiction
itself, which has played its own part in the sad history of hierarchy, rac-
ism and misogyny. Instead of restricting ourselves to the question, Is this
account of the world accurate?, however, we also reflect on how it sets
out to work on us.
An Example
To confine myself to a single, very small and perhaps trivial instance, how
would a critic approach an anti-immigration slogan we hear a good deal
in the UK, and may expect to hear again as climate change deepens the
migration crisis: This country is full up? The proposition might stand,
I suppose, as a miniature fiction in itself but it would surely be beneath
the gaze of philosophers of literature. If we wanted to assess the truth of
this claim, we might measure the uninhabited land that remains in the
UK. Such spaces may not be lived in but most of them are put to use:
for growing food, attracting tourists, recreation, protecting wildlife, or
just preventing urban sprawl. In the sense that there may not be a great
deal of genuine waste ground, the country is indeed full. On the other
hand, since land can be appropriated for new purposes if these are press-
ing enough, that interpretation does not quite seem to capture what is
at stake in the anti-immigrant case. What is? Still referentially, the claim
resonates to the degree that it is taken figuratively: it is not so much about
land but overcrowding; our cities, our roads, our trains and our accident
and emergency departments are oversubscribed and the slogan derives its
plausibility from that common recognition. However, on this interpreta-

tion, it still invites a remedy: to reduce overcrowding, we should spend
more on our infrastructure.
That, however, is not the response the anti-immigration lobby seeks,
either. Regarded opaquely, on the other hand, the slogan works to distract
attention from the possibility of a solution. On this reading, no other
words would do quite the same work; it is not only literature that accepts
no substitutes. The silent comparison, clever in its appeal to the everyday,
is surely with a crowded bus that sails past would-be immigrants as they
wait at the stop: the experience is a harsh one but thats the way it is; you
endanger the existing passengers if you overload a bus that is already full
up.
But how far, reading for opacity might lead us to ask, does a country
resemble a bus? A bus is designed to accommodate a fixed number of
people safely. Is a country designed for a fixed number of citizens? Is it
designed at all? And if you cannot, as a migrant, board this country, will
another be along in ten minutes? In detail, then, the proposed analogy
does not hold. And yet the slogan is widely repeated. Why? Because it sets
out to deflect such detailed analysis in favour of bluff common sense. And
this is where the saying has its real purchase. The phrase, so obvious in
the utterance, takes the place of the referential issues, supplants them and
pushes them out of sight. Seen as opaque, the slogan proposes to close off
debate by unifying all people of plain good sense, who habitually travel
by down-to-earth public transport, in their patriotic commitment to the
safety of this country.
The appeal of this platitude may havesome would say is already hav-
ingsubstantial consequences. The most effective slogans set out to
divert attention from their referential content. If we agree that it is not
only literary fictions that can be read as opaque, we open up a way of
coming out of the book-lined study to intervene in the world. Attention
in education to representation, to those features of language that exceed
transparency, could only lead to sharper, more critical understanding of
how language acts materially on the world. Now that, surely, is common
ground with philosophy, which also calls into question the clichs people
are tempted to live by. I should like to think philosophers and critics could
agree on that.
Sharing a concern with representation, ready to acknowledge the opac-
ity of language wherever it is to be found, philosophers of literature might
even help us resolve our disputes about Hamlet.
34 C. BELSEY
Notes
1. Lyotard, J. (1988) The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G.V.
Den Abbeele (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. xi.
2. Lyotard, The Differend, p. xi.
3. Lyotard, The Differend, p. xii.
4. Lamarque, P. (2009) The Philosophy of Literature (Oxford:
Blackwell), p.62.
5. Eagleton, T. (2012) The Event of Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press), pp.39, 501.
6. Lamarque, P. & Olsen, S.H. (1994) Truth, Fiction, and Literature
(Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. viii.
7. Scruton, R. (2009) Beauty (Oxford: OUP), p.98.
8. Belsey, C. (2011) A Future for Criticism (Oxford: Blackwell),
pp.117.
9. Eliot, T.S. (1962 [1948]) Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
(London: Faber and Faber), pp.27, 31.
10. For examples, see Lamarque, The Philosophy of Literature,

pp.1846.
11. Lamarque & Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature, p.39.
12. Lamarque & Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature, pp. 38, 49.
Oscillation between fiction and the distinguishable category of lit-
erature allows some leeway here, however. In 2014, Lamarque
includes as great literary works the sagas and myths that Lamarque
and Olsen excluded from the category of fiction in 1994 (Lamarque,
P. (2014) The Opacity of Narrative (London: Rowman and
Littlefield), p. vii).
13. Lamarque & Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature, pp.41, 30410.
For a more nuanced account, see Lamarque, The Opacity of
Narrative, pp.1520.
14. Lamarque, The Opacity of Narrative, p.3. In what follows, I have
drawn mainly on pp.132, 14167.
15. My apologies to all Anglo-American philosophers for this verbal
lapse. I have moved heaven and earth to avoid technical terms but
in this context there is no collective noun but signifier that includes
the words, phrases, sentences, punctuation marks, spaces on the
page, names, numbers, allusions and figures of speech that act as
bearers of meaning.
16. This is not the place to discuss the complexities of reading in trans-
lation. Broadly, however, it is the translation we encounter in the
process, not the original. For examples of the inseparability of mat-
ter and manner, see Prince, G. (2014) Narratology and
Translation, Language and Literature, 23, 2331.
17. Matravers, D. (2014) Fiction and Narrative (Oxford: OUP),

pp.45, 47.
18. I welcome the proposition that narrative takes place in the absence
of the referent but my interpolations modify it very slightly here to
allow for such exceptions as simultaneous news reports on current
events.
19. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 5.1.90; John Milton,
Paradise Lost, 4.757.
CHAPTER 3
The Discipline ofLiterary Studies
SteinHaugomOlsen
Introduction
Modern academic disciplines, say David R. Shumway and Ellen
Messer-Davidow:
came into being only with the breakup of natural philosophy into indepen-
dent natural sciences at the end of the eighteenth century. Moral philoso-
phy broke up somewhat later into the social sciences. The humanities is a
twentieth century term of convenience for those disciplines excluded from
the natural and social sciences. While modern philosophy was defined by
what was removed from it in the creation of the sciences, the other modern
humanities emerged first in the form of classical philology, which produced
history, modern languages, and even art history as descendants.1
The sequence of formation of academic disciplines that Shumway and

Messer-Davidow list in this passage is not merely chronological. The nat-
ural sciences with their sophisticated theories, rigorous methodologies,
and testable results producing new knowledge about the world, knowl-
edge which often had direct social utility, came to provide the standard
for what an academic discipline should be. When moral philosophy broke
S.H. Olsen (*)

The Rectors Office, stfold University College, Halden, Norway
e-mail: Stein.Olsen.1970@balliol.org

38 S.H. OLSEN
up into social sciences, they had to strive to conform to a disciplinary ideal

that was defined largely by the natural sciences and so did the humani-
ties. Science, says Heyck in his The Transformation of Intellectual Life
in Victorian England, provided a model for the acquisition and cultural
functions of knowledge, and the rise of science spread this model into
many areas.2 And it was The silent and permeative genius of natural
science, more than any other factor, [that] converted many fields of intel-
lectual activity into professional disciplines.3
In the English language, the logical primacy of the natural sciences
in defining the institutional and conceptual space within which academic
disciplines are located is reflected in the usage of the term science itself.
Science is used exclusively about the natural sciences. The extension of
the term sciences never includes the social sciences, and the humani-
ties are not linguistically related to the sciences even in this attenuated
way.4 The term human sciences5 is now in limited use in certain academic
environments but is a direct translation (or as near as one can come) of
Geisteswissenschaften.
With the development in the nineteenth century of the new research
university with specialised and professionalised academic disciplines, based
on a general model provided by natural science, the main function of the
university changed from being the custodian and transmitter of bodies of
knowledge to being a producer of new knowledge. For the humanities,
this meant that they had to conform to a widely accepted set of criteria
and conditions which distinguish disciplines of knowledge from bodies
of knowledge.6 Very roughly, these criteria and conditions can be sum-
marised as follows. There has to be an area or a slice of reality which is
the object of study and this area has to be clearly defined. There has to
be a disciplinary matrix, that is, a set of concepts and conventions which
enables a description of the slice of reality which is the object of study,
and which licenses arguments and ways of inference as legitimate.7 There
has to be a theory which rationalises the disciplinary matrix. There has
to be a community of practitioners who agree on the disciplinary matrix
and apply it in their practice; and there has to be a social agreement that
the discipline is somehow worth having, that what it is doing is somehow
worth doing. This social agreement does not have to be formulated in
very specific terms but it does form the social basis without which the dis-
cipline would over time wither and die. If a humanities discipline should
fail to conform to these very general criteria, then its status as a discipline
of knowledge would be in jeopardy.
THE DISCIPLINE OFLITERARY STUDIES 39
The Study ofLiterature
It is not of course necessary for a field of intellectual activity or a field

of study to be an academic discipline of knowledge. Literature has been
studied and, indeed, been studied in educational contexts since the time of
Homer. Literature, says Curtius, forms a part of education:
Why and since when? Because the Greeks found their past, their essential
nature, and their world of deities ideally reflected in a poet. They had no
priestly books and no priestly caste. Homer, for them, was the tradition.
From the sixth century onwards he was a schoolbook. Since that time litera-
ture has been a school subject, and the continuity of European literature is
bound up with the schools. Education becomes the medium of the literary
tradition.8
In classical antiquity, the study of literature was an important element

in an educational programme aimed at preparing young men for active
citizenship, in ancient Greece, the paideia dating from the sophists in
the mid-fifth century bc, and, in ancient Rome, the study of humanitas.
In these educational programmes, literature was used with two different
but related purposes, to teach language and language use (grammar and
rhetoric), and to provide moral education. And the emphasis on a lit-
erary education as an important formative element in the development
of the good man continues in the studia humanitatis of the Renaissance
humanists. For when a good teacher undertakes to explicate any passage,
says Lorenzo Guidetti (disciple and friend of Cristoforo Landino, the
most famous (and most highly paid) teacher of rhetoric in the Florentine
Studio9), the object is to train his pupils to speak eloquently and to live
virtuously.10 However, this study of literature in schools and universities
all over Europe prior to the last half of the nineteenth century did not have
the character of an academic discipline. Literature was studied for various
purposes and employing various methods, as a part of a programme of
basic education, as a part of rhetoric, as a part of philology, in relation to
history or philosophy, and so on. To judge by one of the most popular
manuals for teachers, says Lionel Gossman,
The Method for Studying the Belles-Lettres of Charles Rollin, a moderately

progressive Rector of the University of Paris, first published in 1726 and
reprinted in innumerable editions and in German, Italian, Russian, and
countless English translations throughout the eighteenth century and into
40 S.H. OLSEN
the nineteenth (it was still being quoted unconsciously by Herder at the end
of the eighteenth century and by Henry N.Hudson, the so-called American
Carlyle, as late as the 1880s) the study of literature at any fairly mod-
ern institution in the eighteenth century was partly a grammatical exercise,
partly rhetorical (identifying tropes and beauties that the student might
wish to imitate either in Latin compositions or in compositions in his own
language), and partly an occasion for considering moral or metaphysical
questions, or questions of government, history, and geography.11
And outside the systems of education, literature was read, interpreted,

commented on, and, above all, enjoyed.
The study of literature inside and outside of educational institutions
operated with a wide concept of literature, a concept that embraced his-
tory, philosophy, works on rhetoric, and so on. As late as 1882, Matthew
Arnold could say, Literature is a large word; it may mean everything writ-
ten with letters or printed in a book. Euclids Elements and Newtons
Principia are thus literature. All knowledge that reaches us through books
is literature.12 The concept of literature was not only wide, but also unde-
fined. And there was no felt need for an agreed definition. Definitions
[of literature], said John Morley in 1887, in a lecture to the University
Extension Movement entitled On the Study of Literature, always appear
to me in these things to be in the nature of vanity. I feel that the attempt
to be compact in the definition of literature ends in something that is
rather meagre, partial, starved, and unsatisfactory.13 Nor did the study of
literature employ any particular method or any particular set of concepts
and set of rules for argument characteristic of that kind of study. The
method and concepts changed according to whether one used literature
as a grammatical exercise, [] rhetorical [exercise] or as an occasion for
considering moral or metaphysical questions, or questions of government,
history, and geography.
The Demands ofLiterary Studies

With the attempt to turn the study of literature into an academic discipline
of knowledge, all this changed. As an academic discipline of knowledge,
literary studies required a determinate object of study. In order to delimit
the object of study for the new academic discipline, a clear concept of
literature was needed. To ask for a definition of literature was no longer
in the nature of vanity but a pressing methodological concern. There
did not seem to be a particular problem in delimiting the field of study.

First of all, a number of the genres of texts which the wide and unde-
fined term of literature had covered came to constitute the substance of
other academic disciplines. And in this process the rules for evaluating
such texts and, consequently, the constraints imposed on those producing
these texts changed. As sociology, economics, psychology, political sci-
ence, anthropology, and education broke away from moral philosophy,
the work produced in these areas could no longer be assimilated under
the term literature. When the term literature was used about the work
produced in these areas it was always as a part of an expression (The litera-
ture on ) that signalled that these texts were not literature in the wide
and undefined sense. And in some subjects such as history, the rejection
of what one may call the literary mode of writing was part of the process
of defining the academic discipline.14 The only segment of literature in
the wide sense that was available for the new discipline of literary studies
to study was that which was designated by the term belles-lettres, that is,
drama, poetry, and epic.
Though identifying the slice of reality on which literary studies would
focus did not pose any particular problem, there was an immediate prob-
lem with this concept of literature as a technical concept delimiting an
area of study for a discipline of knowledge. The problem can be illus-
trated through the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy to
which Plato refers in The Republic (607b). Plato argues for the exclu-
sion of poetry from the ideal republic because, first, it does not lead the
reader towards the world of ideas (and consequently towards truth) but
away from it by presenting an imitation of an imitation, and, second,
because it feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she
lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled if mankind are ever
to increase in happiness and virtue.15 Plato assumes, and the assumption
has since been a basic feature of all theorising about poetry, that poetry
elicits a response from the non-rational part of human nature and that this
response is central in the experience of poetry. To determine the nature
of and conceptualise this response have been one of the central problems
of poetics. However, no matter how this response is conceived, it is in its
nature non-disciplinary. And, tutored or not, the response is at its core
subjective. That means that epistemic access to the objects that make up
the field of study, literary works, has at its core a non-disciplinary and
subjective element.
42 S.H. OLSEN
In the eighteenth century this response was conceptualised by help of

the notion of taste, taste being a mental faculty, an internal sense that one
would use or exercise to appreciate a work of literature. After having thus
far explained, says Addison,
what is generally meant by a fine Taste in Writing, and shewn the Propriety
of the Metaphor which is used on this Occasion, I think I may define it to be
that Faculty of the Soul, which discerns the Beauties of an Author with Pleasure,
and the Imperfections with Dislike.16
Despite all the efforts made to arrive at a standard of taste, taste was,
at the core, based on a subjective response to the work of literature and
the exercise of taste could not be codified in a set of rules and concepts.
As long as the study of literature remained simply a field of intellectual
inquiry, this did not matter. However, when the attempt was made to
develop an academic discipline of literary studies, the need for a disciplin-
ary matrix became urgent. The new discipline needed norms for what con-
stituted valid and fruitful argument, and what constituted evidence. This
meant that the role of taste in the study of literature had to be rejected or
at the very least circumvented. No academic discipline of knowledge could
be based on taste. Discipline, says Bernard Williams in a recent article,
Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, is supposed to imply discipline.
In philosophy, there had better be something that counts as getting it
right, or doing it right.17 And there was nothing in the study of literature
that counted as getting it right, or doing it right. Taste could be culti-
vated and refined but the authority in matters of taste was the connoisseur
and not the scholar and the authority was personal and not the result of
the application of a method.
The External Approach

There were two ways of solving the problem of a disciplinary matrix.
Literature could be studied from the outside. That is, one could adopt
specific methodologies and epistemologies from already established dis-
ciplines and apply them to such works as are or have been deemed to
be literary works. That is, literary studies could become literary history,
author biography, text editing and textual explication, or the study of the
historical (social, economic, political) context in which a literary work or
an uvre was produced. With their emphasis on documentary sources
and the systematic collection and referencing of evidence, literary his-

tory and author biography draw on the methods and the epistemology
of historiography, as does the study of the social, political, and cultural
context in which a literary work was produced. Text editing and textual
explication draw on the methods of general and comparative linguistics as
well as on a body of established, systematic knowledge about language and
linguistic change.18
The external approach is perhaps best illustrated through the various
kinds of literary theory which have simply bypassed taste and suggested
that literary studies establish its credentials as an academic discipline of
knowledge by developing a theory of literature. In 1957, Northrop Frye
suggested that the only way literary studies could become an academic
discipline, a science, was for it to develop
a coherent and comprehensive theory of literature, logically and scientifi-

cally organized [] The development of such a criticism would fulfil the
systematic and progressive element in research by assimilating its work into
a unified structure of knowledge, as other sciences do.19
The basis for this theory would be a direct experience which is central to
criticism yet forever excluded from it. Criticism can account for it only in
critical terminology, and that terminology can never recapture or include
the original experience.20 In Fryes theory, taste, indeed good taste, is
central to the experience of literature but has no role to play in what he
calls criticism. Frye attempts to constitute literary studies as a discipline
by bypassing the subjective element, the element of taste. Appreciation of
literary works has no part to play in literary studies.
This external approach was echoed in structuralism which again tried
to establish the disciplinary credentials of literary studies by theorising it:
The type of literary study which structuralism helps one to envisage would
not be primarily interpretative; it would not offer a method which, when
applied to literary works, produced new and hitherto unexpected meanings.
Rather than a criticism which discovers or assigns meanings, it would be a
poetics which strives to define the conditions of meaning.21
Interpretative criticism, the sort of criticism that is aimed at promoting

the appreciation of literary works, can claim no authority because it is not
based on any sort of specialised knowledge backed by a theory:
44 S.H. OLSEN
Citing no special knowledge which it deems to be crucial and from which it

might derive its authority, interpretative criticism seems best defended as a
pedagogic tool which offers examples of intelligence for the encouragement
of others. But one needs only a few such examples.22
Instead of interpretation, literary studies should focus on any number of

projects:
There are many tasks that confront criticism, many things we need to advance
our understanding of literature, but one thing we do not need is more inter-
pretations of literary works. It is not at all difficult to list in a general way
critical projects which would be of compelling interest if carried through to
some measure of completion; and such a list is in itself the best illustration of
the potential fecundity of other ways of writing about literature. We have no
convincing account of the role or function of literature in society or social
consciousness. We have only fragmentary or anecdotal histories of literature
as an institution: we need a fuller exploration of its historical relation to the
other forms of discourse through which the world is organised and human
activities are given meaning. We need a more sophisticated and apposite
account of the role of literature in the psychological economies of both writ-
ers and readers; and in particular we ought to understand much more than
we do about the effects of fictional discourse.23
The problem if one assumes that these external approaches constitute lit-
erary studies is that they have no intrinsic connection with the concept of
literature as belles-lettres. Or to put it differently: these external approaches
do not really demand a concept of literature in the only sense which was
left over after other disciplines had appropriated the study of history, phi-
losophy, society in its various aspects, and so on. As long as literary history
considered literature from the outside, it was free to adopt any concept of
literature it might want, and its disciplinary status was defined by the dis-
ciplinary matrix of the discipline of historiography and not by any special
set of concepts and conventions that were inherently dependent on the
concept of literature as belles-lettres.
This problem emerged in its most acute form in what became known
as critical theory which developed into a general theory of texts or a
study of social practices that could be read as texts. In some of these
theories, the bypassing of the aesthetic qualities recognised through the
exercise of taste, was coupled with a political desire to brand the whole
notion of taste as being unavoidably involved with bourgeois ideology.

In these theories the concept of literature as belles-lettres was a social con-
struct with only an ideological function and with no theoretical substance.
As a consequence, the whole concept of literary studies as a discipline was
rejected and replaced by the concept of the study of signifying practices
in a culture generally.
Methodising Taste
The other way of trying to establish the disciplinary credentials of liter-
ary studies was to focus on the problem of methodising taste and the
aesthetic judgements which resulted from the exercise of the taste and, in
this way, remove these judgements from the subjective realm so as to make
them verifiable through a procedure.24 The campaign carried out by John
Churton Collins in the last two decades of the nineteenth century to have
English literature established as an academic discipline was essentially an
attempt to introduce standards of reasoning and argument into the study
of literature that would give it some measure of stringency, standards that
would define what counted as getting it right, or doing it right. And
both Cambridge practical criticism and its development as well as the
American New Criticism were efforts that carried this attempt further.
The isolation of the literary work as an autonomous object of study and
the concurrent attempt to reject as irrelevant to literary appreciation any
personal information about the author were attempts to introduce disci-
pline into the study of literary works.
The attempt to methodise taste does, however, run into the prob-
lem pointed out above by Jonathan Culler: there is no theory which will
confer the necessary authority on any set of concepts and conventions
employed in the appreciation of literary works. The problem has two
aspects. Interpretative criticism, which is at the heart of the appreciation
of literature, is simply an extension of the reading practice of the com-
mon reader. Some readers will have better training than others and will be
better at recognising and communicating the features of a literary work
of art that makes it worthy of attention. They will have a greater fund
of knowledge, that is, they will know more about the literary history of
which a particular work or uvre is a part, more about literary techniques
and conventions, more about the cultural (including artistic), social, eco-
nomic, and political context in which a literary work or an uvre was pro-
46 S.H. OLSEN
duced, know more about the provenance and problems of the text of the
work, and so on, and bring all this knowledge to bear in the interpretation
of the work. They will have had a greater exposure to literature and the
arts in general and will have developed a sense of what to look for and
what connections to establish both internally in the work or uvre they
are interpreting and with other literary works and other arts. The question
in the present context, however, is, if all this can be brought together in
a disciplinary matrix which will secure some sort of objectivity and uni-
formity in interpretative judgements, whether this is enough to meet the
objections voiced by E.A.Freeman in the debate about the establishment
of a school of English at Oxford:
We must know for certain what the study of literature means on the lips of
those who talk most loudly about it. They mean by the word, if we rightly
understand them, the reading of books, the criticism of books, the finding
out everything about the writers of the books, what they did, what they
thought, anything that can better make one understand the books and the
writers; but all essentially as a matter of taste. I am not sure that the word
taste quite expresses all that is wanted, but I know of no one word that will
come nearer to expressing it.25
Indeed, the qualities possessed by a trained reader today do not seem all
that different from the qualities demanded in the eighteenth century of
the true judge in matters of taste: strong sense, united to delicate senti-
ment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all
prejudice.26
The other aspect of this problem is the nature of the authority of
interpretative judgements. One of the major changes as various areas of
study were developed into academic disciplines of knowledge was the
change in the way in which knowledge was underwritten and autho-
rised. When John Stuart Mill wrote on political economy, or Matthew
Arnold on religion or education, the authority of their pronouncements
rested on the claim they could make to have personal acquaintance with
the phenomena they wrote about, to have studied and thought deeply
about the problems they addressed, or to have a demonstrable ability of
synthesising common sense. The intellectual authority of their judge-
ments was an individual authority. With the development of academic
disciplines, this individual authority was undermined and the intellectual
authority of individuals came to be underwritten and authorised by the
institution of which they were a part. John Churton Collinss attack on

Edmund Gosses From Shakespeare to Pope was motivated by the fact
that this was a book by someone working in a university appearing on a
university press:
It is [] with the greatest regret that we have had placed in our hands,
dated from Trinity College, Cambridge, and published by the University
Press, a work which we do not scruple to describe as most derogatory to
all concerned in its production. Whether this volume is an indication of
the manner in which the important subject with which it deals is studied at
Cambridge, we do not know. We sincerely trust that it is not. But of two
things we are very sure; first, that a book so unworthy, in everything but
externals, of a great University has never before been given to the world;
and secondly, that it is the bounden duty of all friends of learning to join in
discountenancing so evil a precedent.27
What so outraged Churton Collins was that Cambridge University, by

giving Gosse the Clark Lectureship and by letting its press publish his
lectures, had given its imprimatur to slipshod work. That such a book
as this, says Collins, should have been permitted to go forth to the
world with the imprimatur of the University of Cambridge, affords mat-
ter for very grave reflection.28 The university at the end of the nine-
teenth century was a guarantor that certain standards would apply to the
research produced by its members, that certain intellectual standards had
been met and institutionally defined disciplinary procedures had been
followed.
However, it is arguable that there is a requirement to interpretative
criticism that falls outside this institutionalised authorisation. Or to put it
the other way around, one can identify a quality in interpretative criticism
which it is difficult to subsume with such features as are authorised by the
discipline. There is a quality of interpretative criticism which apparently
goes beyond what Bernard Williams called getting it right, or doing it
right. Interpretative criticism not only has to be correct, but to have a
point, to be worth doing and reading: it also has to be illuminating. It
is this quality that explains why some works of criticism are repeatedly
reprinted over long periods of time while other works are simply forgot-
ten.29 And it is arguable that the requirement that criticism be illuminating
is as important as correctness. A.C. Bradleys Shakespearean Tragedy was
first published in 1904, before literary studies had acquired any settled
48 S.H. OLSEN
disciplinary framework. It makes a number of mistakes that would not be

acceptable within the disciplinary framework of todays literary studies:
Shakespeares plays are studied today in many ways of which Bradley could
have had no knowledge. He did not see that the tragedies present care-
fully delineated societies, as well as heroes and other interesting individuals.
Political issues did not register clearly for him and so, for example, distinc-
tions among the minor characters of Macbeth and Hamlet escaped his notice,
and he argued that King Lear is overloaded with secondary characters and
unnecessary events. He often missed the effect of groupings and movements
on stage which display changes in authority and allegiance, and also the
political cunning which informs apparently casual exchanges. Neither his
contemporary political awareness nor his study of Elizabethan and Jacobean
society was sufficient to reveal how many of Shakespeares characters are
held together, or divided in significantly different ways, by authority, power,
family interests, age, wealth, poverty, ignorance or knowledge.30
Its major mistake, however, is that it treats characters as if they were real
people and had a history and a mind beyond what the audience sees in
the plays, an approach that was roundly attacked and ridiculed in L.C.
Knights 1932 paper to the Shakespeare Association, How Many Children
Had Lady Macbeth?.31 Nevertheless, a second edition of Shakespearean
Tragedy was brought out in 1905 and reprinted in 1908, 1920, 1922,
1929, 1941, and 1956. An American reprint appeared in 1955 and again
in 1965. It was issued in St. Martins Library in 1957 and was reprinted
six times. It was then reprinted as a Pocket Papermac four times and in
Macmillan Students Editions twelve times. A third edition came out in
1992 with an introduction by John Russell Brown. A fourth edition was
produced in 2007 introduced by Robert Shaughnessy, and also in 2007
appeared A.C.Bradley on Shakespeares Tragedies: A Concise Edition and
Reassessment, edited by John Russell Brown. Illumination is apparently
a strongly weighted positive feature of interpretative criticism. Yet the
authority of this criticism does not seem to be anchored in a disciplinary
matrix.
Criticism andLiterary Studies

In Chapter 4 of Theory of Literature (1942), and then again in two arti-
cles reprinted in Concepts of Criticism (1963), Ren Wellek distinguishes
between literary criticism, literary history, and literary theory.32 Wellek
uses a wide notion of literary history which apparently covers all exter-
nal approaches to literature, including textual explication (Rosamund
Tuves studies of the language and imagery of the metaphysical poets33 are
discussed as an example of the historical approach), but excluding liter-
ary theory, which he sees as a separate discipline within literary studies.
Criticism, in Welleks terms, is the study of the concrete literary works of
art, whether we study them in isolation or in a chronological series.34 By
the study of the concrete literary works of art, Wellek means to select,
interpret, analyze, and judge.35 The task of the critic is to examine his
object, the work itself; he must understand, interpret, and evaluate it.36
Criticism, literary history, and literary theory are not, however, indepen-
dent, but implicate each other so thoroughly as to make inconceivable
literary theory without criticism or history, or criticism without theory or
history, or history without theory and criticism.37 Wellek argues strongly
against the possibility of a merely external approach to literature since
both literary theory and literary history must rest on the selection, inter-
pretation, analysis, and evaluation of literary works.
In one perspective, Welleks position here is clearly too dismissive of
external approaches. It is possible to study literature and literary works in
their various external relationships without exercising any judgement of
selection, interpretation, analysis, or evaluation. One can study the social
and political context in which the works of an author were produced (for
example, the value of incomes or the role of servants in the social environ-
ment in which Jane Austen wrote her novels or the political situation in
England towards the end of the reign of Elizabeth I when Shakespeare
wrote his historical plays). And it is possible to use such studies to throw
light on the literary works mentioned. It is only with this second step
that interpretation and analysis enter and the two steps, the inquiry into
the social and political situation and then the application to the works
of literature, are logically and epistemologically separate. However, what
seems to be correct in Welleks observations is this: in so far as one wants
a justification for attaching the term literary to history or theory, criti-
cal judgements in Welleks sense, either made by oneself or by others,
will be involved. It is instructive to note that structuralist literary theory
quickly became critical theory or just Theory when the ideology of the
aesthetic was rejected. Literary theory then turned into a general theory
of culture.
Welleks restricted notion of criticism is useful both because it
articulates central features of the kind of criticism that proponents in
50 S.H. OLSEN
Anglophone universities fought to have established as an academic disci-

pline and because it isolates the epistemologically significant elements of
critical judgement: identification of the object, interpretation/analysis,
and evaluation. Criticism in Welleks sense is of central importance in
literary studies because of its epistemic role: it is through critical judge-
ment that one identifies and determines the nature of the object of study.
This does not mean that interpretative criticism is what literary studies
should be doing, or that it is a central task in literary studies. But it does
mean that the nature of critical judgement is of central importance for
the status of literary studies as a discipline of knowledge. Wellek is very
much aware of this. And though he denies that literary criticism can be
a science, he holds that the aim of criticism is intellectual cognition []
[It] is conceptual knowledge, or aims at such knowledge.38 What he does
not do is to discuss the nature of critical judgements, in other words, the
nature of the judgements involved in selection, interpretation, analysis,
and evaluation.
Such a discussion did, however, take place as part of the attempt to
methodise taste. The attempt to establish the autonomy of a literary
work led to a debate about what kinds of evidence was legitimate in
interpretative argument. The proponents of the autonomy view held
that to admit biographical information as evidence for an interpretation
would compromise the integrity of the work of literature and lead the
critic to focus on the life and times of the author instead of on the literary
work. They therefore legislated against the use of such evidence in inter-
pretative argument. The attempt to impose such a norm did, however,
fail. And it failed not merely because Words have their history; genres
and devices descend from a tradition; poems often refer to contemporary
realities,39 so that references to historical facts are built into the very
identification of the work. Equally important is that while some kinds
of information about the attitudes, beliefs, and generally the personal
situation of the author will be irrelevant, some such information will
be illuminating. How far biographical information is necessary for or
enhances the appreciation of a literary work is a matter of judgement in
each single case.40
The nature of critical judgement also came into focus because of a
paradox that seemed to undermine the attempt to establish disciplinary
credentials for criticism: some interpretations are clearly better (more
adequate, more correct, more illuminating) than others while at the
same time critical practice shows a bewildering variety of different, and

more often than not, incompatible, interpretations of the same work
which seem to meet the requirements of a certain level of adequacy,
correctness, and illumination. It would seem that a disciplinary matrix
for criticism should at the very least supply criteria for distinguishing
between good and less good interpretations. There were two different
responses to this paradox. Supporters of critical monism argued that the
criteria for distinguishing between good and less good interpretations
can be supported only if one can assume that a final, correct interpreta-
tion of a work is at the very least a logical possibility, even if it has never
been realised in practice. That is, the idea of a final, correct interpreta-
tion is a regulative ideal. Two different interpretations of the same work
would either have to be compatible (they could be amalgamated into
one, coherent interpretation) or one would have be judged inferior (less
correct) than the other. Supporters of critical pluralism, on the other
hand, would argue that the multiplicity of interpretations of a work is
irreducible. All interpretation will construct at least partially the object
of interpretation. Since the features that make a text a literary work are
identified in interpretation, there is no way to distinguish between the
work itself and the work as it emerges through an interpretation. To
look for a final and correct interpretation of a work is consequently futile.
This position, however, runs into the problem that in order for the con-
cept of interpretation to have any function, there needs to be a distinc-
tion between the interpretation and its object. Without this distinction,
the distinction between creating and interpreting collapses, and the iden-
tity of the work is compromised. In fact, it no longer makes any sense to
talk about the work.
Both the attempt to establish the autonomy of the literary work and the
arguments for critical monism (and these views were advanced by the same
group of people) had an effect on criticism. They sharpened the awareness
that the acceptability of an interpretation depends on how it is grounded
in the text, and consequently sharpened the attention paid by the critic to
the actual work. And they focused attention on the necessity of reasoned
argument in establishing interpretative conclusions. However, in retro-
spect, one is bound to conclude that the attempt to legislate against the
use of biographical information as evidence in interpretative argument,
as well as the attempt to establish critical monism as an ideal in critical
practice, both failed. And these attempts failed not because the arguments
52 S.H. OLSEN
produced in their favour were bad or faulty, but because the arguments as
such were not listened to. Critical practice is apparently governed by other
standards than those which would most obviously ensure its status as a
discipline of knowledge.
The Function oftheCritic at thePresent Time

The question about the status of criticism as a discipline of knowledge is
often confused with the related question concerning what is seen as the
tension within literary criticism between criticism as a specialist and criti-
cism as a generalist discourse. The former question is epistemological and
it sometimes also leads to a question of ontology, as when constructivists
argue that the literary work is constituted through interpretation. It is the
question whether literary criticism has a specific and appropriate epistemol-
ogy that yields a disciplinary matrix of a kind that fulfils the conditions for
a discipline of knowledge. A negative answer to this question does not
have as a corollary that literary criticism is not a specialised activity that
requires special qualifications and training. The development of academic
disciplines had two different aspects: in addition to the development of
specific and appropriate epistemologies, academic disciplines required the
development of a community of practitioners who agreed on the disciplin-
ary matrix and applied it in their practice. This community of practitioners
developed into professional specialists who steadily pushed the frontiers
of knowledge even further and who became the custodians of the knowl-
edge and methods developed by the various disciplines.41 However, while
the community of practitioners that is a necessary component of an aca-
demic discipline cannot avoid specialisation, there are multiple specialised
activities that are not disciplines of knowledge. And literary criticism is
indeed a specialised activity with all the paraphernalia of an academic dis-
cipline of knowledge, though its disciplinary credentials may not actually
stand up to scrutiny.
If the claim that literary criticism is a specialised activity cannot be
underwritten by an epistemological claim to being a discipline of knowl-
edge, then the question remains how it can be sustained. This is a particu-
larly tricky problem for literary criticism since criticism in the sense we are
dealing with here is an articulation of how a reader appreciates a work. It is
the articulation of the epistemic access which a reader has to a work. Since
literary works have been written and appreciated by common readers
for many centuries before criticism became a specialised activity based in
the university, and since also today literary works are not written for those
who practise criticism as a speciality, one is faced with a paradox.
However, two related considerations indicate that the paradox is more
apparent than real. The first concerns judgements of taste generally.
Judgements of taste are not only themselves evaluative but can also in
their turn be evaluated. And though such judgements may have a per-
ceptual core that is private and subjective, they are dependent on the
judge possessing a conceptual structure, a vocabulary in which to state
the judgement, and they are grounded in a body of knowledge which
has to be mastered. Moreover, such judgements are normally dependent
on a trained sensibility. This means that to become a connoisseur, one
has to undergo a long and sometimes arduous apprenticeship. A connois-
seur, though not drawing his authority from a discipline of knowledge nor
from an institutionally approved procedure, is also a specialist. Though
his authority is individual, earned through the kind of judgements he has
made and how he has been able to guide others, he is still an authority
within the circle which accepts connoisseurship. However, the distinc-
tion between the connoisseur and the mere dilettante is not identical to
that between the professional and the amateur. Indeed, as the individual
authority of the Victorian man of letters came into competition with the
institutional authority of academic critics in matters of literature, the men
of letters responded both by insisting on the non-professional nature of
their activity as well as on the demanding and difficult nature of the critical
judgement.42
Second, if one accepts Curtiuss position that Education [is] the
medium of the literary tradition, then a mastery of literature, the knowl-
edge of how to read a literary work, has always been acquired through
instruction. In the literary tradition, there have always been teachers and
students. And the teacher has usually been a paid professional. So there is
nothing new about the role of the professional teacher of literature. What
was new at the end of the nineteenth century was that what was tradition-
ally a matter for the connoisseur was turned into a matter for the paid
professional. As was pointed out above, well into the nineteenth century,
literature was taught for various purposes and employing various methods,
as a part of a programme of basic education, as a part of rhetoric, as a part
of philology, as a gateway to history or philosophy, and so on. What was
new at the end of the nineteenth century was that the teacher of literature
ceased to be a custodian of a body of knowledge that had to be acquired
for the purpose of the study to be fulfilled and instead became someone
54 S.H. OLSEN
whose task it was to train the student to make correct interpretative and
evaluative judgements about literary works, in other words, to train the
student to appreciate such works. Appreciation is part of the private sphere
of the individual human being and though a literary education did teach
the student to make the necessary discriminations and judgements, this
was not part of its public purpose. Appreciation could equally well be
taught at home in the circle of the family.
What sustained the claim that literary criticism made at the end of the
nineteenth century to be a specialised activity that called for a special
class of paid professionals and what still sustains it, was the disappearance
of a cultured public that had the leisure to acquire the knowledge (lin-
guistic, social, political, cultural) necessary to understand literary works
written at different times, the leisure necessary to read enough literary
works to become acquainted with literary traditions and what one may
call the art of literature, and in this way acquire the necessary concep-
tual structure to appreciate works of literature. At the same time, the
social agreement on what Leslie Stephen called an undeniable propo-
sition, that familiarity with our literature is desirable43 held, and still
holds, among a reasonably large and culturally important public. The
nature and composition of this public are an empirical question that one
does not, for the present purpose, need to speculate on. The important
fact is that this public was and is large enough and important enough to
secure a place for the training of literary judgement within the educa-
tion system. And the education system in all Western countries has over
the last one hundred years expanded enormously at all levels: primary,
secondary, and tertiary. And with it has expanded the number of teach-
ers and students of literature.44 And the main employers for students of
literature at the tertiary level are educational institutions at the secondary
and primary level.
The need for the professional teacher of literary critical judgement did
not emerge primarily because of an increased specialisation resulting from
the development of a disciplinary matrix for literary criticism. It emerged
because of a long-term decline in the cultured reading public. The rea-
son for this decline was the disappearance of leisure among all classes
and in all social strata. The notion of an educated public changed in
the course of the nineteenth century from being a notion of a cultivated
public sharing a cultural heritage (though to a lesser or greater degree)
to a notion of a public trained to serve as specialists in a rapidly expand-
ing industrial society of increasing complexity, in government and public
administration as well as in social and economic organisations. For the

specialised professional, there are holidays but there is no leisure in the
sense in which Virginia Woolfs common reader has leisure for expansive
reading, for engaging with and thinking about works, and generally for
acquiring culture, including knowledge of the other arts, of the nations
past, and of the Western tradition, political, social, and cultural. During
a few months, from January to June, Virginia Woolfs reader has gone
through Elizabethan literature
with some thoroughness; he read a great deal of Webster, Browning,

Shelley, Spenser, and Congreve; Peacock he read from start to finish; and
most of Jane Austens novels two or three times over. He read the whole
of Meredith, the whole of Ibsen, and a little of Bernard Shaw. We may be
fairly certain, too, that the time not spent in reading was spent in some
stupendous argument in which the Greeks were pitted against the moderns,
romance against realism, Racine against Shakespeare, until the lights were
seen to have grown pale in the dawn.45
[I]f we follow the reader through his months, she says, it is clear that
he can have done practically nothing but read.46 The insistence on the
connection between leisure and reading is pervasive in all those essays of
Virginia Woolf that deal with reading. In essays like How Should One
Read a Book?47 and Reading,48 the atmosphere Woolf evokes is one of
unlimited freedom to read what one likes unconstrained by pressures of
work or duties, while in Middlebrow,49 the insistence on the leisure and
freedom from constraint enjoyed by the highbrow is explicit: We high-
brows read what we like and do what we like and praise what we like.50
However, at the time when Virginia Woolf was idealising her common
reader, the leisure on which the common reader depended was already a
thing of the past. It was not merely that even non-vocational education
was aimed at making the student into a specialised professional. It was
also, as Harold Perkin points out, that in the nineteenth century the very
ideal of the leisured gentleman was, for various reasons, replaced by that of
the hard-working businessman or hard-working professional:
Work, from being the curse of Adam to be shunned by the aristocratic lei-
sured gentleman, had become a gospel and replaced the cult of leisure as the
main justification of wealth, power and success in life, so that landed politi-
cians like Gladstone and the Earl of Derby never stopped working, either
at politics, writing or tending their estates. As Professor Alfred Marshall
56 S.H. OLSEN
expressed it, every man, however wealthy he may be, if he be in health and
a true man, does work and work hard.51
In this situation, no one, except the paid professional, can spend the nec-
essary time reading literature and acquiring the knowledge necessary to
understand this literature. Literary culture itself becomes something that
can only be acquired in part and only through being taught by a specialist.
The Discipline ofLiterary Studies

There are, then, a number of developments that come about and prob-
lems that arise in literary criticism specifically because of the requirements
that have to be met by a modern academic discipline of knowledge. The
search for a research object leads to the need for a clear and well-delimited
concept of a literary work and to the emphasis on its autonomy. The need
for a methodology and an appropriate and specific epistemology leads to
the attempt to define a disciplinary matrix, and the need for an authorita-
tive theory in which one could anchor a disciplinary matrix leads to the
search for a theory of literature that will make the discipline scientific.
These problems and developments are standardly described and explained
as resulting from a change in the ideas about the nature and function of
literature itself, without seeing them as arising out of a specific institu-
tional development that has nothing to do with the study of literature as
such. However, such explanations represent a form of institutional blind-
ness. These problems and these developments can only be understood in
the context of the rise of literary studies as a discipline. For John Morley,
definitions of literature appeared to be in the nature of vanity. The study
of literature did not really require such a definition. And The Intentional
Fallacy is a fallacy only in a context where canons of interpretation are
required and where it is required that these canons secure the autonomy
of the literary work as an object of study. If literary criticism is not a disci-
pline of knowledge, then these questions may not lose their interest, but
they do lose their urgency. If nothing further hangs on the answer to these
questions, then it is no reason why they should dominate an analysis of the
nature of criticism. And if it is not a discipline of knowledge, there is no
need for a theory rationalising critical practice.
But if the epistemological credentials of literary criticism as a disci-
pline of knowledge are questionable, then the question has to be faced
whether and how it can sustain its claim to a place among other aca-
demic disciplines. Professionalisation and specialisation are not sufficient

to sustain such a claim, and John Guillorys remarks in a recent article
on Literary Study and the Modern System of the Disciplines, on the
familiar insecurity of the humanities in the modern constellation of dis-
ciplines seem to be particularly apt in so far as literary criticism is con-
cerned.52 Nevertheless, an answer needs to be attempted since there is no
doubt that literary studies do occupy an important place among modern
academic disciplines and there is no serious attempt at dislodging literary
studies from this place.
The answer has two parts, the first of which looks beyond the func-
tion and role of the modern research university to an older model of the
university:
Learning, virtue, utility: the advancement of knowledge, preparation for the

observance of a code of social, moral and religious conduct, and training for
high office or the professions are the three great purposes that all through
history and with constant changes of emphasis are repeatedly cited in the
discussion of the purposes of universities.53
The university is traditionally an institution of higher learning concerned

with the advancement of knowledge of all kinds, not merely the pro-
duction of knowledge. Literary studies are concerned with the advance-
ment of the knowledge of literature in all its forms, including literary
history, the establishment of reliable texts, the understanding of the lan-
guage in which these texts are written, the context of origin of these
texts, and interwoven with all of these activities, the interpretation and
appreciation of the texts. Furthermore, humane studies, of which the
study of language and literature make up the central part, has through-
out the history of the university been the means of defining, develop-
ing, and instilling into the student the cultural values which form the
groundwork of a code of social, moral, and religious conduct. As long
as it is accepted that the university has a responsibility for maintaining
such cultural values, the study and teaching of literature have a place in
the university.
The second part of the answer brings us back to the notions of sci-
ence and discipline. The concept of being scientific, says Wilhelm
Schmidt-Biggemann in the chapter on New Structures of Knowledge in
Volume II of A History of the University in Europe, is the concept which
gave and gives the university its internal intellectual coherence.54 Being
58 S.H. OLSEN
scientific is a relative concept, the content of which varies in according

which science has the leading role, but at the core of the concept is the
idea of disciplined intellectual work. It is this core which guarantees the
internal intellectual coherence of the institution. Developing a matrix
for a discipline of knowledge is one way of specifying what is to count
as disciplined intellectual work. However, a specification of what counts
as disciplined intellectual work for a field of inquiry does not necessarily
add up to a disciplinary matrix, nor is this necessary for the notion of
disciplined intellectual work to apply to such a field. Guillory makes
the point that a major reason for the resistance to allow criticism into the
university in Britain and the United States was that the discourse of the
critics (the bellelettrists) was too undisciplined to offer a serious intel-
lectual challenge to the scholars (the philologists and literary histori-
ans).55 In fact, the criticism that the study of literature lacked discipline
was directed also against the way in which literary history was practised
even by those who had a university appointment in literature. Churton
Collinss criticism of Edmund Gosse, John Addington Symonds, and
George Saintsbury was a fierce attack on what he considered ignorance,
historical inaccuracies, slipshod scholarship, and unargued and errone-
ous interpretations in these histories.56 As I have pointed out elsewhere,
it was with reference to this notion of discipline that Churton Collins
introduced a distinction between academic criticism and literary journal-
ism,57 the latter being exempt from the kind of discipline that the for-
mer had to display. The notion of being scientific as it appeared in the
writings of those who wanted to rid criticism of its reputation of being
the expression of a personal response to literary works, designated an
approach to literature and literary works that was undertaken in a scien-
tific spirit, but they did not insist that criticism was a science. After all,
says Leslie Stephen,
though criticism cannot boast of being a science, it ought to aim at some-

thing like a scientific basis, or at least to proceed in a scientific spirit. The
critic, therefore, before abandoning himself to the oratorical impulse, should
endeavour to classify the phenomena with which he is dealing as calmly as if
he were ticketing a fossil in a museum.58
It is possible, then, to interpret the efforts made by those who wanted lit-
erary studies established as a university subject as aiming to establish it as a
field of disciplined intellectual work rather than as a discipline of knowl-
edge. This effort did succeed. The standards of argument and scholarship
in present-day literary studies are of a different order from what they were
in the nineteenth century. This is a development to which the term prog-
ress is appropriately applied. And though such improved standards cannot
guarantee that the criticism produced is illuminating, they do provide a
basis for saying that the literary works are better appreciated today than at
any time before in the history of literature.
Notes
1. Shumway, D.R. & and Messer-Davidow, E. (1991) Disciplinarity:
An Introduction, Poetics Today, 12:2, 204.
2. Heyck, T. W. (1982) The Transformation of Intellectual Life in
Victorian England (London: Croom Helm), p.82.
3. Heyck, Transformation, p. 120. The expression The silent and
permeative genius of science comes from Pattisons (1885)
Memoirs (London: Macmillan), p.305. One sometimes finds the
view that this is a model of knowledge that does not fit and that
therefore does not apply to the humanities. However, as Paisley
Livingston has pointed out in his Literary Knowledge: Humanistic
Knowledge and the Philosophy of Science (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1988), p.119:
[T]alk of the abyss that separates the two cultures is totally misguided
insofar as one of these cultures is in fact already situated within a space
defined by the other culture. In other words, the institutional and con-
ceptual space of knowledge is today already organized in function of
concepts and motives of the model of natural science. Thus the natural-
scientific attitude effectively stands as the model of real knowledge in
relation to which other branches are evaluated.
4. None of the eight volumes in T. M. Porter & D. Ross, eds. The

Cambridge History of Science has a section on the humanities.
Vol. 7: The Modern Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), has a section on History and Historicism
(pp.11330) and on History and the Social Sciences (pp.391
406), but there is no mention of any other humanistic disciplines.
5. Or, says Arthur Danto in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of
Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 49: the
60 S.H. OLSEN
humansciences, as I shall term them in an effort to preserve the

German agglutinative. Danto, however, contrasts humansciences
with humane studies.
6. Guy, J.M. & Small, I. (1993) Politics and Value in English Studies:
A Discipline in Crisis? (Cambridge: CUP), p.156.
7. The concept of disciplinary matrix was first used by Thomas
Kuhn in his 1969 Postscript to The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), printed in the
1970 and 1996 editions. See the 1996 edition p.182ff. The term
is used here in a narrower and more precise sense.
8. Curtius, E.R. (1953) European Literature and the Latin Middle
Ages, trans. Willard R.Trask (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul),
p.36.
9. Grafton, A. & Jardine, L. (1986) From Humanism to the
Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and
Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press), p.58.
10. Quoted in Grafton & Jardine, Humanism to Humanities, p.59.
11. Gossman, L. (1982) Literature and Education, New Literary

History, 13:2, 342.
12. Arnold, M. (1974) Literature and Science, in R.H. Super (ed.)
The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold. Vol. X: Philistinism
in England and America (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan
Press), p.58.
13. Morley, J. (1890) On the Study of Literature, in Studies in

Literature (London: Macmillan & Co.), p.216.
14. See Jann, R. (1983) From Amateur to Professional: The Case of
the Oxbridge Historians, Journal of British Studies, 22:2, 12247.
15. Plato (1953) Republic, The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. 2, trans.
Benjamin Jowett, 4th edition (Oxford: OUP), 606d.
16. Addison, J. (1982) The Spectator, no. 409, in A. Ross (ed.)

Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books), p.365.
17. Williams, B. (2000) Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline,

Philosophy, 75:4, 477.
18. Wallace Martin points out in Criticism and the Academy, p.279
that the three dominant conceptual structures that proved attrac-
tive to the early advocates of [literary studies] in England and the
United States were literary history, philology (the study of Anglo-
Saxon and Middle English) and the conception of literary study

that emphasised the continuity of classical and modern civilisation,
all external approaches.
19. Frye, N. (1957) Anatomy of Criticism. Four Essays (Princeton:
Princeton University Press), p.11.
20. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p.18.
21. Culler, J. (1975) Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics
and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), p.
viii.
22. Culler, Structuralist Poetics, p. viii.
23. Culler, J. (1981) The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature,

Deconstruction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), p.6.
24. The two ways to academic respectability have been discussed in
some detail in Olsen, S.H. (2005) Progress in Literary Studies,
New Literary History, 36, 34158, and (2007) The Moment of
Theory, Critical Quarterly, 49:4, 88119.
25. Freeman, E.A. (1887) Literature and Language, Contemporary
Review, 52, 560.
26. Hume, D. (1993 [1757]) Of the Standard of Taste, in Selected
Essays, Copley, S. and Edgar, A. (eds) (Oxford: OUP), p.147.
27. Collins, J. C. (1886) Review of From Shakespeare to Pope, by

Edmund Gosse, Quarterly Review, 163, 295.
28. Collins, Review, 289.
29. Here are three more or less random examples. John Dover

Wilsons What Happens in Hamlet was published by CUP in
1935. There was a second edition in 1937, reprinted in 1940. A
third edition appeared in 1951. By 2003, this edition had been
reprinted nineteen times. E.M. W Tillyards Milton was first pub-
lished by Chatto & Windus in 1930 and reprinted in 1934, 1946,
1949, 1951, 1956, and 1961. A revised edition was brought out
by Chatto & Windus in 1966 and in 1968 it came out in a Penguin
edition. Ian Watts The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe,
Richardson and Fielding was first published by Chatto & Windus
in 1957. There was an American edition published by the
University of California Press in 1959. It was reprinted by Penguin
books in 1963, 1967, and 1972. It was reprinted again by Chatto
& Windus in 1974 and by Hogarth Press in 1987. In 2000,
Pimlico brought out a cheap paperback, and in 2001 there was a
62 S.H. OLSEN
second American edition published by the University of California

Press, which is still in print.
30. Brown, J.R. (1992) Introduction to the Third Edition, in A.C.
Bradley (ed.) Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello,
King Lear, Macbeth (3rd edition) (London: Macmillan), p. xxii.
31. Knights, L. C. (1933) How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?:
An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism
(Cambridge: Gordon Fraser, Minority Press).
32. Wellek, R. (1963) Literary Theory, Criticism, and History [1960]
and The Term and Concept of Literary Criticism [1962] in
R. Wellek, Concepts of Criticism, S. G. Nichols Jr. (ed.) (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
33. Wellek, Literary Theory, pp.89.
34. Wellek, R. & Warren, A. (1966) Theory of Literature (3rd edition)
(London: Jonathan Cape), p.39.
35. Wellek, Literary Theory, p.5.
37. Wellek & Warren, Theory of Literature, p.39.
40. For a range of examples that demand different judgements about
the relevance of biographical information to interpretative conclu-
sions, see Olsen, S.H. (2009) Biography in Literary Criticism, in
A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, Hagberg, G. & Jost,
W. (eds), (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell).
41. The development of the two aspects were closely connected and,
indeed, intertwined. For an account focusing in particular on his-
tory, see Levine, P. (1986) The Amateur and the Professional:
Historians, Antiquarians and Archaeologists in Victorian England,
18381886 (Cambridge: CUP). Heyck gives a more general
account in Transformation of Intellectual Life.
42. See Chapter 4in Atherton, C. (2006) Defining Literary Criticism:
Scholarship, Authority and the Possession of Literary Knowledge,
18802002 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). For the possible
inherent contradiction in the position of what Guy and Small call
the amateur critics of the first decades of the twentieth century,
see Guy, J.M. & Small, I. (2000) The British Man of Letters
and the Rise of the Professional, in The Cambridge History of
Literary Criticism, Vol. 7: Modernism and the New Criticism, Litz,
A.W., Menand, L. & Rainey, L. (eds) (Cambridge: CUP). What

Guy and Small there refer to as amateur critics, would in the
vocabulary of this article be connoisseur critics. These connois-
seur critics defined themselves in opposition both to the newly
emerging class of professional academic critics and in opposition
to the mere dilettante. Once they are seen as connoisseurs rather
than amateurs, the possible contradiction in their position
disappears.
43. Stephen, L. (1887) The Study of English Literature, Cornhill
Magazine, 55, 486.
44. In 2007, the total number of students enrolled in arts and humani-
ties at a tertiary level in North America and Europe was 3,625,000.
A significant number of these would read literature. The majority
of these when they graduated would enter the school system.
Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Education, Table 15:
Enrolments by broad field of education in tertiary education,
accessed 2 August 2009: http://stats.uis.unesco.org/unesco/
TableViewer/tableView.aspx?ReportId=168.
45. Woolf, V. (1996 [1916]) Hours in a Library, Collected Essays,
Vol. II (London: The Hogarth Press), p.35.
46. Woolf, Hours in a Library, p.35.
47. Woolf, Collected Essays, Vol. II, pp.111.
50. Woolf, Middlebrow, in Collected Essays, Vol. II, p.199.
51. Perkin, H. (2002) The Rise of Professional Society:England since
1880 (London: Routledge), pp.1201. The quotation from Alfred
Marshall is from Memorials of Alfred Marshall, A.C. Pigou (ed.)
(London: Macmillan, 1925), p.103.
52. Guillory, J. (2002) Literary Study and the Modern System of the
Disciplines, in A.Anderson & J.Valente (eds) Disciplinarity at the
Fin de Sicle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), p.25.
53. Frijoff, W. (1966) Patterns, in H.Ridder-Symoens (ed.) A History
of the University in Europe. Vol. 2: Universities in Early Modern
Europe (15001800) (Cambridge: CUP), p.43.
54. Schmidt-Biggeman, W. (1996) New Structures of Knowledge, in
W.Ridder-Symoens, University in Europe. Vol. 2, p.489.
55. Guillory, Literary Study, p.34.
64 S.H. OLSEN
56. For two somewhat different versions of these attacks, see

Grosskurth, P. (1965) Churton Collins: Scourge of the Late
Victorians, University of Toronto Quarterly 34:3, 25468; and
Kearney, A. (1986) The Louse on the Locks of Literature (Edinburgh:
Scottish Academic Press), Chapters 4 and 7.
57. See Olsen, Progress in Literary Studies, p.349.
58. Stephen, L. (1877) Charlotte Bront, Cornhill Magazine, 36,
723.
CHAPTER 4
Analytic Philosophy ofLiterature:

ProblemsandProspects
JukkaMikkonen
Introduction
Analytic philosophy of literature appears to be in a state of flux. On the
one hand, there is a growing interest in interdisciplinary study and dia-
logue with other disciplines that can be seen in the study of fiction and
narratives, for instance. On the other hand, there is amostly implicit
disagreement about the very aims and methods of the analytic approach,
for example, whether it should engage in a dialogue with literary studies
or psychology and neurosciences, or be a pure philosophical enterprise.
This chapter explores the aims and methods, and the problems and pros-
pects, of analytic philosophy of literature. It first briefly discusses the char-
acteristic and history of the analytic philosophy of literature. After that, it
examines certain alleged weaknesses of the analytic approach, such as its
neglect of the historical and the empirical. Finally, it considers the future
prospects of the analytic enterprise and suggest how it can contribute to
our understanding of literature.
J. Mikkonen (*)
University of Tampere, Otava, Finland
e-mail: jukka.mikkonen@uta.fi

66 J. MIKKONEN
Analytic Philosophy andAesthetics
In recent decades, analytic philosophers have become interested in theo-

retical self-reflection and the history of their approach.1 Michael Dummet,
for one, claims:
It is important to analytical philosophy that it understands its own history,

seeing itself in the context of the general history of philosophy during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries: especially is this true at a time when it is
undergoing profound changes.2
Likewise, Avrum Stroll holds that analytic philosophy is essentially a

humanistic endeavour and thus intimately tied to its past in a way that
science is not.3 These sort of commonsensical remarks are interesting,
for analytic philosophers have often considered philosophy an ahistorical
activity, the most radical ones even wanting to outsource the study of the
history of philosophy to the history of ideas.4
But what is analytic philosophy? The philosopher Dagfinn Fllesdal
introduces three customary ways to define a philosophical tradition: (1)
by methods; (2) by doctrines or problems; and (3) by genetic relations. As
Fllesdal shows, however, these sort of definitions make analytic philoso-
phy either so narrow that it excludes some key figures of the enterprise or
so broad that it includes figures who are clearly outside the tradition.5 To
begin with, there seems to be no unified view of the analytic method, let
alone analysis.6 Not all analytic philosophers have engaged in conceptual
analysis or some other kind of analysis of a unifying kind. On the other
hand, some non-analytic philosophersHusserl, and even Socratesana-
lysed concepts.7 As for doctrines, there is no shared view of the aim and
nature of philosophy among analytic philosophers. For instance, the char-
acteristic which Simon Critchley implicitly attributes to analytic philoso-
phy, that is, scientism (or naturalism),8 does not unite all but only some
analytic philosophers. Defining analytic philosophy in terms of the prob-
lems it studies seems also untenable, for the same problems are studied in
other philosophical traditions. Appeals to schools or genetic relations are
also problematic. For example, Bolzano anticipated the ideas of Frege,
Carnap, Tarski and Quine and treated the ideas in an analytic manner;
yet, he did not have a teacherstudent relationship to any analytic philoso-
pher proper.9
ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY OFLITERATURE: PROBLEMS ANDPROSPECTS 67
It might be best to speak of analytic philosophy as a manner of tackling

philosophical problems. Analytic philosophy is often characterised as an
approach that emphasises conceptual clarity, coherence and argumenta-
tion, and attempts to achieve its ends by the use of formal logic and lin-
guistic analysis, for instance. Analytic philosophers also characteristically
stress objectivity and truth and tend to consider philosophical problems to
be timeless and universal.10
Analytic philosophers have always had a special interest in literature.
Roughly speaking, there are two central reasons for this. First, analytic
philosophers have traditionally been concerned with questions about
language. As William Elton put it in his Introduction to Aesthetics and
Language, the aim of the anthology was to diagnose and clarify some
aesthetic confusions, which it holds to be mainly linguistic in origin.11
Literature, being essentially a linguistic art form, was a rather obvious
object for philosophers studying issues such as meaning, truth, and refer-
ence, and language in general. Second, analytic philosophers excitement
for literary works of the characteristically fictional kind is also understand-
able, for fictionality brings up questions related to ontology and logic,
such as the question of the nature of fictional characters. Nevertheless, in
the analytic tradition, philosophers interest in fictional literature has been
twofold. Roughly speaking, aestheticians have studied literature as a form
of art, whereas philosophers working in other areas have turned to literary
works in order to illustrate or test their theories of ontology or meaning,
for example. However, these two ways to approach the subject converge
in theories of fictionality and the like.
For the first generation analytic aestheticians, the aim of aesthetics
was, as Arnold Isenberg defines it in the Conclusion of his 1950 report
to the Rockefeller Foundation, an analysis of the concepts and principles
of criticism and other aesthetic studies, such as the psychology of art.12
Furthermore, Monroe C. Beardsleys influential work Aesthetics, subti-
tled Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism, and published in 1958,
greatly substantiated this view, in which analytic aesthetics was considered
a second-order discipline that aims at clarifying and refining critical terms
by investigating the practice of criticism.13 Originally, analytic aesthetics
aimed to get rid of dreariness in aesthetics, as John Passmore put it,
and, by being ruthless in making distinctions, to reveal the characteristics
of its subject matter.14 Nevertheless, it has repeatedly been claimed that
68 J. MIKKONEN
analytic aesthetics has become dreary and dull itself. Literary critics and
philosophers in other traditions have not paid much attention to the ana-
lytic philosophical study of literature, which the art scholar Karl-Heinz
Ldeking thinks is due to analytic philosophy being widely considered to
be pettifogging, boring and irrelevant.15
I shall next discuss some features of the analytic approach which are
often cited as reasons why literary scholars and philosophers in other tradi-
tions do not find analytic aesthetics appealing. Rather than seeing them as
limits of the analytic enterprise, I consider them to be potential obstacles
and pitfalls, which analytic philosophers of literature should acknowledge
in order for their theories to be more illuminating and telling. The prob-
lems I shall discuss are themselves abstractions, and many analytic phi-
losophers are aware of them and reflect on them in their work; perhaps it
would be best to describe them as problematic tendencies or ghosts that
haunt the discipline.
Obstacles andPitfalls
To begin with, there is a potential problem in the way analytic aesthe-

ticians approach their questions, or the secondariness of the discipline.16
As philosophers Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen remark, ana-
lytic aesthetics has tended to give priority to topics arising from concerns
elsewhere in philosophy [] [t]he emphasis on logic and philosophy of
language, for example, led inevitably to an interest in questions about
meaning and truth in aesthetics.17 It is somewhat troublesome that ques-
tions in the analytic philosophy of literature often derive from questions in
certain core areas in philosophy, such as epistemology, and especially that
they employ the concepts used in studying these primary matters. For
example, the questions of authorial intention and the meaning of a liter-
ary work, and the focus on propositions, originate from the philosophy
of language and theory of meaning. Such questions, although interesting
from a philosophical point of view, might not shed much light on litera-
ture as literature or help us to understand aesthetic values.18 Even though
many contemporary philosophers of literature focus on the distinctive
questions that derive from our encounters with literary works (and liter-
ary practice in general), together with theoretical questions formulated by
literary scholars, one of the burdens of analytic aesthetics and philosophy
of literature is that it still considers itself subservient to the major areas
in philosophy, an approach where literary works serve rather as a test case

for theories of meaning.
Another putative problem with the analytic enterprise relates to its urge
for ahistorical objectivity, an ideal which manifests itself both in analytic
philosophers conception of philosophical problems and their notion of
literature. Analytic philosophers tend to treat philosophical problems as
timeless and ahistorical, by appealing to logic and argument rather than
observations of social, political and ideological factors.19 Nevertheless,
it has often been claimed that analytic philosophers lack historical self-
reflection and that this lack is an obstacle to the proper comprehension
of the problems. Nicholas Wolterstorff, an analytic philosopher himself,
states that analytic philosophers do not ponder why historical philoso-
phers have asked the questions they have asked and used the concepts
they have used. Neither, Wolterstorff claims, do analytic philosophers
ponder why they themselves ask the questions they ask.20 Many have con-
nected the lack of self-reflection to alleged crises in analytic philosophy.
Jaakko Hintikka, for example, asserts that the survival of analytic philoso-
phy requires theoretical self-reflection and a change from within.21 On a
smaller scale, the dismissal of the historical background of philosophical
problems and the focus on logical issues may lead to a situation in which
problems in the philosophy of literature start to live their life as abstract
debates, distanced from the significance of the problems in our encounters
with literature, as in certain discussions on authorial intention, theory of
fiction, or the debate on readers imaginative resistance to deviant moral
views in literature.
Gilbert Ryle once remarked that the wise rambler occasionally, though
not incessantly, looks back over his shoulder in order to link up the place
he has got to with the country through which he has recently passed.
As he pointed out, ones attempts to trace ones proximate origins are
valuable by improving ones sense of direction and helping one to under-
stand the contemporary scene.22 A glance at recent work in the philoso-
phy of literature suggests that many contemporary analytic philosophers
consider it important to track the history of the problem they are scruti-
nising. Contemporary philosophers also like to discuss the raisons dtre
of their inquiry.23
Still, one may ask for more context-sensitivity and attention to the par-
ticular in the analytic philosophy of literature, as the tendency to overt
abstractions can be seen in many analytic philosophers notion of litera-
70 J. MIKKONEN
ture, for example. Analytic philosophers often speak of literature as if there

were a common, transhistorical concept of literature, and ignore the vari-
ous historical and contemporary uses of the word. Further, we analytic
philosophers have traditionally considered realistic literature as the model
for literature tout court (realism considered here both as a historical liter-
ary movement and as a mode of representation). Arguably, our interest in
realism stems from our liking of uncomplicated literary examples and our
emphasis on objectivity and truth.24 This idea of objectivity is apparent,
for instance, in those theories of fictional truth which take the narrator
to offer us a transparent view on the world of the work, as well as discus-
sions on the meaning of the work, where it is thought that literary works
have a certain fixed meaning that is determined by the author and/or
the text, and the readers task is to reconstruct that meaning. What is not
problematised is that generalisations drawn from Tolstoys novels might
not carry in modernism and beyond.
Indeed, it is frequently said that analytic philosophers operate with obso-
lete conceptions of literature and literary criticism. Tzachi Zamir remarks:
[P]hilosophical criticism appears to operate within the conceptual param-

eters of the New Criticism and the Arnoldian humanism and romanticism
that underlie it. The charge is that philosophical criticism has not seriously
dealt with the numerous challenges to formalism within literary studies. It
thus replays the Old Criticism practiced before the cultural turn in literary
studies, and it does this without addressing the reasons that have led literary
critics to avoid thematic reflection through poetry.25
In addition to an obsolete view of literature (or the focus on realism), an

obsolete view of literary criticism is problematic in analytic philosophical
theories which seek to justify their theoretical claims via criticism or pres-
ent descriptive claims about what critics do in interpreting literary works.
What is also dubious is analytic philosophers striving for universality.26
For example, thinking of the diversity of works of literature, it is question-
able if there could ever be a theory of the cognitive value of literature
that would be both extensive and non-trivial. Some works elicit emotions
that might contribute to cognition, some provide imaginative experiences
that might count as subjective knowledge, some may be seen to be similar
to thought-experiment in philosophy. Because of the universalizing ten-
dency, it seems difficult for analytic philosophers to engage in a dialogue
with literary critics, at least those who hold that critical concepts are more
or less tied to particular works and that the literary work under analysis
modifies and contests the theoretical concepts needed to understand it.27
My final concern in the analytic enterprise is its lack of concern for the
empirical. For instance, the literary critic Anders Pettersson remarks that
analytic philosophical theories of literary interpretation seldom make ref-
erence to empirical studies of literary reception, although the theories
claim to describe the practice of reading.28 Indeed, philosophical debates
on readers typical motives, for example, often stagnate at intentions. But
our horror mundi manifests itself also in other ways, such as our eagerness
to use invented examples to illustrate our views. Examples drawn from
the literature, in turn, are thought to bring unnecessary complexity
interpretative issuesinto ones thinking of the logical aspects of the
problem. Thus, say, the thought-experiment of a historical novel in which
every sentence would be asserted by the author. While examples of this
sort well illustrate the philosophical argument at hand, their artificiality
causes suspicion: how plausible is a theory of literature (or fictionality)
that requires invented examples?29
The issues introduced are matters that are repeatedly said to lessen the
credibility of the analytic approach in the eyes of literary scholars and oth-
ers interested in the intersections of philosophy and literature. Of course,
the emphasis on logical matters, for instance, is not only a characteristic
of the analytic approach but also one of its chief virtues; it is not the
logical emphasis that is problematic but rather the philosophers overt
abstractions and her invention of hypothetical examples that are aimed to
illustrate her theory. Also, an abstract conception of literature can hardly
be avoided in philosophical aesthetics, as the discipline aims at generality.
Nevertheless, it would greatly benefit the analytic approach, if analytic
philosophers articulated and problematised these issues, acknowledged
historical changes in the practices of literature and literary criticism and
engaged directly and in detail with particular literary works.
The Role ofAnalytic Philosophy ofLiterature
Although there has been relatively little meta-philosophical discussion

within analytic philosophy of literature, one may find, roughly, three pop-
ular aspects of the role of analytic philosophy of literature. These are: (1)
the analysis of critical concepts; (2) a philosophy of science; and (3) the
study of the phenomenon of literature.
72 J. MIKKONEN
Analysis ofCritical Concepts

As I have argued, analytic aesthetics was originally understood as the phi-
losophy of criticism or metacriticism, its purpose being to investigate criti-
cal concepts and principles. This is a view which Richard Shusterman, for
instance, still emphasises in his Introduction to the anthology Analytic
Aesthetics (1989).30 Many, if not most, contemporary analytic aestheti-
cians think, however, that the study of the fundamental issues in criti-
cismits methods, aims, and conceptsis not only too narrow but also
is a misguided description of aesthetics. Kathleen Stock and Katherine
Thomson-Jones, for instance, remark that analytic aestheticians today are
critical of the narrow analytic program of the pioneering analytic aesthe-
ticians. As they observe, the scope of aesthetics today is broader and more
diverse than the mere analysis of concepts and principles. Also, questions
in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind are given much attention in
contemporary aesthetics.31
Indeed, Beardsleys tripartite distinction, in which the philosopher stud-
ies what the critic says about the poets work,32 is no longer tenable. Peter
Lamarque has forcefully shown that criticism is too diverse a field for a
methodologically coherent view of it to be presented, and that metac-
riticism will fail both as a descriptive and normative exercise: because of
the multiplicity of critical approaches, descriptive metacriticism, which
aims to explain critical principles, could only deliver a set of principles
relative to each approach. In turn, normative metacriticism, which aims
to formulate interpretative principles that ought to be followed, would
simply describe the principles of a given approach, and the validity of
those principles would be disputed after the critical approach had been
declined.33 Moreover, the philosophy of literature cannot be construed
as metacriticism because of its concern for questions falling outside criti-
cism. Nonetheless, there are some contemporary aestheticians who think
that philosophy of literature consists of a large part of metacriticism. For
example, in On Criticism (2009), Nol Carroll maintains that the time
has come to rejuvenate [metacriticism], since there is probably more art
criticism being produced and consumed now than ever before in the his-
tory of the world.34 The idea of philosophy of literature as metacriticism
is also implicit in many analytic philosophers work.
While the philosophy of literature is not to be identified with metacriti-
cism, there is need for a philosophy of literature as an analysis of critical
concepts, where analysis is understood not only as descriptive analysis that
purports to show how concepts are used in criticism but also as construc-
tive analysis that aims to reformulate concepts that are vague or indeter-
minate, such as fiction and narrative.
It has been common to defend the analytic enterprise by contrasting
it with critical theorywhich is seen to embrace disbelief in rationality
and truth and to prefer persuasion over argumentationand by emphasis-
ing the clarity, precision and argumentative strength of the analytic enter-
prise.35 Sure enough, clarity, precision, and argumentativity are prospects
of the analytic enterprise. Extensive conceptual analysis and the insistence
on detail and mechanics are characteristic of the analytic enterprise and
invaluable in analysing critical concepts, theories and disputes. Moreover,
clarity and coherence do not need to exclude profundity.36
In turn, those critics of the analytic approach who have no education in
philosophy might have difficulties in differentiating between the philoso-
phers aims and methods, and to understand the context and meaning of
the analysis.37 As the literary critic David Gorman puts it,
[F]or better or worse, the power and interest of analytic philosophy lie in
its technical details more than its large programmatic generalizations; and
unless literary theorists are willing to master some of this detail, they can
write at length about analytic philosophy, but without any insight.38
Certainly, there are good reasons for analytic philosophers logico-

systematic inquiries. In Lamarque and Olsens view:
[I]t has long been thought a merit of [the analytic] enterprise that it favours
slow, meticulous work finding strong arguments to support precise,
clearly defined theses over generalizations weakly or imprecisely defended.
Certainly, debates by analytic aestheticians seem to move slowly, but that is
because attention to detail is highly valued.39
The piecemeal effort and insistence on detail may also produce theoretical
tools. The literary critic Peter Swirski thinks that it would greatly improve
literary critics work if they were familiar with David Lewiss Reality and
Mutual Belief principles and with their roles in the analysis of fictional
truth and implicit story content.40 Likewise, Terry Eagleton argues that
the rigour and technical expertise of the best philosophy of literature con-
trasts favourably with the intellectual looseness of some literary theory,
and has addressed questions left mostly unexamined by those in the other
74 J. MIKKONEN
camp, such as fictionality.41 Clearly, analytic philosophy is at its best in

slow, meticulous work and its attention to detail, and there is need for it
as a metacritical, clarificatory enterprise.
A Philosophy ofScience
Philosophers of literature have not only investigated literary criticism but
also other approaches to literature. For example, the study of the psychol-
ogy of art has been part of analytic aesthetics since the beginning, and
recently more and more analytic philosophers have been eager to turn to
the sciences of mind in order to advance traditional debates in aesthetics.
Gregory Currie, for one, maintains that aestheticians should get out of the
armchair and look at different branches of psychology, neuroscience, lin-
guistics and economic and sociological studies of the art market.42 In par-
ticular, Currie is dissatisfied with philosophers who make empirical claims
about the educative function of literature but provide no evidence for
their claims. He suggests that in discussing the effects which literary works
are claimed to have on their readers, philosophers should look at studies
conducted in experimental psychology.43 And what is the role of philoso-
phy? Currie thinks that none of the empirical studies will be worth much
unless we retain a commitment to the clarity that philosophical reflection
of a traditional kind can bring.44 As he sees it, the role of philosophy is to
formulate theoretical models, especially given that psychological work in
this area sometimes suffers from an impoverished view of the explanatory
options.45
On the other hand, there is need for philosophical considerations in
assessing the explanatory power of scientific approaches to literature.
Philosophical reflection is required in analysing the assumptions, concepts
and results of empirical studies of literary reception. Of course, studying
scientific approaches to literature does not require ones committing to
them; sceptics are welcome too. One of the crucial questions is whether
psychological studieswhich generally do not distinguish between
unskilled and skilled readers, for instancemay illuminate the practices
of reading works of literature as works of art.46
A Philosophy of(Literary) Art

In addition to analysing critical concepts and exploring the literary-critical
and scientific study of literature, there is need for the philosophy of litera-
ture in the most comprehensive sense as a philosophy of art. This concep-

tion of the discipline is supported by Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom
Olsen, who highlight the need for an aesthetics of literature that studies the
act of reading imaginative literature and the nature of values and appre-
ciation associated with literary works.47 Lamarque, for one, thinks that
philosophy should explore the fundamental principles and conceptual
connections in the practice of literature.48 In his view, the philosopher of
literature studies
the phenomenon, common to most if not all cultures, of elevating cer-

tain kinds of linguistic activitiesnotably story-telling or poetry-making or
dramato an art form issuing in products that are revered and of cultural
significance.49
This sort of study is not an empirical enquiry into a particular empirical

institution; rather it looks at foundational issues in the inquiry itself, its
methods, aims, presuppositions, modes of argument or evidence or rea-
soning, the status of its central claims, and its basic concepts.50 However,
Lamarque remarks that a philosophical investigation is not worth much if
it becomes too abstract or if it loses touch with the literary works them-
selves or critical works that comment on them.51
Trends and approaches in criticism change fast, and philosophy of liter-
ature is needed to draw an overall picture of the phenomenon of literature:
a picture that includes the author, the work and the reader. The object
of such a study is the literary practice, literary values and the experience
of literatureincluding all its aesthetic, cognitive, emotional and ethical
dimensions. In this comprehensive view, philosophical analysis is a means
of studying literature as human action and a distinct art form.
Endword
In this chapter, I have discussed the problems and prospects of analytic
philosophy of literature. While I have said that there are certain obstacles
and pitfalls in the analytic approach which analytic philosophers should
acknowledge in their work in order to make their views more credible in
the eyes of literary scholars, I think there will always be a certain kind of
divergence between philosophers, who aim for generality and like the mul-
tiplicity of examples, and literary critics, who are interested in particular
works and different ways in which the content of a given work might be
76 J. MIKKONEN
rendered. The gap between the disciplines is likely to remain, but I do not
consider it simply as a problem. There is no progress without dialectic, and
the discrepancy between philosophy and literary studies is intriguing as it
prevents theoretical stagnation.
Notes
1. Current meta-philosophical discussions on the nature of analytic
philosophy are often seen to originate from Michael Dummets
(1993) Origins of Analytic Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press) or his earlier work on Frege. For a comprehensive
overview of the key themes in the discussion, see Hans-Johann
Glocks (2008) What is Analytic Philosophy? (Cambridge: CUP).
For recent work in the history of analytic philosophy, see, for
example, Michael Beaney (ed.) (2013) The Oxford Handbook of the
History of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: OUP).
2. Dummet, Origins of Analytical Philosophy, p.1.
3. Avrum, S. (2000) Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy (New
York: Columbia University Press), p.246.
4. See Grafton, A. (2004) A Note from Inside the Teapot, in J.B.
Schneewind (ed.) Teaching New Histories of Philosophy (Princeton:
Princeton University Center for Human Values), p.318.
5. Fllesdal, D. (1997) Analytic Philosophy: What is It and Why
Should One Engage in It? in H.Glock (ed.) The Rise of Analytic
Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 37. Fllesdal thinks analytic
philosophy is best understood as an approach very strongly con-
cerned with argument and justification (p. 7). For problems in
defining analytic philosophy in terms of doctrines or methods, see
Glock, Analytic Philosophy, Chapters 5 and 6. For historical and
contemporary views of the nature of analytic philosophy, see
Preston, A. (2010) Analytic Philosophy: History of an Illusion
(London: Continuum).
6. Michael Beaney, for one, remarks that both Russell and Moore
were notoriously unclear as to what exactly analysis meant, and
they use the term in a number of ways throughout their writings
(Beaney, M., The Analytic Turn in Early Twentieth-Century
Philosophy in Michael Beaney (ed.) (2007) The Analytic Turn:
Analysis in Early Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology (New
York: Routledge), p.1).
7. Some analytic philosophers have suggested that the analytic

method, understood as conceptual analysis, indeed traces its roots
back to Socrates. As L.Jonathan Cohen summarises it, [a]nalytical
philosophy is occupied, at an appropriately general level, and in a
great variety of ways, with the reasoned discussion of what can be
a reason for what. As such it is a strand in the total history of west-
ern philosophy from Socrates onwards rather than just a modern
movement (Cohen, J. L. (1986) The Dialogue of Reason: An
Analysis of Analytical Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press) p.49).
8. Critchley, S. (1998) Introduction: What Is Continental
Philosophy? in S.Critchley & W.R. Schroeder (eds), A Companion
to Continental Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell), p.12.
9. Raatikainen, P. (2013) What Was Analytic Philosophy?, Journal
for the History of Analytical Philosophy, 2:1, 13.
10. Lamarque, P. (2009) Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell),
p. viii. For characteristics of analytic philosophy, see also Soames, S.
(2006) Introduction to the Two Volumes, in Philosophical
Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Vol. 1: The Dawn of Analysis
(Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. xixv. One should
note that the interest in formal logic does not unite all analytic
philosophersit excludes ordinary language philosophers, for
exampleand, further, that many logicians have based their theory
of logic on phenomenological philosophy (see Raatikainen, What
Was Analytic Philosophy?, 1213).
11. Elton, W. (1954) Introduction, in W.Elton (ed.) Aesthetics and
Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), p.1.
12. Isenberg, A. (1987 [1950]) Analytical Philosophy and the Study
of Art, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 46:3, 128;
emphasis in original. Peter Lamarque remarks that analytical
methods had been applied to aesthetics already in the 1920s, the
1930s and the 1940s, in prominent philosophical journals and
works such as David W. Pralls Aesthetic Judgment (1929) and
Aesthetic Analysis (1936) and John Hospers Meaning and Truth
in the Arts (1946) (Lamarque, P. (2013) Analytic Aesthetics in
M. Beaney (ed.) Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic
Philosophy (Oxford: OUP), pp.7701).
13. For a similar view of aesthetics as a philosophy of criticism, see
Stolnitz, J. (1960) Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Criticism: A
Critical Introduction (Boston: Houghton Mifflin).
78 J. MIKKONEN
14. Passmore, J.A. (1951) The Dreariness of Aesthetics, Mind, 60:

239, 320, 327.
15. Ldeking, K. (2010) The Limits of Conceptual Analysis in

Aesthetics, The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 21:39, 100.
16. The early analytic philosophy of literature may be considered sec-
ondary in two senses, as it considered itself both subordinate to
the main areas of philosophy and ancillary to literary criticism. Of
these, the weakness discussed relates to the former sense of
secondariness.
17. Lamarque, P. & Olsen, S. H. (2004) General Introduction in
P.Lamarque & S.H. Olsen (eds) Aesthetics and the Philosophy of
Art: The Analytic Tradition (Malden, MA: Blackwell) p.4.
18. For a recent formulation of this view, see Landy, J. (2012) How to
Do Things with Fictions (Oxford: OUP), pp.411.
19. Lamarque & Olsen, General Introduction, p.2.
20. Wolterstorff, N. (2003) Why Philosophy of Art Cannot Handle
Kissing, Touching, and Crying, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, 61:1, 201. Richard Rorty, in turn, sees analytic phi-
losophy as an attempt to escape from historyan attempt to find
nonhistorical conditions of any possible historical development
((1980) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton
University Press), p.9).
21. Hintikka, J. (1998) Who Is About to Kill Analytic Philosophy? in
A.Biletzki & A.Matar (eds) The Story of Analytic Philosophy: Plot
and Heroes (London: Routledge), p.260.
22. Ryle, G. (1957) Introduction, in A.J. Ayer (ed.) The Revolution
in Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1957), p.1. Bernard Williams
also argues that analytic philosophy should be more concerned
with the past. For his defence of historical approaches in philo-
sophical enterprise, see Williams, B. (2002) Truth and Truthfulness
(Princeton: Princeton University Press) and (2008) Philosophy as
a Humanistic Discipline, in A. W. Moore (ed.) Philosophy as a
Humanistic Discipline (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
23. See Pettersson, A. & Olsen, S. H. (eds) (2011) Why Literary

Studies? Raisons Dtre of a Discipline (Oslo: Novus Press).
24. Literary examples have often been considered too complicated and
detailed for moral philosophical examples, see Phillips, D. Z.
(1982) Allegiance and Change in Morality: A Study in Contrasts
in D.Z. Phillips, Through a Darkening Glass: Philosophy, Literature,

and Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), p.9.
25. Zamir, T. (2007) Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean
Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp.445.
26. On the other hand, a focus on narrow genres, such as rock covers
or self-portrait photography, has become common in contempo-
rary analytic aesthetics.
27. Here, see Eagleton, T. (2012) The Event of Literature (New Haven:
Yale University Press), p.14.
28. Pettersson, A. (2008) Three Problematic Aspects of Analytical
Aesthetics, The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 35, 63.
29. See Selleri, chapter Literary Examples in Analytic Aesthetics: The
Claim of the Empirical in this volume.
30.
Shusterman, R. (1989) Introduction: Analysing Analytic
Aesthetics, in R. Shusterman (ed.) Analytic Aesthetics (Oxford:
Blackwell), p.7.
31. See Stock, K. & Thomson-Jones, K. (2008) Introduction in

K. Stock & K. Thomson-Jones (eds) New Waves in Aesthetics
(Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan), p. xii.
32. Beardsley, M. C. (1981) Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of
Criticism. Second edition (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing),
pp.37.
33. Lamarque, Philosophy of Literature, p.7.
34. Carroll, N. (2009) On Criticism (New York: Routledge), p.1.
35. Lamarque, P. & Olsen, S.H. (2004) The Philosophy of Literature:
Pleasure Restored in P.Kivy (ed.) The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics
(Malden, MA: Blackwell), pp.199200.
36. hlberg, L. (1993) The Nature and Limits of Analytic Aesthetics,
British Journal of Aesthetics, 33:1, 15.
37. See Gorman, D. (1990) From Small Beginnings: Literary

Theorists Encounter Analytic Philosophy, Poetics Today, 11:3,
656. In the Preface to updated edition of Must we mean what we
say? Stanley Cavell tells about the rejection of his Beckett and Lear
essays in literary and cultural journals, which he assumes was due
to the strangeness of his approach (a supposition that was later con-
firmed by literary scholars in describing their initial experiences
with the Lear piece). See Cavell, S. (2015) Must We Mean What We
Say? Updated edition (Cambridge: CUP), pp. xxvixxvii.
80 J. MIKKONEN
8. Gorman, Small Beginnings, 656; emphasis in original.

3
39. Lamarque & Olsen: General Introduction, p.5; see also Swirski,
P. (2010) Literature, Analytically Speaking: Explorations in the
Theory of Interpretation, Analytic Aesthetics, and Evolution (Austin:
University of Texas Press), p.11.
40. Swirski, Literature, Analytically Speaking, p.12.
41. Eagleton, The Event of Literature, p.11.
42. Currie, G. (2013) On Getting Out of the Armchair to Do

Aesthetics in M. C. Haug (ed.) Philosophical Methodology: The
Armchair or the Laboratory? (New York: Routledge), pp.4356.
Currie, however, wisely reminds one that the problems with which
aestheticians deal are very various, and not all of them ought to be
approached in the same way (p.442).
43. Currie, On Getting Out, p.448.
44. Currie, On Getting Out, pp.4356.
45. Currie, G. (2015) Methods in the Philosophy of Literature and
Film in H. Cappelen, J. Hawthorne & T. S. Gendler (eds) The
Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology (Oxford: OUP).
46. See Lamarque, P (2014) The Opacity of Narrative (London:

Rowman & Littlefield International), p.200n.
47. Lamarque & Olsen, The Philosophy of Literature: Pleasure

Restored, p.203.
48. Lamarque, Philosophy of Literature, p. vii.
49. Lamarque, Philosophy of Literature, p.8.
50. Lamarque, Philosophy of Literature, pp.45.
51. Lamarque, Philosophy of Literature, p. vii.
PART 2
Interdisciplinary Interaction in
Practice
CHAPTER 5
I Will Draw aMap ofWhat YouNever See:

Cartographic Metaphor inWittgensteins
Philosophical Investigations
MichaelRose-Steel
The later Wittgensteins use of recurring metaphors and analogies as a

central part of his philosophical method has been well documented.
Discussions about his choice of style and manner of argument are plen-
tiful, including accounts that seek to discover the proper philosophical
arguments behind the phrasing and those that hold it to be more produc-
tive to treat the writing as a work of literature, inseparable from its style.
Philosophical Investigations (hereafter PI) in particular has attracted rival
approaches to reading.1
This chapter, while avoiding conflating the activities of philosophy and
literature, attempts to take seriously a number of the key analogies used in
PI, to show how, by interrogating them, we can better understand both
Wittgensteins reason for using them and the implications for his ideas. The
effort is in a sense literary, and will make some of its arguments on the basis
Miller, K. (2014) iv, in K.Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion
(Manchester: Carcanet), line 4.
M. Rose-Steel (*)
University of Exeter, Callington, Cornwall, England
e-mail: M.D.Rose-Steel@exeter.ac.uk

84 M. ROSE-STEEL
of literary examples, chiefly from Kei Millers collection The Cartographer

Tries to Map a Way to Zion. This collection places notions of mapping,
landscape and language at the centre of its concerns, using them to write
about identity, expression and oppression, as well as studying the histories
and rhythms of cartographical language itself. The poems therefore pro-
vide a deeper and alternative exploration of the metaphors under scrutiny,
while also opening up a channel for discussing the ethical concerns implicit
in and underpinning Wittgensteins imagery. Simultaneously, by consider-
ing the ramifications of the language Wittgenstein used, an opportunity
for further engagement with Millers poetry is created in a consciously
interdisciplinary way. As is argued in a number of chapters in this col-
lectionnotably but differently by Andrea Selleri (chapter Literary
Examples in Analytic Aesthetics: The Claim of the Empirical) and Stein
Haugom Olsen (chapter The Discipline of Literary Studies)a histori-
cal and permeable perspective on literature as a discipline (both subject
matter and technique) can be materially productive and help us to avoid
taking for granted the staging devices of our investigations. In the case of
this chapter, though I only have space to touch on it briefly, one might
harness the parallel ways in which Miller and Wittgenstein make use of
complexly related (not to say disciplining) interlocutors in their writing,
as a way of bringing into focus the dissolution of apparent opposites or
equivalencies; this reflects how dialogue and characterisation can bring us
to see things not captured by conceptual analysis alone.
Maps, Journeys andLandscapes

In part, this chapter stems from a larger ambition to categorise
Wittgensteins network of analogies, and thereby provide another way of
thinking about his choices of presentation. Aspects such as the complex
relation between sight and thought, the concentration on physical activity,
and the interplay of everyday scenes with strange fantasy societies might all
be brought into a new light by being able to see their re-use and connec-
tions. This work is still ongoing, so is here limited to discussing one text
and a circumscribed collection of images, namely maps and landscapes.2
The actual word map only occurs in one section of PI, 653, and it is
not used as a direct metaphor for language, but as an example of the con-
fusions we can get into when we look for an explicit definition of r eading,
or understanding. In this section, Wittgenstein asks the following: At
what point can one be said to be following a map, if unable to provide
any of the normal structures of explanation that constitute being able to
I WILL DRAW AMAP OFWHAT YOUNEVER SEE: CARTOGRAPHIC METAPHOR... 85
read it? However, Wittgensteins treatment of our encounters with lan-

guageand especially the activity of philosophyis certainly associated
with related activities, notably, taking pictures or sketches3 of landscapes,4
of finding ones way about,5 routes and paths,6 and walking.7 These are
all very grounded and active images in the text, and comprise a striking
contrast to the idea of lofty contemplation usually associated with philoso-
phising.8 The question is whether these kinds of activities can provide us
with what we long fora way of understanding the world, or orienting
ourselves within itor whether they lack the distance needed to obtain a
clear view of that world.9
The Idea(l) ofaClear View

A central idea in Wittgensteins understanding of language and our lan-
guage games is the desire we have to obtain a perspicuous representa-
tion10 of our practices. Since we are always immersed in our language
games as they unfold, and can only truly understand them from within,
we lack the clear overview that we would sometimes like to attain in being
able to explain them from the outside. And this limitation is a frustration.
Within particular language games, this lack of an overview is partly to do
with the difference between knowing and inhabiting a practice (like the
difference between knowing the words of a language and being a native
speaker of it), and partly to do with the different demands that are made
of the concepts we want to explain when they are in use or on display;
sometimes a sharp-edged definition is wanted, sometimes a blurred edge,
or a series of examples.11 There is also the feeling (which may be thought
of as characteristic of the philosophical mind-set) that only an absolutely
outside perspective will do if we are to really explain things, including
language itself. If we could escape from the particularities of application,
we would better understand the functions and rules of particular words
or games. We would, as it were, be able to speak about language from
outside if only we could strip away all of the ambiguities and qualifica-
tions of actual use. Although certainly distinct from the ladder metaphor
at the end of the Tractatus, the ascent metaphor implicit in attaining this
perspicuous representation draws on similar feelings of escape, stillness
and clarity that would be achieved by getting above the ambiguities and
contingencies of our existence.12
There are different ways in which Wittgensteins use of perspicuous
representation can be taken, especially given the variably interpretable
phrasing of PI 122: The concept of a perspicuous representation is of
86 M. ROSE-STEEL
fundamental significance for us. It earmarks the form of account we give,

the way we look at things. I will briefly describe two divergent applications
of this remark to illustrate these possibilities: David Schalkwyks analysis
of earthbound and airborne metaphors of philosophy in Wittgensteins
Imperfect Garden and John Gibsons discussion of literature and stan-
dards in Reading for Life.13 In each case it is instructive to consider the
limitations on the idea of a perspicuous representation, and to what extent
these limitations are themselves part of Wittgensteins approach.
A lot hinges on what we understand the words concept and we to be
doing in 122. Schalkwyk takes the we to refer to the philosopher who
wishes to get above the hurly-burly of ordinary language-games in order
to see and make the necessary therapeutic connections that will free us
from the bewitchments induced by our usual inextricable situatedness in
linguistic practice (p.60). In other words, he equates the desired ascent
with the Wittgensteinian project of explaining philosophical confusions by
obtaining a clearer perspective on what puzzles and distracts us. If we do
not (currently) command a clear view, it is because we need to remove the
debris of everyday use or intellectual habits in order to avoid philosophical
cul-de-sacs and questions that remain unanswerable.
Looked at this way, Wittgensteins philosophical technique can be seen
as guiding us in this direction, pointing out obstacles, like someone famil-
iar with the territory to a visitor. Schalkwyk notes the elevated position of
the perspicuous representation and contrasts it instructively with the more
earthbound activities of criss-crossing landscapes mentioned above. How
can we both continue our necessarily involved language games (at ground
level) while also looking for the clear representation from above?14 He
reads this tension between the metaphors as an unresolved desire for the
clarity of philosophical abstraction (or the escape of the Tractarian lad-
der), and one which eventually proves a frustration for Wittgenstein. The
overview is linked with the search for a redeeming word that will put
an end to intellectual restlessness,15 but the search proves unending, and
brands the philosopher as a perpetual itinerant, never able to settle in or
summarise the surrounding landscape.16
The trouble with this reading of 122, attentive though it is, is that
the frustration described is attributed to the Wittgensteinian method in a
way that suggests the difficulty was not foreseen, or that the eggshells of
an earlier philosophy (as per Wittgensteins simile in Culture and Value17)
are still found to be clinging to the new approach and are not rejected but
treasured. But this seems to miss the central difference of Wittgensteins
method: that the frustration is not a surprise, or something eventually to

be overcome, but something that has to be faced up to, and worked with,
despite the acknowledgement that philosophy will never permanently
come to an endthe redeeming word is a moment of peace or rest, not an
epiphany. I argue that if we take the words concept and we in 122 dif-
ferently, we can attribute the we not to the small band of Wittgensteinian
philosophers, but to us more generallythe range of humanity that may
include philosophers in general in their attempts to analyse and understand
language, politicians looking for the best means of persuasion, Christmas
party attendees working out social niceties, and so forth. We have a sense
that to command our language game is to get a clear view of it, to be
able to partially stand above it in ways that other players cannot. Think
of the common footballing expressions, that a clever pass showed great
vision or that reliable defending involved being able to expertly read the
game. Within such particular language games, an overview is sometimes,
and to varying degrees, achievable, and we therefore have the concept of a
perspicuous representation. However, when it comes to the kind of abso-
lutely general overview that philosophers tend to seek, we have the con-
cept but no way of making it real; our perfectly understandable desire for
it is doomed to failure. This is the key Wittgensteinian insightnot that
the clear view is needed but difficult (the objective of much philosophi-
cal activity), nor that the very idea of a clear view is nonsense. Rather, the
desire for such an understanding is simultaneously present and under-
standable, yet unfulfillable. That is why the philosopher remains earth-
bound and restless. This is not a flaw in Wittgensteins method, but a key
part of it; without that realisation, the continuation would be not work
but torture. The real difficulty of this kind of philosophy comes from hav-
ing to accept an element of perpetual frustration, release from which can
only be momentary.
John Gibson has a similarly grounded idea of what a perspicuous rep-
resentation could be, in Reading for Life. The challenge of our failure to
understand is not met by a flight away from our language practices, but
by the accumulation of helpful examples, so that where we are puzzled
we are shown how to carry on, but in such a way that nothing seems
strange, nothing appears to stand in need of explanation. Indeed, a per-
spicuous representation does not explain anything. It rather demystifies
what we once found queer.18 This does not mean that for each case there
is a perfect example, or a standpoint from which we can see everything
there simply is no Gods-eye view19 that could be attained. Instead, with
88 M. ROSE-STEEL
patience and attention to how we use our language, we can provide a

series of intermediate cases that serve particular purposes. Gibsons reten-
tion of the provisional and ordinary nature of our relief is effective; there
is no transformative information, only a new view on things and a series of
fixes. It is important to remember, though, that this sage advice will only
satisfy the philosophical urge temporarily. We have always to guard against
our desire to make our world fully comprehensible. How do we continue
to resist the temptation of generalisation, without giving up the work of
philosophy altogether?
Both Gibson and Schalkwyk go on to describe how literary examples
can be made to do the kind of therapeutic work that their conception
of philosophical restlessness requires, which I will say more about briefly
later. Meanwhile, I want to return to the metaphors of maps and land-
scapes in order to show how Wittgensteins repeated uses can create the
series of reminders that are needed to keep us grounded and engaged. We
can attempt to be continually prepared for the compromises and limita-
tions of our situated worldview, and this is part of the effectiveness of
Wittgensteins choice of imagery: the map, symbol of order and overview,
can be revealed as a vehicle of compromise.
Remarkable Maps
In Glimpses of Unsurveyable Maps, David Wagner has given a many-
faceted account of Wittgensteins use of the map metaphor, alongside
examples of imagined or impossible maps in literature. It provides a
reminder of the specific kind of compromise that a map is, without which
the notion becomes absurd.20 A map cannot replicate the world it rep-
resents in such detail that it becomes a suffocating replica, as happens in
Jorge Luis Borges On Scientific Rigor.21 Neither, though, can a per-
fect map be one that is impossible to misread because it shows nothing
at all, as The Bellmans chart in Lewis Carrolls Hunting of the Snark
demonstrates. Nor can a map go all the way down, like Josiah Royces
idea of a map that is so perfectly, self-reflexively accurate that it contains
a scale v ersion of itself, which contains a scale version of itself, and so on
ad infinitum.22 However, despite this necessary distance and difference
from what it represents, a map must contain some connection with its
own context in order to be useful, which may be considered a form of
self-reflexiveness.23 Indeed, a map must be sufficiently like a map to be
recognised as one, even if it turns out to be a very bad or misleading one:

Maps will only get us lost if we know how to read them.24
The point of the map metaphor is that it combines the method by which
Wittgenstein sought to progress, while also showing that this method itself
only makes sense relative to a context. A map is useful because it is limited,
because it has certain omissions and assumptions. When the importance of
each maps particularity of design and application is forgotten, the map
becomes counter-productive or ridiculous. In this sense the useless maps
Wagner describes become useful, [i]f only as inspirational material for
philosophers.25 More pertinently, perhaps, they can act as reminders of
the dangers of philosophical ambition and the over-application of our pro-
ductive pictures and metaphors.
These considerations of mapping, however, tend to come at the
image only from one side, as it were. We draw or use a map to find our
way about in a landscape, one that seems to predate and dwarf us as we
traverse it. Mark Rowe is right to note that the journey26 through the
Wittgensteinian landscape is usually rural or mountainous27something
discovered and to all intents and purposes permanentrather than the
built and designed world of a city.28 Where the city metaphor does come
into play in Philosophical Investigations, it is usually still an underpopulated
ancient city29 and tends to be a restrictive or disorientating place, rather
than something that can be criss-crossed and explored30; here we follow
paths but do not create them. Most often, the map metaphor suggests
a landscape; the journeys are on foot and through countryside. One is
hard-pressed not to associate the image with Wittgenstein striding across
the dramatic countryside of Norway or Austria, or taking a riverside walk
with a friend, deep in conversation.31 The map is the means by which we
navigate the landscape, or explain it to others; it is a means of following
the rules laid down by the space we want to understand.
At this point, a small cross-country excursion: exactly how rules are
laid downand the implications for what it means to then follow a
ruleremain points of contention. Most Wittgensteinian accounts posit
a normative power to the rules of language, so that the roads they make
offer us the only route of travel; any attempt not to follow the road leads
into the wilderness of nonsense. There is certainly a sense of being thus
guided and directed in how we follow rules. But it is not clear that this is
an essential or operative aspect of the rules themselves. Wittgenstein in The
Big Typescript also uses the metaphor of a path around a garden: A rule
90 M. ROSE-STEEL
compared to a path. Does a path say that one is to walk on it (and not on
the grass)? Does it state that people usually go that way?32 In Wittgenstein:
Opening Investigations, Michael Luntley responds: Clearly, both ques-
tions are to be answered in the negative. So, what is a path? It is a regular-
ity, a way we regularly go up the garden.33 If so, no force makes the path
the way it is; it emerges as a factor of the regularity of our usea descrip-
tion, rather than a prescription. Luntley uses this more modest notion
of rule to question conservative, normative accounts of Wittgensteins
conception of grammar.34 For our purposes here, the diversity of ways
in which language can direct usfrom necessity to instruction to simple
regularityis worth noting, both in connection with the impossibility of
a conclusive release from philosophy via a clear overview, as in Schalkwyks
account, and with the idea of our view of the world having a living history,
as the following discussion will make clear.
While a fuller discussion of the difference the path analogy makes will
have to take place elsewhere, one way of reading the difference between
a path partly created by our actions and a road laid out ahead of us is that
the former can help us to extend Wittgensteins metaphorreturning to
our original trackinto thinking about the implications of mapping for
the landscape mapped, as well as for the map-holder.
Cartography is not a neutral science, though it tends to aspire to be
so. As J.B. Harley warns in The New Nature of Maps, design is fraught
with potential ethical consequences.35 And yet, Harley complains, the
discipline itself rarely engages in the consequences of the choices made
of what to map, what to obscure, the distortions of projections, and the
implications of keys and symbols. Without underestimating the achieve-
ments of increasingly powerful mapping technologies and the benefits of
standardised design, [o]nce it is accepted that certain conventions are
natural or normal, the danger is that they acquire a coercive and
manipulative authority.36 Truth in mapping cannot only be a question
of graphical accuracy and respect for copyright; the ways in which carto-
graphical consensus can shut down those voices that do not follow its keys
may hide the choices of omission or accent in design, and these require
our attention, too. A map does not only record, but fixes, simplifies and
instructs.37
Here it is useful to turn to a literary example that provides a way of
speaking about such issues that resists being subsumed into the standardis-
ing discourse of cartography. It simultaneously provides an exploration of
the map metaphor that has implications for our thinking about language:
our yearning for a clear view, and what it means to orient ourselves in
this way.
The Cartographers Ideal

Kei Millers The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion has received
widespread praise for its humour, musicality and political alertness, win-
ning 2013 years Forward Prize. Much of Millers writingprose, poetry
and commentcharts issues of globalisation, race, blending cultures, and
the powers of literature to reveal and preserve specific lived experiences.
At the heart of the collection is the insistence that the ways in which we
talk create and constrain how we see the world, what seems possible within
it. The words we have access to, and the status we afford them, impact on
not only what we see, but how and where we look. This may no longer
be a startling idea. By its own terms, however, it is one that perpetually
needs to be fleshed out again through original examples and forms. It
is one thing to say that our language is itself active and world-building,
another to keep this in mind through renewal and demonstration. As our
language-world evolves, so does our appreciation of this change. What
Miller has achieved is to interlink clashes of culture, discourse and outlook
in a manner that is involving yet individual, and that remains irreducibly
poetic.
The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion is largely composed of
a dialogue of poems between the titular Cartographer, who has been
charged with mapping the island of Jamaica, and the Rastaman, who is
keen to challenge the assumptions and systems behind this apparently
neutral task. Through the moments that pass between the interlocutors,
we are presented with the benefits of mappingits precision and capacity
for orderingbut also its contrast to the bright variety of local colour, the
dark rumblings of history, and the unmappability of people. The turning
point of their encounter comes in the Cartographers sudden resolution
to map a way to the mystic city of Zion, about which the question that
defines his disciplineWhere is it?makes little sense. At best, one might
ask the related questionHow do I get there?
Initially, the confrontation seems to be one of cultural asymmetry, as
the Cartographer represents the scientistic, abstract, Western, quantita-
tive discipline of cartography, whose objectivity belies a rapacious urge
to count and classify; against him is set the firmly local, historical, pro-
vocative Rastaman. The latter is loquacious, hospitable and distrusting,
92 M. ROSE-STEEL
a determinedly human figure, wholly involved in, and protective of, the
life the Cartographer would like to classifyneutrally and rationally, as if
from above.
In particular one can find the attractions and dangers of a systemising
worldview. The illusion of neutrality in such an endeavour is a common
target in the poems, for instance, the pair of short poems numbered iii
and iv:
iii.
The cartographer says
no
What I do is science. I show
the earth as it is, without bias.
I never fall in love. I never get involved
with the muddy affairs of land.
Too much passion unsteadies the hand.
I aim to show the full of a place in just a glance.
iv.
The rastaman thinks, draw me a map of what you see
then I will draw a map of what you never see
and guess me whose map will be bigger than whose?
Guess me whose map will tell the larger truth?38
But this difference does not result in a stand-off. The characters con-
tinue to argue, travel together, pick up each others traits, and reveal their
similarities. The Rastaman plays the hostCome share with I an unsalted
stew/an exalted stew of gungo peas and callaloo/and let I tell you bout
the nearby towns,39 while the Cartographer, despite his early claims that
he would never get involved40 finds himself not recording neutrally the
landscape, but learning of the islands sometimes dark history, and wish-
ing he could make some recompense, if on his map he made our roads a
little/smoother, a little straighter, as if in drawing/he might erase a small
bit of historys disgrace.41
In each encounter, the consequences of mapping are drawn out
from the large-scale imposition of borders42 to the precise vagueness of
navigating according to the advice of locals43; the possibility of seeing the
world geometrically or mythically,44 or of the relation between representa-
tion and history.45 Two recurring themes in the collection also comple-
ment the dialogue poems: place names and roads. I have discussed these
images in more detail elsewhere,46 so for the moment I want to take one
image that emerges from the poems, and is particularly relevant for the
Wittgensteinian map metaphor. Miller is at pains to stress the history
and the continued living of itthat have shaped the island geographi-
cally, culturally and linguistically. In Roads, xxi, v, and elsewhere, the
different purposes and characters of roads are charted; a route on which
we travel may also be a scar of slavery, a reminder of pilgrimage, crime or
struggle, an opening up of new land, an escape or a conquest. In short,
roads wear their histories into their landscape.47
The Wittgensteinian figure criss-crossing the landscape is not, on such
a view, a neutral presence; it imposes while it explores by opening up one
route, closing down another, recording and moving according to a partic-
ular purpose. The perspicuous representation is not one that can be created
by absenting oneself from the landscape, but neither can it be achieved by
an exhaustive familiarity with the terrain. We make choices based on our
priorities and limitations. In this structure of selection and incompletion,
mapping is an ethically charged choice, and likewise the map metaphor
must consider its ethical implications. Wittgensteins choice of metaphor,
thus seen, reflects his own stance regarding the proper way of approaching
the ethical, including the means by which one might write on ethics.
Ethics andPractice
It is difficult in any discussion of Wittgensteins work that touches on the

poetic to exclude from the same debate the notion of the ethical. The reg-
ular linking of the two in Wittgensteins notes, even while his publishing
on either subject was near non-existent, marks something important both
about how the later Wittgenstein conceived of language and judgement
functioning, and the centrality of ethics to Wittgensteins conception of a
human life.
The oft-quoted remark that Wittgenstein considered talking about
ethics and aesthetics to be merely Geschwtz (chatter) might be taken
to indicate a dismissal of the topic as nonsense or, at best, an essentially
human but ultimately hopeless activity, as a positivist reading would take
the Lecture on Ethics to be presenting.48 In the later writings, ethics fall
almost completely out of the picture, with only one brief aside occur-
ring in the Philosophical Investigations: 77. We might then ask whether
Wittgenstein had simply lost interest in the topic, or felt that his earlier
critique had answered all the questions, or whether he now thought that
philosophyeither his own or the model of philosophising he was often
94 M. ROSE-STEEL
attackingwas not the vehicle for such a discussion. However, an equally

viable and more productive reading of the omission is that he did not hold
ethics to be unimportant, but perhaps too importantthat anything that
could be said in ethics would always fall short of its target and be a travesty
of what it hoped to capture. Leaving aside the fact that everything we
know about Wittgensteins personal life insists that he was far from indif-
ferent to the ethical or the aesthetic, there is little to suggest in the later
writing that the ethical has become irrelevant;49 this is never stated, and its
omission may in itself be a comment on the subjecteven a key to mak-
ing sense of the project, as Benjamin Tilghman has argued in Wittgenstein,
Ethics and Aesthetics. The moral and aesthetic dimensions of Philosophical
Investigations remain to be made manifest through its techniques, rather
than its utterances.50
No matter how we choose to view the transition from his earlier to his
later thinking, Wittgensteins movement beyond the work of the author
of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus51 seems in this area to be connected
to a dissatisfaction with the tools used, or how the problem was conceived,
rather than a rejection of the subject of the end of the Tractatusthe
ethical and how it might be spoken about. I follow Yaniv Iczkovitss line
in Wittgensteins Ethical Thought, therefore, in seeing the Geschwtz as a
complaint against the usual ways in which philosophy approaches ethics,
specifically the moral philosophy of G.E. Moore, whose role in pricking
Wittgenstein on in his work it would be difficult to overestimate.52 In this
case, the problem Wittgenstein sees is not with the attention to ethics
itself, but with the emptiness of assuming that there is something iden-
tifiable as the gooda special category of thingand then trying to fit
more tangible concepts into this space.
In line with the method of the Philosophical Investigations, we ought
rather to find multiple examples (both in everyday life and in imagined
circumstances) and see what each of these tells us about the various ways
in which the idea of the good is usedhow these uses connect and dif-
fer. Literature seems like a suitable candidate for this sort of work, since it
provides examples in a way that is bounded and memorable. Both Gibson
and Schalkwyk, in different ways, want to use the literary example as a
reiterable moment of life, like an animated gif that we can recall and rerun
alongside our everyday experience. This will provide a model for judge-
ment or a clear(er) view of our practices, respectively. But in either case,
what the example is supposed to achieve relies on extracting it from the
practices in which it is embedded (reading, performing, watching) in

order to facilitate analysis. The literary example makes itself particularly
attractive for this move, because it is often written down, shareable and
repeatable, and manages to both reflect life and not represent a specific
(real) part of the world. A soliloquy from Paradise Lost will be available
for re-reading and re-performing at our leisure; its construction within
the literary frees it from diluting contextual detail, and allows it to be a
superior version of language-at-work.
However, it never thereby quite escapes the necessity of being language-
at-work. As Rupert Read points out in Applying Wittgenstein, as soon as
we attempt to study language in this decontextualised way, we spoil the
work that it is supposed to be doing.53 The extracted expression becomes
a useless knob, unconnected, a mere ornament.54 Reads account, in par-
ticular, his analysis of Wallace Stevens Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Blackbird, suggests that the poem (and by extension poetry generally)
do something different from the practical work of ordinary language:
poetry can transport us; it can make a beautiful noise [] but it cannot
transport us from A to B.55 In other words, poetry has the ability to create
certain moods or grammatical effectsin the Stevens case, urging us to
try to imagine things that on closer inspection turn out to be unavailable
to our imagination, in the manner of Wittgensteins philosophybut it
remains, strictly speaking, useless; it does no work in the ordinary flow of
life; it stands idle. Reads analysis does make a persuasive case for one way
of reading Stevens poem, but the divide that the attendant view of poetic
language opens up is somewhat reductive, based on an idea of idleness
linked to a definite outcome. Being on display in a poem, though it may
repurpose elements of language from their everyday application need not
stop them being part of the activity. Even the magicians coloured hand-
kerchief is part of the trick, even if its purpose is to distract us from the
mechanism by which the Queen of Hearts finds its way into our pocket.
Gibsons and Schalkwyks uses of literature similarly carry this division
between the literary and practical language. In addition, this view seems
implicitly to contain a reductive view of what other forms of language
are doing, when even the most mundane exchanges of information are
implanted with jokes, clichs, gestures, circumlocutions, flourishes and
repetitions, even if these are not on display as they may be in a poem. If
this is kept in mind, the common twentieth-century quandary about what
the essential difference between ordinary and literary language is disap-
96 M. ROSE-STEEL
pears, given that there is in fact no material difference, [only] the use to
which we put language varies so much that words and sentences become,
as it were, unfamiliar when they reappear in a new context.56
This is, of course, a very large and varied debate, so I am only touch-
ing on it here briefly, in the service of a more specific point about poetic/
philosophical activity. Certainly, to approach a poem looking for direct
instruction or information will often lead to disappointment. Even to look
for a new metaphor or image for something in everyday experience seems
to fall short of what the activity of literature entails, as though the new
expression were something to be extracted from the poem for application
elsewhere. Rather, the value and richness of poetry lie in its totalityas
practice, invention and activity.
This is perhaps the best way of taking Wittgensteins notoriously difficult-
to-translate remark Philosophie drfte mann eigentlich nur dichten.57 It
would, I suggest, be a mistake to equate this with the traditional forms of
poetry, or even the attention to finding the right words and expressions
(though this was certainly a deeply-rooted part of Wittgensteins attempts
to write philosophy). Better, it should be seen as the call for an activity per-
formed in a certain spirit, of a showing that does more than is said. Here I
use showing advisedly, and not as a stand-in for what is absolutely beyond
expression, but as something that makes active demands on the reader, in
a way beyond the transfer of information; to say Here, come and see what
I see can sometimes be the best and only description on offer.
And this is essentially the technique of both Kei Millers poems and
the character of the Rastaman within them; there is very little direct argu-
ment in the collection, though the Rastaman, who holds a PhD, from
Glasgow/no less,58 would be perfectly capable of arguing within the
Academy, if this is what would be effective. Instead, we are given mean-
ingful details and their connections that might otherwise be lost: plenty
things that poor people cyaa do without like board/houses, and the
corner shop from which Miss Katie sell/her famous peanut porridge.59
The Cartographer cannot just be told about them, either, he has to eat
the food, dance to the music of the place, the DUP-DUP-dudududu-
DUP-DUP of a nyabinghi beat; this is no riddim the mapmakers heart
is/familiar with. No. Aint nuttn iambic bout dis.60 And in the same
way the reader is not just told, but brought into the imaginative space of
another voice, through Millers use of patois, powerful rhythms, and the
demonstration that things can be seen differentlya kind of persuasion,
an invitation to compromise. Millers sketches of a landscape, his itinerant

Cartographer, may never reach Zion, though it is the search, not a dis-
covery that will get him there. Likewise, the Wittgensteinian figure in the
landscape must continue to travel, seeking out new viewpoints, drawing
new sketches.61
Acknowledgements I would like to thank my anonymous reviewers for valuable

feedback on previous drafts of this chapter, as well as Esther van Raamsdonk, my
collaborator on the project that initiated it.
Notes
1. Wittgenstein, L. (1997) Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E.
M.Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell). For literary treatments of PI,
see Stanley Cavells 2004 essay The Investigations Everyday
Aesthetics of Itself, in J.Gibson & W.Huemer (eds) The Literary
Wittgenstein (London: Routledge), Majorie Perloffs 1996 aes-
thetic/biographical account in Wittgensteins Ladder: Poetic
Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press), or Mark W.Rowes claim in 2013 that it could
be considered a late-Romantic text in Success Through Failure:
Wittgenstein and the Romantic Preface, Aisthesis, 6:1, 85113.
2. The analysis is based only on the English text of G.E.M.Anscombes
translation of Philosophical Investigations; a bi-lingual analysis
might have generated more results, though likely not significantly;
likewise other editions. I mined the text using common terms and
phrases associated with journeys, landscapes and mapping. Some
phrases are well known, such as the remark in the Preface (p. vii):
The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number
of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these
long and involved journeyings (my emphases) for which key terms
I sought out additional instances. Other terms were part of the
usual network of expressions connected with these practices. A full
account of all the instances in which relevant phrases or images
occur would be, in its current form, unwieldy, so in this article I
will only reference (as endnotes) key phrases as they are deployed
as part of the ongoing argument.
3. Cf. PI p. vii.
4. Cf. PI p. vii, 398, 509, p.197, p.200, p.205.
98 M. ROSE-STEEL
5. Cf. PI 123, 203, 664, p.202.

6. Cf. PI 85, 139, 203, 525, 534, p.213, 653.
7. Cf. PI 25, 38, 107, 139, 172, 183, 398, 444, 615,
653, p.215, p.216.
8. The contrast between the geographical language of the Philosophical
Investigations and the geological or depth imagery of the earlier
Tractatus has been made before, see, for example, P.M.S.Hackers
(2001) Wittgenstein: Connections and Controversies (Oxford:
OUP), p.23. It is hoped that this chapter will emphasise how sys-
tematic Wittgensteins use of such metaphors could be, as well as
giving additional weight to the specifically literary importance of
his choice of language. I hold that the notion of activity is strongly
connected with the language of Philosophical Investigations.
9. Cf. PI 5, 24, 89, 92, 122, 125, 126, 132, 435, p.198,
p.213, p.224.
10. PI 122.
11. PI 77.
12. Wittgenstein, L. (1997) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F.
Pears & B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge), 6.54.
13. Gibson, J. (2004) Reading for Life, and Schalkwyk, D. (2004)
Wittgensteins Imperfect Garden, in J.Gibson & W.Huemer
(eds) The Literary Wittgenstein (London: Routledge).
14. Schalkwyk, Imperfect Garden, p.61.
17. Wittgenstein, L. (2006) Culture and Value, trans. P. Winch

(Oxford: Blackwell), 51e.
18. Gibson, Reading for Life, p.118.
19. Gibson, Reading for Life, p.119.
20. Wagner, D. (2011) Glimpses of Unsurveyable Maps, Publications
of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, 17, 36576.
21. Wagner, Glimpses, 366.
23. Wagner claims that in a contextual sense every useful map is a
map-within-a-map. For what use would a map of Oxfordshire be
to someone lost in Lower Austria? (Glimpses, 371). But this
ignores the fact that a map could be used for navigation outside of
its own field of depiction, such as when planning a trip, or using its
scaling to mark off how far one has travelled, or learning how to
read a another, more useful, map by studying the keys and signs of
cartographical orthodoxy, and so on. However, the more general
point still applies: a map must contain enough that is comprehen-
sible to the reader and the context if it is to do more than play to
our hunches.
24. Compare this to Wittgensteins remark in On Certainty, trans.
D.Paul and G.E. M.Anscombe (New York: Harper Touchbooks,
1972) about how differently a diagram representing the inside of
a radio receiver might appear to one who does or doesnt under-
stand its significance (201).
26. Bulson, E. (2007) Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imag

ination, 18502000 (New York: Routledge), p.131; cf. PI p. vii.
27. Cf. PI p.200.
28. Rowe, Success Through Failure, 87.
29. PI 18.
30. Cf. PI 89, 206, 243, 308, p.185.
31. See, for example, the majority of episodes recounted in the mem-
oirs assembled in Wittgenstein, L. (1984) Recollections of
Wittgenstein, R. Rhees (ed.) (Oxford: OUP). This biographical
note may be irrelevant to how we understand and apply the meta-
phor itselfthat is, its significationthough it perhaps explains
some of its continuing appeal, both for Wittgenstein and for us.
32. Wittgenstein, L. (2005) in C.G. Luckhardt & M.A. E.Aue (eds
and trans.) The Big Typescript (Blackwell: Malden), 240.
33. Luntley, M. (2015) Wittgenstein: Opening Investigations (Oxford:
Wiley Blackwell), p.97.
34. Luntley, Wittgenstein, p.92.
35. Harley, J. B. (2001) The New Nature of Maps (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Press) p.201.
36. Harley, New Nature, p.202.
37. Wittgenstein regularly asks about the way to go or knowing the
way about: cf. PI 222, 230, 309, 339; 123, 203, 664,
p.202.
38. Miller, iii and iv, Cartographer.
39. Miller, v, Cartographer, lines 13.
40. Miller, iii, line 5.
41. Miller, ix, Cartographer, lines 346.
42. Miller, ii, Cartographer.
100 M. ROSE-STEEL
43. Miller, x, Cartographer.

44. Miller, xii, Cartographer.
45. Miller, xi and xiii, Cartographer.
46. Rose-Steel, M. (forthcoming) Cartographic Thinking and the

Poetry of Kei Miller: Of Metaphors and Maps, Politics of Place:
Green Connections, 3.
47. Cf. PI 29, 85, 426, 491, 596.
48. Wittgenstein, L. (1965) A Lecture on Ethics, The Philosophical
Review, 74.1, 312.
49. See Monk, R. (1991) Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius
(London: Vintage).
50. Tilghman, B. R. (1991) Wittgenstein, Ethics, and Aesthetic: The
View from Eternity (London: Macmillan) p. ix.
51. PI 23.
52. Iczkovits, Y. (2012) Wittgensteins Ethical Thought (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan).
53. Read, R. & Cook, L. (eds) (2007) Applying Wittgenstein (London:
Continuum).
54. PI 270.
55. Read & Cook, Applying Wittgenstein, p.35.
56. Perloff, Wittgensteins Ladder, pp.1920.
57. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 28e: [R]eally one should write
philosophy only as one does poetry is one slightly clumsy transla-
tion, though dichten as the activity of poetising has no real equiv-
alent in English. Various translations have been offered, each with
a complication. One wants to avoid too formal a connection, as
though philosophy should be bent into certain pre-existing forms,
as a poem might be, or equate Wittgensteins writing with an
attempt at verse, erasing the distinction between the two kinds of
activity. I am sympathetic to Schalkwyks interest in preserving the
activity at the heart of dichten, though even the suggestion that
philosophy should be poetised (Imperfect Garden, p.56) feels
retroactive; my suggestion of a certain spirit being called upon
(above) avoids these difficulties, but admittedly goes beyond either
a direct translation or anything as convenient a clear explanation.
For example, James C. Edwards in Ethics without Philosophy:
Wittgenstein and the Moral Life (Miami: UP Florida, 1982) makes
a similar claim about the need to adopt a certain spirit if seeking to
continue Wittgensteins philosophical project, but his conception
is essentially Christian-religious, whereas my interest lies in the

acknowledgement of the unsettleability and work on oneself (cf.
Culture and Value 24e) that constitutes so much of poetic creativ-
ity and, specifically in this case, the act of writing.
58. Miller, xiv, Cartographer, lines 78.
59. Miller, ii, lines 68.
60. Miller, xvii, Cartographer, lines 79.
61. Cf. PI p. vii, 232, 673.
CHAPTER 6
The Pleasures ofSolipsism forWriters

andPhilosophers
EryShin
Phenomenology, queer theory, and Gertrude Stein have rarely, if ever,

been studied together. Why, I suspect, has to do with the difficulty of all
three. Stein, with few exceptions, breaks with textbook grammar, spelling,
and storytelling (nowhere are the usual contextual clues, chronologies,
and character development given to invite readers in) to reorder the logic
by which the world is rendered into an aesthetic phenomenon. Queer
criticism, while known for deconstructing mainstream gender-sex norms,
especially by disassociating biological sex from gender identity and sexual
orientation, remains a nebulously broad field. For unlike gay and lesbian
studies, queer theory includes heterosexual desire and identity politics
within its purview, questioning how they should be played out and why
for instance, whether the gender binary need remain as such, gender
exists as a fact versus an externally enforced fiction, or sexual preferences
need be fixed for life. Phenomenologys relative inaccessibility begins with
its founders prose, whose dense, winding sentences and neologisms chal-
lenge even trained readers. Structural obscurities aggravate these stylistic
difficulties. Edmund Husserls uvre seems to revise or reintroduce itself
with each constituent work. Individual books may be devoted to specific
E. Shin (*)
Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94035, USA
e-mail: eryshin@stanford.edu

104 E. SHIN
themes, but how those themes interact with Husserls broader philosophi-
cal system is never explicitly stated.
And then there are phenomenologys technical ambiguities. Is phe-
nomenology a combination of introspective psychology and logic or an
earlier version of logical semantics? Is Husserl a realist or an idealist? Is
Husserls presenting phenomenology as a hard science a contradiction
in terms? How has (or hasnt) Husserls phenomenology evolved over
time? Such questions have generated almost a century of debate regard-
ing phenomenologys aims and historical development.1 The result is a
philosophical movement whose most celebrated thinkersHeidegger,
Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Ricoeur, Ingarden, Levinas, and
Schultzshare few of its founders emphases (or heavily revise them)
and whose critics possess a vociferousness that substantially informs phe-
nomenologys ongoing progress. Decades of grappling with these issues,
however, have given readers a better grasp of phenomenologys meaning
and value.
Although Husserl defines phenomenology as the eidetic exploration
of imaginative natural data2 or descriptive eidetic doctrine of transcen-
dentally pure mental processes as viewed in the phenomenological atti-
tude3and these are but two variations of severalDavid W.Smith and
Eric Matthews relate phenomenology most elegantly when the former
describes it as how the mind (and therewith language) represents things
in the world,4 while the latter proffers, how intentional objects appear
to consciousness.5 Intentionality here does not refer to the purpose-
fulness stated in dictionaries, but to the way in which consciousness
is directed toward things, real or imaginary.6 Consciousness is always
consciousness of something, the slogan goes. In that vein, intentional
objects are objects I intend or cognise. As these remarks suggest, phe-
nomenology is not so much about the objects out there, as how they
acquire meaning in consciousness. Phenomenology leaves the former
pursuit to ontology proper (of which existential phenomenology is a
branch in practice) and empirical science. How we consciously experi-
ence what is there brings us to phenomenology rather than ontology.
To quote Husserl directly, [T]he actual thing, the actual world, is not a
phenomenological datum.7
But lest we give the false impression that phenomenology operates
apart from reality, it should be clarified that Husserl emphasises how
consciousness opens out to the real (although this focus becomes exces-
THE PLEASURES OFSOLIPSISM FORWRITERS ANDPHILOSOPHERS 105
sive at times). The phenomenologist explores the world through direct

intuition, which, in this context, denotes unmediated contact with
everything presented to consciousness. Direct intuition leads us, then,
to the phenomenological methods ultimate ambition: the entire work
of differentiating essences and of conceptual apprehension of essences.8
Phenomenology deals with the signification(s) attributed to objects. It
scrutinises the essence of consciousness through the ways that conscious-
ness relates to things, not the essences of things themselves. So when
Husserl famously declares, [W]e must go back to the things them-
selves,9 he means things-as-intendedwhat precede things-as-they-
are because they comprise the immediate sensory or imaginative fodder
for empirical investigation. Thus, phenomenology grounds all philoso-
phies for Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the two phenomenolo-
gists whose theories most intimately relate to Steins aesthetic concerns.
Phenomenology comes first to the extent that it examines how we think
about everything, including ontology, epistemology, and itself, although
phenomenology as a discipline recruits concepts from other disciplines
and falls under Philosophys overarching doctrine.
Merleau-Ponty prioritises embodied subjectivity above all. [O]ur
body is a being of two leaves, from one side a thing among things and
otherwise what sees them and touches them, Merleau-Ponty writes in
The Visible and the Invisible.10 Or beyond the leaf metaphor, which he
immediately finds dissatisfying, our body is Visibility sometimes wander-
ing and sometimes reassembled.11 To be conscious is to be a body. My
bodyand ergo Iam in and of the world. My subjectivity is uniquely
my own, yet it forms from material conditions and stimuli-responses
beyond my control: the optical structures converting light into electro-
chemical impulses, the food I consume to survive, my stomachs ability
to digest food, the language(s) taught to me, my brains physiological
properties that permit linguistic development, the cultural environment I
was raised in, and so forth. While Husserl, too, integrates the subjective,
intersubjective, and objective, he concentrates on ideal meanings rather
than how the external world forms the backdrop for all phenomenologi-
cal description.
Whether it professes itself as such or not, the phenomenology of lit-
erature has stayed abreast of such inquiries into the body, perception,
society, language, and so on. Aside from Roman Ingardens The Literary
Work of Art and Norman Weinsteins Gertrude Stein and the Literature of
106 E. SHIN
the Modern Consciousness, there has been scant official discussion of phe-
nomenologys literary applications until the past fifteen years or so (scant
compared to that granted to psychoanalysis or Marxism), when works
such as Maurice Natansons The Erotic Bird; Ulrika Maude and Matthew
Feldmans jointly edited Beckett and Phenomenology; and Phenomenology,
Modernism and Beyond, an anthology arranged by Carole Bourne-Taylor
and Ariane Mildenberg, began appearing.12 But literature and its theo-
retical discourse are already phenomenological studies in many respects.
With or without phenomenologys jargon and method, all literature bears
a phenomenological stamp because it is spawned from the imagination of
individual writers. Creative texts open the door to vicarious experiences.
During reading, we can pretend (often with more detail and sustained
attention than if we were following a story spun aloud) to look at the
world through anothers eyes.
Themselves only phenomenological in practice, not intent, many
critical worksfrom Henry James The Art of Fiction to Virginia
Woolf s Modern Fiction, Erich Auerbachs Mimesis, David Lodges
Consciousness and the Novel, and James Woods How Fiction Works
have noted literatures dual investment in representing and manipulat-
ing the workings of consciousness. Through collaging conversational
snippets, events, stray thoughts, and sensory descriptions from vari-
ous perspectives and moments, modernist pieces, for example, recreate
the tumultuousness defining our inner life. Steins Tender Buttons even
scrambles the state-of-affairs between and within perceived objects and
perceptual modes. Literature temporarily or permanently transfigures
our experience of its subject matter. It is often written from the first
person, tracing various oratorial modes. Literature already dwells on
what Husserl calls noematic content, noema referring to the mean-
ing that can be abstracted from, and our attitude toward, an intentional
object.13 Characters see, feel, dream, hallucinate, wish for, remember
the list goes ondifferent things in different ways. When such inten-
tionalities become patterned, we have themes, motifs, symbols, and
the like.
The pertinence of phenomenology to queer theory is a slightly
different matter. By interrogating the assumptions behind everyday
experience, phenomenology dovetails nicely with queer studies. For
phenomenology, especially Merleau-Pontys body-oriented phenom-
enology, allows gays and lesbians to locate themselves beyond the
constraints of fear and disgust in its renunciation of the natural atti-

tude, which is to say our confidence in a pre-given, objective reality. In
Husserlian thought, the term denotes the general positing, by virtue
of which there is not just any continual apprehensional consciousness of
the real surrounding world, but a consciousness of it as a factually exist-
ing actuality.14 This consciousness goes beyond an articulated judg-
ment about existence.15 It is the involuntarily instantaneous awareness
that everything which is [] an object [] bears, in its total unity and
with respect to all articulated saliencies in it, the characteristic there,
on hand.16
The second we step back, however, from posit[ing] an objective spa-
tiotemporal actuality17 and its constitutive value-judgments,18 we enter
the phenomenological attitude. It is to enter an investigative mode that
shuts me off from any judgment about spatiotemporal factual being,19
including the expectation that human sexuality be straight or utilitarian
(reproduction-oriented). Phenomenologys significance for queer theory
rests in its capacity to question the grounds of time-honoured erotic ritu-
als and roles. Whether Sara Ahmed ponders, in Merleau-Pontian terms,
how socially ingrained bodily habits shape desire and self-identity or Lee
Edelman expounds upon how child-rooted ideology incites homophobia,
queer theorists deploy a phenomenological style of thinking that turns
consciousness back upon itself, reorienting it in the process.20 It is this
sense of departure from customs that pervades Ida. Beyond lesbian innu-
endos, there are timely questions here regarding the meaning of solitude
for the outcast and how one becomes an outcast in the first placeeven
how far one can go without turning back.
What follows, then, is a meditation on the appeal that solipsism exerts
across literature, early twentieth-century European philosophy, and
gender-sex criticism. The desire to distance the world frequently belongs
to worldly subjects. But whether a world-weary protagonist, a scholar
immersed in the worlds primordial appearances, or the historically per-
secuted, none can outrun the interworld, what Merleau-Ponty philoso-
phises as the intersubjective dimension of all human existence. Yet Steins
heroine Idaa character somewhere between a Husserlian phenomenolo-
gist and Edelmanian misanthropeleads readers along an exercise in futil-
ity for much of the 1941 eponymous novel. Itinerant, attracted to both
sexes, and schizophrenic, Ida both embodies the spirit behind Steins most
hermetic manner of writing and attempts to act out its purest expres-
108 E. SHIN
sion: utter aloneness. She personifies the anti-social energies that Edelman
aligns with the queer in a heroic sense, collapsing not our ties to the future
(although childless), but to others for all time.
The Reduction
To sharpen our attention toward ideal meanings, Husserls phenomeno-
logical or transcendental reduction, otherwise known as the epoch, brackets
the natural attitude. According to Husserl, [W]e parenthesize everything
which that positing encompasses with respect to being: thus the whole
natural world which is continually there for us, on hand, and which
will always remain there according to consciousness as an actuality even
if we choose to parenthesize it.21 If I do that, as I can with complete
freedom, Husserl continues without pause, then I am not negating this
world as though I were a sophist; I am not doubting its factual being
as though I were a skeptic; rather I am exercising the phenomenologi-
cal which also completely shuts me off from any judgment about
spatiotemporal factual being.22 Husserls point is not to reach scientific
neutrality, but to exceed sciences external objectivism. Phenomenology
consequently poses a more radical kind of questioning than the sciences
demand, momentarily freezing the realist-empirical framework that sci-
ence works within.
Afflicted by writers block upon The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas
commercial success,23 Stein shares Husserls will to suspend our ordi-
nary involvement with the world in her metaphysical formulation of the
human nature and human mind, a binary synonymously expressed
as identity and entity.24 Detailed in The Geographical History of
America and What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of
Them?, human nature or identity refers to the socialised, histori-
cised self who possesses a healthy awareness of individual personality,
family, and chronological time. This self is moulded through memo-
ries, group behaviour, and discursive knowledge. Since the mode of
writing based on nature/identity operates in relation to an audience,
being self-conscious and eager to please, it feels creatively vitiated for
Stein.25 Writing for others from a sedimented personality compro-
mises the author, tying him or her down with personal baggage. I
am I because my little dog knows me, Stein writes of nature/identity,
but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and
your recognizing that he knows, that is what destroys creation.26 In

The Geographical History of America, Steins tone even turns sarcastic:
Thank you for identity even if it is not a pleasure.27 Mind/entity ema-
nates a playfulness vital for artistic innovation, while nature/identity
remains predictable.
Once nature/identity is bracketed, we come to the human mind
or entity. When Brooks Landon describes the human mind as a state
of immediate experience [] untroubled by human emotion or tem-
poral awareness and totally unconcerned with making any causal con-
nections,28 he accurately identifies Steins mind/entity as a stylised
phenomenological attitude. Stein renders the human gaze as inhuman
as possible. The opposite of a favour-currying core strides forth, an anti-
social cogito (The human mind lives alone29) entrenched in the present,
sentient but not self-reflexive. Mind/entity is the impersonal, anony-
mous self. It remains detached from audiences, individualism,30 public
glory, and events.
Tensions between nature/identity and mind/entity manifest in Steins
twinning pieces: Ida, Lucretia Borgia, Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters,
Four Saints in Three Acts, and Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs (Two
Sisters Who Are Not Sisters). The twin or sister figures as the inauthentic,
commercially manufactured alter-ego (nature/identity), while the original
retains what spiritual integrity she can (mind/entity). In Ida, the hero-
ine psychologically splits into multiple selves: the beauty pageant queen
Winnie, Ida-Ida, Virginia from Wyoming, a mysterious we that Ida adopts
in Washington,31 Christine who owns a Chinese dog named William, and
the quintuplets.32 Ida even merges with Andrew at one point.33
Given how homosexuality has historically been conceived as a coupling
between mirror images,34 Idas self-duplication exudes a queer feelIda
herself, again, gravitating toward both sexes. While the original Ida was
partly inspired by the Duchess of Windsor,35 her same-sex encounters
carry enough suggestiveness to render Idas sexuality ambiguous. Two
pages before the novel ends,
[Ida] did meet women. When they came she was resting, when they went
she was resting, she liked it and they did not mind it. They came again and
when they came again, she was obliging, she did say yes. She was sorry she
was resting, so sorry and she did say yes. She thought they liked it and they
did but it was not the same as if she had ever said no or if she had not always
been resting.36
110 E. SHIN
Stein conveys such interactions with the same emotional coolness she
accords Idas straight affairs. The men and women Ida shares company
with appear interchangeable. Characters are either reduced to names with-
out details or details without names.
Back to Idas splintering mental statewhat begins as a convenient ges-
ture, I am tired of being just one and when I am a twin one of us can go
out and one of us can stay in,37 turns sinister when Winnie etal. threaten
to take over Idas personality. During a conversation with an army officer,
Ida experiences no little existential disorientation when he mistakes her for
Winnie. He asks her, What is it that you like better than anything else.
I like being where I am [] I am not here, she responds, signalling her
detachment from her surroundings. The officers next words, however,
perturb Ida deeply: I know what you mean. Winnie is your name and
that is what you mean by your not being here. This misinterpretation or,
more bitingly, correct assessment makes Ida feel very faint.38 When did
she (want to) become Winnie? This identity crisis actually looms ten pages
earlier, when Ida confides to (her dog) Love, Love later on they will call
me a suicide blonde because my twin will have dyed her hair. And then
they will call me a murderess because there will come the time when I will
have killed my twin which I first made come.39 If not suicide by killing
Winnie-who-is-Ida, the remaining option for herself, Ida feels, is solitude,
where creative integrity can be salvaged.
So Ida withdraws into herselfa pure mind/entity, the anti-social
queer. More specifically, Ida exemplifies Steins taking, albeit unknow-
ingly and decades ahead, Edelmans anti-social rhetoric to its most absurd
conclusion, since Edelman never severs queerness from the social. In No
Future, he hedges his polemic from almost the first page:
The ups and downs of political fortune may measure the social orders pulse,
but queerness, by contrast, figures, outside and beyond its political symp-
toms, the place of the social orders death drive [] queerness attains its
ethical value precisely insofar as it accedes to that place, accepting its figural
status as resistance to the viability of the social while insisting on the inextri-
cability of such resistance from every social structure.40
The inextricability of [social] resistance from every social structureby defi-

nition, counter-cultures cannot exist without something to counter. To
resist the organizing principle of communal relations,41 to challenge
[] the very value of the social itself,42 to urge that we embrace realities
outside (often tyrannically enforced) heterosexist cultures is not to advo-

cate a zero-sum end game: nothingness. It is merely to acknowledge that
death instincts undershoot life itself, and that their allegorical implications
prove integral to enhancing the quality of life for ritually death-marked
figuresin this case, the homosexual.43
Ida escalates Edelmans cultural mission into a stunningly quixotic
quest: more than rejecting the classical role of mother and wife, rejecting
society at large. This repudiation commences with her discarding her pub-
lic faces. From writing letters to Winnie (the winner in herself), Ida flees
at Winnies mention. The escape translates literally and parabolically. When
Ida goes away to liv[e] where she is not,44 her mind vacates her body.
During these out-of-body moments, our heroine gazes at herself from a
birds-eye view: Ida saw herself come, then she saw a man come, then she
saw a man go away, then she saw herself go away.45 Other instances, she
vacillates between silence, sleep, and soliloquy:
Now listen to me, I am here and I know it, if I go away I will not like it
because I am so used to my being here. I would not know what has hap-
pened, now just listen to me, she said to herself, listen to me, I am going to
stop talking and I will.
Of course she had gone away and she was living with a friend.
How many of those who are yoked together have ever seen oxen.
This is what Ida said and she cried. [] [S]he went over everything that
had ever happened and in the middle of it she went to sleep.
When she awoke she was talking.
How do you do she said.
First she was alone and then soon everybody was standing listening. She
did not talk to them.
Of course she did think about marrying. She had not married yet but she
was going to marry.
She said if I was married Id have children and if I had children then Id
be a mother and if I was a mother Id tell them what to do.
She decided that she was not going to marry and was not going to have
children and was not going to be a mother.
Ida decided that she was just going to talk to herself. Anybody could
stand around and listen but as for her she was just going to talk to herself.
She no longer even needed a twin.46
The fantasy of such isolation is the fantasy of bracketing the world to

live as a mind/entity. It is a queer separatist fantasy. It is also a Husserlian
112 E. SHIN
fantasy. In Steins ambition to seize lifes substantiality, she erects theoreti-

cal hurdles for herself on par with the dream of a perfectly hermetic cul-
tural underground and Husserls resolution to put on hold our assumptions
regarding, even certainty in, the surrounding world to more immediately
explain its happenings. For Idas solipsistic impulses tie into broader ques-
tions regarding the limits of the idealism permeating queer separatismthat
is, the push made by certain gay and lesbian groups to break with mainstream
societyand Husserlian phenomenology. Against Steins best efforts, our
socio-historical selves (what she calls, to reiterate, human nature or iden-
tity) cannot be totally bracketed, much in the same way queer societies
cannot subsist without any cultural or material bonds to the general public
and Husserl cannot bypass the worlds tangible presence. Put another way,
like romantic outsiders and Husserl who try disengaging with the everyday
world all too literally, Stein envisages an impossibly alone loner.
Whether the Husserlian reduction is correctly understood is debated to

this day.47 But if we take the epoch at face-valuethe mandate to eschew
every assumption, stipulation, and conviction founded on our certainty
in the outside world48current philosophy tells us it cannot be executed
for three interrelated reasons. First, the epochs goal is inherently impos-
sible. The mind inevitably overlooks subliminal biases. When old ones get
ferreted out, new ones take root. Besides, certain age-old prejudices never
go away. For a philosopher who apprehends that all-sided insight remains
impossible,49 Husserl is strangely breezy regarding its logical correlate:
all-sided neutrality. The reduction ends up being a well-intentioned but
impossible game of pretend. Humans cannot suspend all pre-judgements
to arrive at a perfectly objective worldview. Humans cannot, in short,
become post-human. Heidegger, in Being and Time, reframes the grounds
of this debate by arguing that every act of cognition is an act of inter-
pretation: [W]e never perceive equipment that is ready-to-hand without
already understanding and interpreting it.50 To perceive is to automatically
and irrevocably engage in bias. The subject necessarily sees subjectively.
Second, Husserl overstates the egos position. Although objects find
form through subjectivitys prism, we cannot discern them without con-
sidering how those very objects shape our intentional faculty itself. The
worlds appearances cannot be examined without implicitly confirming
the worlds existence, the latter enmeshed in the former. Whether we want
to or not, we make use of the natural attitude, since it grounds our ability
to comprehend use in the first place. In this regard, Heidegger, Ricoeur,
and their disciples view the epoch as intellectually self-defeating.51
The third charge against the reductions feasibility lies in languages
subjective nature. As Lawrence Ferrara makes clear in his phenomenology-
influenced Philosophy and the Analysis of Music, [I]n order for the epoche
[sic] to be purely performed, a value-free or neutral language would also
be required.52 Such a mandate, alas, can never be met. Ferrara presses on
as to why: [L]anguage grows from and in culture bringing with it cul-
tures inherent prejudices and biases. [] [A]s soon as an experience is
articulated in language, it is already culturized and relativized.53 Ferrara re-
articulates an argument begun decades earlier in the phenomenological tra-
dition, most devastatingly by Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. When
an assertion is made, some fore-conception is always implied; but it remains
for the most part inconspicuous, because the language already hides in
itself a developed way of conceiving, Heidegger declares in 1927.54 Nearly
forty years later, Gadamer adds, We are always already biased in our think-
ing and knowing by our linguistic interpretation of the world. To grow
into this linguistic interpretation means to grow up in the world.55 Latent
semantic conditions determine what meanings can be garnered from
things. Those very conditions render all philosophical inquiries relativistic.
The transcendental reduction only partially transcends the natural atti-
tude from which it wells forth. My consciousness grants the world meaning.
The world possesses a subjective dimension because it is filtered through
me. Yet to insist, as Husserl does, that consciousness can purge its subjec-
tive inclinations summons a logical muddle. The Husserlian phenomenol-
ogist seeks to surmount subjectivist and objectivist pitfalls, but sinks into
their bastard child instead: an impossibly objectivised subjectivity.
Steins failure to write from an immaculately impersonal, timeless per-

spective mirrors Husserls failure to actualise a purely phenomenological
attitude. In the end, Stein cannot reconcile tensions between nature/iden-
tity and mind/entity. Quod erat demonstrandum, the phrase with which
Stein secretly started her career (Q.E. D.), is not proved at all. Ida remains
a flawed theorem on mind/entity expression. Far from being airtight, the
novel opens out to the world in a way that reflects the impossibility of a
complete epoch. No matter how far Steins mind/entity poetics departs
114 E. SHIN
from linear time and narrative, it is still linked with what is left behind:
memory, patterned meditation. In Ida, the narrative progresses in sec-
tioned intervals, grammar prevails (albeit tenuously), time passes, and the
heroinearticulate, self-conscious, socialisedages. The novel enacts an
epoch insofar as it greatly sheds literary and social norms, yet this reduc-
tion must be less than total.
Idas attempts to withdraw entirely from society are doomed from
the outset. Before any words fall from her lips, Ida is already situated
in a psychosomatically interconnected reality. When Ida vows to only
talk to and for herself, we are still listening to her in what Merleau-
Ponty calls, again, the interworld. Merleau-Ponty cites facial mimicry
in infants, among other social instincts preceding conscious thought,
as evidence of a primordial psychosomatic substratum underlying
humanitys collective consciousness.56 This pre-reflective, intersubjec-
tive dimension we inhabit but do not create is the one interworld for
Merleau-Ponty.57 While, as Merleau-Ponty phrases it, The other person
is never quite a personal being to me the way I am to myself.58 All
humans share a social sphere. Our bodies co-exist in reality. Language
binds us together.
Once Idas words escape from her, they do not circulate inside a
galactic vacuum, but only make sense within the one single world in
which we all participate as anonymous subjects of perception.59 To
talk is, on principle, social. To talk in the presence of others, more so. I
know others are listening, their presence subliminally affecting my talk-
ing. There can be no self-contained linguistic mode, since all language
possesses an intersubjective element. It is a communicative matrix we
enter into and can adapt, but do not create beforehand because it is
pre-given. If to be articulate is to be socialised, not only can Ida not
be a mind/entity, no one can. [N]o locutor speaks without making
himself in advance allocutary,60 be it only for himself , Merleau-Ponty
argues,61 a sentiment reworded by Gadamer as: [An] essential feature
of the being of language seems to me to be its I-lessness. Whoever
speaks a language that no one else understands does not speak. To
speak means to speak to someone.62 To the extent that language and
the human world are social, then, all writers writing from whatever
mindset write for others.
What is strange is that Stein reaches this conclusion in Narrations
fourth lecture, but either talks herself out of it or fails to fully absorb its
implications by the time she writes Ida:
So then although any one can say that they do not write for an audience and
really why should they since anyway the audience will have its own feeling
about anything nevertheless the writer writing knows what he is writing as
he recognizes it as he is writing it and so he is actually having it happen that
an audience is existing even if he as an audience is not an audience that is
is one not having a feeling that he is an audience and yet that is just what a
writer is. As he is a writer he is an audience because he does know what an
audience is.63
The writer is her own audience in that she self-reflexively recognises

her creation. Furthermore, grasping the idea of an audience wills it into
being. If one knows what an audience is, the audience is already present.
None of what Stein says otherwise diminishes this intuitions forcefulness.
Mind/entity brushes against nature/identity the instant it transpires as a
thought-bubble. It develops through tensions with its counter-mode from
its theoretical inception.
Steins publishing ambitions and Idas paradoxical desire to cut off
and foster communication point to this reciprocity. No little posturing is
involved when Ida and her creator claim utter indifference to audiences.
In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway recollects a Stein who chooses to
write unintelligibly by conventional standards, yet nevertheless possesses
the conventional desire to be admired by the public. This desire can be
palpably felt in Steins 1934 radio interview with William Lundell. When
Stein tells her interviewer, Nothing can be the same thing to the other
person. Nobody can enter into anybody elses mind; so why try? he que-
ries, Then why did you publish manuscripts that were really written only
for yourself?64 All Stein can say is:
There is the eternal vanity of the mind. One wants to see ones children in
the world and have them admired like any fond parent, and it is a bitter blow
to have them refused or mocked. It is just as bitter for me to have a thing
refused as for any little writer with his first manuscript. Anything you create
you want to exist, and its means of existence is in being printed.65
Even the most stubbornly individual writer wants to be heard in a com-

munity of writers and readers. Even the most anti-social characters can
become chafed when others ignore or dismiss them. For all her frustra-
tions with conversation and companionship, Ida still becomes very angry
when two men find her not interesting and will not listen to her once
116 E. SHIN
they know she is not going to stay.66 What happens next is a far cry from
those moments when Ida removes herself from society: You are not lis-
tening to me, she said [to them], you do not know what you are saying, if
I talk you have to listen to what I say, there is nothing else you can do.67
The insistence sharpening this command betrays Steins interest in her
readers and their interest in her writing.
The interworld has significant implications for queer cultural studies.

It brings the notion of the queer into the wider social stream rather than
leaving it obscurely aside. The concept of a larger stream (versus lesser or
tributary), in fact, becomes pass in this context, where only a single, all-
encompassing stream exists. Steins phenomenology of the queer, however,
forgets the communal ground upon which queerness and straightness arise.
In this aspect, it resembles the more sectarian lesbian-feminism of bygone
decades. Militant tracts, such as Valerie Solanas SCUM Manifesto; sepa-
ratist groups styled after The Furies Collective; and lesbian communes
on womyns land (women-only properties) have largely died out amid
changing cultural values.68 More moderate attitudes have replaced radically
separatist ones, with younger generations of men and women tending to
avoid cloistered lifestyles and unbounded isolationist ideals. Women cannot
wholly disengage from society. The materials they use for shelter, the food
they eat, the clothes they wear, the language they speak, and the ideas they
bring with them into whatever enclave all inadvertently bespeak the broader
social setting from which they emerged. Every revolt is defined by what is
rebelled against and so bears the mark of that original establishment.
It is this bilateral logic that, in more poetic form, hovers over Idas sep-
aratist impulses and forecloses them. In so far as I have sensory functions,
a visual, auditory and tactile field, I am already in communication with
others taken as similar psycho-physical subjects, Merleau-Ponty avows.69
There is no such thing as a mind/entity against this background. Mind/
entity can only be imagined by a nature/identity, and only as an impos-
sible reverie at that. Similarly, queer counter-cultures cordon themselves
off from the mainstream, but the marginal and mainstream can no more
negate one another than dark and light, elements that define themselves
in relation to their inverse.
Everyone is of the interworld. Such truth is startling for its deceptive
simplicity and divergence from postmodernisms usual resistance to a uni-
fied worldview. In Steins writing, this sense of the interworld translates

into the literary revelation that no one can have that thing happen and
go on living that is continue to be alone.70 These words are followed by:
That is what mysticism is, that is what the Trinity is, that is what marriage
is, the absolute conviction that in spite of knowing [] how any one is
never really feeling what any other one is really feeling that after all after
all three are one and two are one.71 One is not one, however, because
one is always two that is one is always coming to a recognition of what the
one who is one is writing that is telling.72 Mind/entity writes. Nature/
identity recognises what is written. Therefore, one is always two by virtue
of these co-existing intentional modes. And these notions, their adherents,
their opponents, the queer, the straighteverything is together from the
beginning in a world where the most extreme anti-social metaphors are,
in a sense, untrue.
Something of this communion can be glimpsed in Idas finale. Ida,
Andrew, and unnamed others are presented for what feels like the last
acknowledgement before curtain call:
If she said anything she said yes. More than once nothing was said. She
said something. If nothing is said then Ida does not say yes. If she goes out
she comes in. If she does not go away she is there and she does not go away.
She dresses, well perhaps in black why not, and a hat, why not, and another
hat, why not, and another dress, why not, so much why not.
She dresses in another hat and she dresses in another dress and Andrew
is in, and they go in and that is where they are. They are there. Thank them.
Yes.73
It is as though Andrew and Ida primp themselves to walk onstage (the

interior stage of their living room) and receive our applause. The Yes
belongs to the audience, the narrator, the characters, and us.
Like Husserls reduction, Steins mind/entity pose remains itself at
best: a pose. For whether an object exists or not affects how we deem
it, and some biases run so deep that they cannot be effaced or even fath-
omed. (Plus, new ones keep growing as life goes on.) Similarly, the Steinian
writer cannot bracket the natural attitudememory, history, personality,
emotions, social awarenessto conjure a narrative somehow floating in
an existential vacuum. No, a complete epoch was always a fantasy to begin
with, a doomed thought-experiment. Consciousness cannot linger upon
118 E. SHIN
itself apart from its primordial foundation. The queer and straight inhabit
one world, the interworld.
Notes
1. See, for instance, Natanson, M. (1988) The Erotic Bird:
Phenomenology in Literature (Princeton: Princeton University
Press); Bernet, R., Kern, I. & Marbach, E. (1999) An Introduction
to Husserlian Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press); Moran, D. (2000) Introduction to Phenomenology (London:
Routledge); Smith, B. & Smith, D.W. (eds) (1995) The Cambridge
Companion to Husserl (Cambridge: CUP).
2. Husserl, E. (1980) Supplement IV, in Ideas III: Ideas Pertaining
to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff), 79.
3. Husserl, E. (1982) Ideas I: General Introduction to a Pure
Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff), 75.
4. Smith, D.W. (2007) Husserl (London: Routledge), p.59.
5. Matthews, E. (2006) Merleau-Ponty: A Guide for the Perplexed
(London: Continuum), p.7.
6. Husserl adapted the notion of intentionality from Franz Brentano,
who adapted it, in turn, from scholastic philosophy.
7. Husserl, E. (1991) On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of
Internal Time (18931917), J. B. Brough (trans.) (Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic), 1.
8. Husserl, Ideas III, 11.
9. Husserl, E. (2001) Introduction, in Logical Investigations, Vol. I,
J.N. Findlay (trans.) (London: Routledge, 2001), 2.
10. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968) The Visible and the Invisible, C.Lefort
(ed.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press), p.137.
11. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible, pp.1378.
12. See also Hejinian, L. (2000) The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley:
University of California Press); McCabe, S. (2005) Cinematic
Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film (Cambridge: CUP);
OSullivan, M. (2008) The Incarnation of Language: Joyce, Proust
and a Philosophy of the Flesh (London: Continuum); Caranfa, A.
(1990) Proust: The Creative Silence (London: Associated University
Press); Koppen, R. (1997) Formalism and the Return to the Body:
Steins and Forness Aesthetic of Significant Form, New Literary
History, 28:4, 791809; Mildenberg, A. (2008) Seeing Fine

Substances Strangely: Phenomenology in Gertrude Steins Tender
Buttons, Studia Phaenomenologica, 8, 25982.
13. Husserl, Ideas I, 12933.
14. Husserl, Ideas I, 31. To clarify, apprehensional consciousness in
this excerpt simply denotes perceptual awareness.
18. Husserl lists friends, enemies, servants, superiors, strangers,
relatives, beautiful, ugly, pleasant, unpleasant, agreeable,
and disagreeable as examples; see Ideas I, 27.
20. Ahmed, S. (2006) Queer Phenomenology (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press); Edelman, L. (2004) No Future: Queer Theory
and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Other
notable examples include Sedgwick, E.K. (1990) Epistemology of
the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press); Butler, J.
(1988) Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in
Phenomenology and Feminist Theory, Theatre Journal, 40:4,
51931; Warner, M. (2000) The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics,
and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press); Berlant, L. (1997) The Queen of America Goes to Washington
City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press); Bersani, L. (1995) Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press); Freeman, E. (2010) Time Binds: Queer
Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press).
23. See Stein, G. (1974) Reflection on the Atomic Bomb, R. B. Haas
(ed.) (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow), p.94; Stein, G. (1974) How
Writing is Written, R.B. Haas (ed.) (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow),
pp.636.
24. In The Geographical History of America (New York: Vintage,
1973), Stein uses identity and human nature interchangeably,
both terms invoking creative stagnation. See pp.147, 153, 155,
157, 167, 1836, 190, 193, 1989, 202, and 210.
120 E. SHIN
25. Works representative of nature/identity writing would be Three

Lives, The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, Wars I Have Seen, and
Brewsie and Willie, which adhere to a typical narrative frame-
work, replete with a relatively clear-cut cast, setting, action
sequences, and oratorical voice.
26. Stein, G. (1990) What are master-pieces and why are there so few
of them? in Patricia Meyerowitz (ed.) Look at Me Now and Here I
Am: Writings and Lectures, 190945 (London: Penguin),
pp.1489.
27. Stein, Geographical History of America, p.155.
28. Landon, B. (1981) Not Solve It But Be In It: Gertrude Steins
Detective Stories and the Mystery of Creativity, American
Literature, 53:3, 497.
31. Stein, Look at Me Now, p.370.
34. See Freud, S. (1957) On Narcissism: An Introduction, in

J.Strachey (ed.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14 (London: Hogarth); Freud, S.
(2000) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, J.Strachey (trans.)
(New York: Basic Books).
35. See Esdale, L. (2012) Introduction and Mrs. Simpson in

G.Stein, Ida, L.Esdale (ed.) (New Haven: Yale University Press).
37. Stein, Look at Me Now, pp.3401.
40. Edelman, No Future, 3.
43. In truth, to the extent that he labours on behalf of the persecuted
queer, Edelman is not pushing anti-sociality, really, but redefining
the social to absorb those lifestyles uninterested in old-fashioned
family values.
46. Stein, Look at Me Now, pp.35960.
47. Husserls twenty-first-century proponents argue that the epoch

remains grossly misconstrued. Its point is not to seriously put the
spatiotemporal world on hold, but to shift the discussion from
objects to consciousness-of-those-objects. The epoch functions as
an administrative manoeuvre more than anything else. See Smith,
Husserl, pp.167, 2401; Hopkins, B.C. (2011) The Philosophy of
Husserl (Durham, UK: Acumen), pp.11214; Smith, A.D. (2003)
Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations (London: Routledge),
pp.1833; Russell, M. (2006) Husserl: A Guide for the Perplexed
(London: Continuum); Smith, D. W. & McIntyre, R. (1982)
Husserl and Intentionality: A Study of Mind, Meaning, and
Language (Dordrecht: D.Reidel); Dreyfus, H.L. & Hall, H. (eds)
(1982) Husserl, Intentionality and Cognitive Science (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press). For different but equally sympathetic defences of
the phenomenological reduction, see Zahavi, D. (2003) Husserls
Phenomenology (Stanford: Stanford University Press) and Mohanty,
J. N. (2003) The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical
Development (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp.3536. But
such disclaimers cannot redeem the weight of Husserls ego-cen-
trism that offers little by way of compromise. It is daunting to
argue away the opinion that the whole natural world is
essential[ly] detachabl[e] from the domains of consciousness
(Ideas I, 46). For Husserl, we are to wholeheartedly bracket the
natural attitude, not feign to do so.
48. Husserl, Internal Time, 1.
49. See Husserl, Ideas I, 3, 44. For additional reference, see Husserl,
E. (1997) Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, R.Rojcewicz (trans.)
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic), 3335.
50. Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time, J. Macquarrie &

E.Robinson (trans.) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), 32.
51. See, for instance, Ricoeur, P. (1967) Husserl: An Analysis of his
Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press);
Kolakowski, L. (1987) Husserl and the Search for Certitude
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press); Heidegger, M. (1982) The
Basic Problems of Phenomenology, A. Hofstadter (trans.)
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
52. Ferrara, L. (1991) Philosophy and the Analysis of Music: Bridges to
Musical Sound, Form, and Reference (New York: Greenwood),
p.156.
122 E. SHIN
53. Ferrara, Philosophy, p.156.

54. Heidegger, Being and Time, 33.
55. Gadamer, H. (1976) Philosophical Hermeneutics, D. E. Linge

(trans.) (Berkeley: University of California Press), p.64.
56. See Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception,

C.Smith (trans.) (London: Routledge), pp.41014.
57. Merleau-Ponty also refers to the interworld as the thing, one
single world, common ground, single fabric, consummate rec-
iprocity, and common world; see Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology,
pp.40325.
58. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, p.411.
59. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, p.411.
60. In other words, one to whom speech is directed.
61. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible, p.154.
62. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, p.65.
63. Stein, G. (2010) Narration (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press), p.56.
64. Lundell, W. (1999 [1934]) Gertrude Stein: A Radio Interview in
L.S. Watts, Gertrude Stein: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York:
Twayne), pp.907.
65. Lundell, Gertrude Stein.
68. For information on Alapine, a mature lesbian community located
in northeast Alabama that is representative of many aging separat-
ist groups unable to attract new members, see Kershaw, S. (2009)
My Sisters Keeper, New York Times (30 Jan.). For additional
insights on the rise and fall of lesbian separatism within Euro-
America, see also Hoagland, S.L. (1988) Lesbian Ethics: Toward
New Value (Palo Alto, CA: Institute of Lesbian Studies) and
Fougre, M. (dir.) (2012) Lesbiana: A Parallel Revolution (Groupe
Intervention Video).
69. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p.411.
70. Stein, Narration, p.57.
CHAPTER 7
To Tell What Happened asInvention:

Literature andPhilosophy onLearning
fromFiction
ManuelGarca-Carpintero
This chapter examines the question whether we can acquire knowledge

from fiction. The main claim is a nuanced positive answer. It is based on an
account of the fiction/non-fiction distinction that I have defended elsewhere
and summarise in the first section. Narrative non-fiction consists of an asser-
toric corea speech act governed by a norm requiring truth for its correct-
ness. Fiction consists of a core of fiction-makingspeech acts not governed
by a norm requiring truth for correctness, but one requiring for correctness
Financial support for my work was provided by the DGI, Spanish Government,
research project FFI2013-47948-P and Consolider-Ingenio project
CSD2009-00056; and through the award ICREA Academia for excellence in
research, 2013, funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya. The paper was presented
at 21st-Century Theories of Literature: Essence, Fiction and Value, University
of Warwick, 2729 March 2014; I thank the audience there for comments and
suggestions. I am particularly indebted to comments and suggestions provided
by the volumes editors, and to Michael Maudsley for the grammatical revision.
M. Garca-Carpintero (*)
Dept of Philosophy, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
e-mail: m.garciacarpintero@ub.edu

124 M. GARCA-CARPINTERO
that interesting imaginings are invited. In the second section, I argue that
this account is compatible with fictions involving truth and allowing for the
acquisition of knowledge, on at least two counts. First, like other speech acts
(say, rhetorical questions), acts of fiction-making can indirectly convey asser-
tions. Second, but no less important, fictions may assert background facts
about the time, the place, or the characters setting up the fiction. I present
and discuss illustrative examples of the first kind, in McEwans Atonement
and Marass Dark Back of Time, which indirectly make assertions precisely
about the topic of the chapter. I also confront arguments that such indirect-
ness makes impossible the acquisition of knowledge.
A Normative Account ofFiction-Making
Is it possible to learn from fictions, in other words, to acquire from them

new beliefs that count thereby as justified and are true, or at least closer
to the truth than those we had before? An answer to this question presup-
poses an account of the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. An
influential view assumes that fictions result from specific speech or com-
municative acts of fiction-making: fictions result from acts by which the
author or authors invite their audiences to imagine or make-believe the
fictional contents.1
There are two contrasting schools of thought on the nature of speech
acts. Searle2 follows Austin3 in thinking of them as social practices defined
by social norms; while many other writers follow Grice4 in taking them to
be definable in psychological terms, appealing to a peculiar kind of reflex-
ive intention. What is at stake in such debates? Austinians point out that
speech acts might well take place even when their authors lack the complex
intentions that Griceans posit.5 A clerk in an information booth makes an
assertion when she utters the plane will arrive on time, even though she
does not care at all what psychological impact this has on her audience.
Similarly, a fiction-maker might create a perfectly polished fiction, even
though she does not care about producing any imaginative impact on any
audienceshe might just put it in the drawer afterwards. Austinians argue
that speech acts are governed by norms, not just regulative ones (clarity,
politeness, wit) but constitutive ones, and that this has a stronger impact
on the determination of the speech act made than whatever communi-
cative intentions the author had. Thus, for instance, the clerk might be
criticised if she cannot have known the information she provided (we had
been reliably told that the plane just took off from the departing airport,
and so we reply, You cannot know that!). A fiction can be praised based
TO TELL WHAT HAPPENED ASINVENTION: LITERATURE ANDPHILOSOPHY... 125
on an interesting, worth-imagining interpretation that competent audi-

ences ascribe to it, even if it had not occurred to her author in its details.
In previous work I have defended a speech-act account of the distinction
between fiction and non-fiction.6 Like Currie and the others, I propose to
think of fictions as speech acts. Unlike them, however, I take Waltons
normative characterisation seriously,7 assuming an Austinian account of
such acts in terms of social norms in contrast to the Gricean account in
terms of psychological reflexive intentions. On my proposal, while non-
fictions constitutively result from constativesacts of saying, the genus
of speech acts characterised in terms of norms requiring truth for their
correctness, of which assertion is the core speciesfictions constitutively
result from directivesthe genus of which commands are the core species
characterised by a norm of providing the intended audience with reasons
to imagine the fictions content.
More specifically, I used Williamsons simple characterisation, deploy-
ing a constitutive norm that uniquely characterises the act by its normative
essence.8 For assertionthe act we made by default when uttering declara-
tive sentencesI suggested a knowledge-provision rule,9 a norm requiring for
correctness that knowledge be made available to the intended audience. An
assertion with content p (say, that dz is in Ukraine) is the act whose result
is subject to this rule: it is correct only if it puts its audience in a position to
know p (in other words, that dz is in Ukraine). Other constatives have
weaker requirements, bare truth or justification for guessing or conjecturing,
and so on. Norms like this are sui generis: they do not have their sources in
moral or prudential codes, but in specifically illocutionary ones. They are
defeasible and pro tanto: they can be overridden by stronger norms. And it
is possible to violate them, thereby rendering the acts not non-existent, but
wrong. Thus, there are plenty of situations in which p is asserted but the
audience is not thereby put in a position to know p, simply because p is false
(that dz is not in Ukraine, but in Poland), or justification is lacking. The
assertion is then wrong, relative to norms constitutive of such speech act.
In the case of fiction-making, I modelled my proposal on a normative
account of directives derived from Alstons, in other words, one on which
speech acts are constituted by norms. I took commands to be subject to
the norm that they are correct only if their audiences are thereby provided
with a reason to see to it that their content obtains. The reason is to be
based on different sources, depending on the specific nature of the direc-
tive: the authority of the speaker in the case of commands, or the good will
or presumed interests of the audience in the case of requests, suggestions,
or proposals. Again, the norms are sui generis, defeasible and pro tanto,
and it should be possible for them to be brokenas when a speaker sug-

gests that the audience do something which has no chance of satisfying
their relevant desires. My proposal was that a fiction with the content p is a
result of an act that is correct only if it gives relevant audiences (audiences
of the intended kind, with the desire to engage with such works) a reason
to imagine p. The reasons in question have to do with whatever makes
engaging with good fictions worthwhile; say, the succession of emotions
provoked by engagement with well-drafted, suspenseful thrillers for those
of us who enjoy these things.
A reason I offered for that view was that normative accounts fare better
relative to the intentionalism/conventionalism debate about the interpre-
tation of fictions. As mentioned, there are compelling criticisms of Gricean
accounts of core speech acts such as assertion, based on examples show-
ing that, even when lacking the relevant Gricean communicative inten-
tions, speakers nonetheless make assertions. Similarly, as suggested above,
a fiction might have a specific interpretation, even if the author has not
intended it to be imagined in its fully detailed specificity. I also argued that
the view affords a clear-cut response to a forceful objection presented in
a series of papers by Stacie Friend to Currie and his followers.10 She con-
tends that there is no conception of imagining or make-believe that
distinguishes a response specific to fiction as opposed to non-fiction,11
recommending that we give up the quest for necessary and sufficient con-
ditions for fictionality.12 She argues for this by addressing the Gricean spe-
cific forms of the speech-act account that her target writers have provided.
I suggested in reply that a normative view supplies us with the option of
casting off the problematic features of Gricean accounts.
What I find most appealing in speech-act accounts is precisely the clear
light they throw on the relation between truth and fiction; this virtue,
however, is lost in the versions I am questioning, in my view because of
their intentionalist underpinnings. Of course, there is an ordinary sense of
fiction in which this just means false. But such intuitive use of fiction
and derivatives is not the one at stake here, but rather the one used in the
classification of works (I will mostly focus on literary ones, but I will also
use examples of fictional films, which raise the same issues) as fictional or
non-fictional.
Like Walton, when it comes to this sense, I do not find anything intui-
tively wrong in counting works consisting only of truths as fictional.13 I
will be discussing below Javier Marass Negra espalda del tiempo as a case
in point.14 There is no single utterance that I would say was clearly made
up, even though, as will become clear, there are several with which I dis-
agree. Still, this is not a borderline case; it is primarily a fictional work, a
novel. With most writers (including most anti-intentionalists), I take the
classification of a work in a given category to be up to the author, ceteris
paribus. Maras has published the book as a novel; and there is no reason
to think he only did that, say, for fear of censorship, or to prevent legal
charges. He did declare, when presenting the book, that it could be called
a false novel but this was right after saying, it is not an autobiography or
a memoir, but a work of fiction.15 To be sure, the work is also assertive,
typically described by critics as weaving fiction and fact. Maras himself
affirmed that the narrator is me, with my name and last name, and every-
thing I tell is true, or they are things with which I am acquainted or are
known or speculated by me.16 But only the intentionalist characterisation
of fictions that Gricean theorists are relying upon leads them to find a
problem here, as I will now explain.
Currie provided four thought-experiments to intuitively support his
view that fictive intent is not sufficient for fictionality;17 the content must
also be at most non-accidentally true, a condition which he articulated as
the absence of counterfactual dependence of the utterance on the repre-
sented facts.18 The thought-experiments have not convinced everybody,19
but others have suggested similar constraints. Lamarque and Olsen have
a requirement that the audience adopt the fictive stance towards fictive
contents, by inferring neither that the utterer of a fiction believes them nor
that they obtain.20 Davies suggests that the author of a fictional narrative
flouts a fidelity constrainta requirement to include in the narrative only
events believed to have occurred, and to present them as occurring in the
order they are believed to have occurred.21
Currie, Davies, and Lamarque and Olsen thus adopt what Friend
describes as the mere-make-believe approach to fictionality. The guid-
ing intuition is that belief, rather than imagining, is appropriate for non-
accidentally true content [] the kind of imagining prescribed by fiction
must be imagining without belief. Call this attitude mere-make-believe.22
She explains elsewhere:
Fiction (as opposed to non-fiction) invites mere-make-believe, whereas non-

fiction (as opposed to fiction) invites belief. This proposal may seem plau-
sible given that mere-make-believe is appropriate to those features of a work
that are made up (and known to be so), and it is common to associate fiction
with such features.23
As Currie acknowledges, this has the result that most fictional works are
a patchwork of fiction-making and assertion.24 Realist fictions include
truths about the settings in which the fictional events occur, intended
as such. This makes understandable Salman Rushdies criticism of the
film Slumdog Millionaire that it piles impossibility on impossibility,25
given the realist ambitions of the film. Even the most fantastic fictions
invite readers to assume truthssay, about human psychology in Alice in
Wonderland to make sense of the behaviour of the characters she meets.
The reverse is also the case: non-fictions standardly traffic in mere-make-
believe. Historians, journalists and philosophers ask us to imagine possible
scenarios, or in other acknowledged ways make up parts of the contents
they put forward. On the accounts we are considering, such works end up
as patchworks of fact and fiction. The accounts are thus left with no easy
way of concurring with pre-theoretic intuitions when it comes to deter-
mining their global classification in a principled way. This is the patchwork
problem for these views. It is especially acute in the case of literary fictions,
given their aesthetic aspiration to cohesive integration. As many have
pointed out regarding the celebrated example of Anna Kareninas first
sentence, real setting claims typically play an essential role in generating
the core elements of the contents the fiction asks readers to imagine, and
henceforth must be themselves imagined.
On my diagnosis, what leads the authors we have considered to add
the mere-make-believe conditions that creates the patchwork problem
are not shaky intuitions about problematic cases, but their reliance on
Gricean intentionalist accounts. The intention to lead your audience to
imagine a given content through its very recognition hardly distinguishes
fictions from other speech acts, including assertions; for audiences need
also to imagine, or at least consider, the contents of assertions. Matraverss
recent criticism of the consensus view that there is a necessary connec-
tion between a proposition being fictional and there being a prescription
(of any sort) that we imagine it26 follows in the footsteps of Friends; but
he also has a criticism of his own that emphasises this point. As he puts
it, My objection to Currie is that his functional characterization of this
activity [imagining] [] does not apply only to fiction but to our engag-
ing with representations generally.27 He mentions in support empirical
data concerning the psychological processes involved in engaging with
fiction and non-fiction.
My proposal does not need to contend that contents put forward as fic-
tion cannot be at the same time presented as non-fiction, or the other way
around; nor that our psychological engagement with them differs. The dif-
ference between fiction and non-fiction lies in the commitments the agent
incurs, and not in further attitudessuch as that the imagined contents
are taken to be at most accidentally true, or objects of the fictive stance.
An acts being subject to the norm constitutive of fiction-making that I
outlined above makes it ideal for putting forward interesting made-up
content, but this is not mandatory. Against Friend, fiction and non-fiction
can be defined by necessary and sufficient conditions, albeit normative/
axiological ones. An act produces a fiction if and only if it is subject to the
fiction-making norm as its defining constitutive norm; an act produces a
non-fiction (assertion) if and only if it is subject to a rule requiring truth
for its correctness as its defining constitutive norm. It is in this way that we
may still capture the guiding intuition [] that belief, rather than imag-
ining, is appropriate for non-accidentally true content [] the kind of
imagining prescribed by fiction must be imagining without belief.28 There
is an essential difference between fiction and non-fiction, but it lies in the
commitments speakers incur. Matravers contends: We represent (some
part of) the content of a narrative we engage in a mental model. The nar-
rative could be either non-fiction or fiction. Some of these propositions we
also believe, some we do not believe. That is it.29 That may be right as a
psychological matter; but it does not follow that there is no distinction to
be drawn between fiction and non-fiction. The normative proposal shows
how we can trace it.
In a work with which I otherwise mostly agree, Gaskin appears to over-
look the distinction between normative and non-normative views. He
claims that, while literature is a normative status, fiction is not.30 This
is certainly so in the kind of psychological account of fiction by Currie,
Lamarque and Olsen and others we have been discussing, to which Gaskin
refers approvingly: what makes a work one of fiction, as opposed to his-
tory, say, is [] the relative counterfactual independence of the fictional
story from the way things are.31 Then he correctly points out that, as he
puts it:
[T]here is such a thing as non-fictional literature, by which I mean not

literature that is perhaps adventitiously factual, but rather literature that
is, as I shall put it, factualist. A factualist work is constitutively one that aims
(whether or not successfully) to track the truth; it seeks to be counterfactu-
ally dependent on the way things are.32
In fact, it is a crucial part of the literary humanism he wants to defend

that literary works involve such truth claims.33 Alas, Gaskin does not seem
to notice that this creates for him the patchwork problem posed by Friend:
works of literature include fictional contents, but also factualist ones,
which, given his characterisation, should be expunged from the former,
leaving the fictional content holey.
Moreover, Gaskin in fact offers a different, normative account of the
fiction/non-fiction distinction, without apparently noticing the differ-
ence. He says:
[A] fiction, unlike a history, is not counterfactually dependent on how the

world is in all its rich and detailed particularity: if things had been different,
historical accounts produced in relevant possible worlds would be obliged to
take account of that difference; but there is no similar requirement on fiction
to move in step with the detailed historical facts.34
Here, being non-fictional is not a matter of being in fact counterfactually

dependent on the represented content, but of there being an obligation
of attending to such dependence. Gaskin does not seem to realise that,
on this second (and better) characterisation, fiction is as much a norma-
tive status as literatureonly one involving different norms. The example
should warn us against overlooking a distinction I take to be crucial for
our present concerns.
On the account that Friend advances, invitations to imagine are mere
standard properties of fictions.35 Fiction is a genre, defined by relational,
historically changing features: what counts as non-fiction in one con-
text might be rightly classified as fiction in another, and the other way
around. Now, there is surely something right about this. To use one of
her examples, if a historian were to put invented speeches into the mouths
of his characters the way Tacitus did, he would be harshly criticised by his
colleagues; the material would be counted as non-fiction that does not
meet the standards of the discipline. But perhaps Tacitus contemporaries
accepted a convention by which such material is to be counted as a h elpful
fiction, and hence would not have criticised him. However, it does not
follow from this that the categories of fiction and non-fiction themselves are
subject to such historical vagaries. It is perfectly compatible with the fact
that non-fiction has a normative essence, and likewise for fictions. For,
even so, the question of what it is that determines that specific acts are
to be counted as subject to particular norms remains open. I mentioned
before that the intentions of the agent play an important role in this, but
there are other significant factors, including those having to do with the
historically changing genre conventions that Friend mentions. Invitations
to imagine (elaborated as the norms I suggested at the outset) would still
be constitutive of fictions, not mere standard features of them. Friend
never provides any reason to think that there could be fictions not involv-
ing invitations to imagine.
Philosophy andLiterature onTruths inFictions
In this section, I want to elaborate on how the account I have suggested

allows for learning from fiction.36 Now, this would be very difficult to
understand, if not outright impossible, if the contents of fictional worlds
were built, as it were, from materials disjoint from those making up those
of non-fictions. Some authors embrace claims entailing that.37 Most con-
temporary writers assume the opposite, in other words, that words like
Napoleon and water preserve their ordinary meanings when they occur
in fictions; Gaskin is a recent example. Against this second view, I have
argued for a view close to Lamarque and Olsens.38 On my view, when it
occurs in War and Peace, Napoleon does not rigidly refer to Napoleon
in the way it does when it occurs in a straightforward assertion. Its contri-
bution is descriptive, say, the person called Napoleon who was victorious at
Jena, and so on. Descriptions, however, might apply to real entities; this
view rejects the main tenet of proponents of the first view that fictions do
not refer to the actual world. The proposal is thus compatible with the
point that advocates of the second view invoke in its support; namely, that
we use knowledge about the actual entities associated with names such as
Napoleon and water when interpreting fictions, using criteria such as
Waltons Reality Principle,39 that fictional worlds are as much as possible
in accordance with the actual world.
Walton adopted that principle from a related one previously stated by
Lewis. Lewis clearly envisaged the two ways of learning from fiction whose
compatibility with my account of the fiction/non-fiction distinction
I would like to show. The first he derives from the role of the Reality
Principle in determining the content of fictions: There may be an under-
standing between the author and his readers to the effect that what is true
in his fiction, on general questions if not on particulars, is not to depart
from what he takes to be the truth.40 Gendler has explained how princi-
ples allowing the import of truths about the actual world to the content of
fictions are a coin whose reverse side are corresponding export principles,
allowing audiences in some cases (realist fiction genres, such as historical
novels, biopics, and so on) to infer from fictional contents truths about the
actual world. This is the basis for one of two ways through which we can
learn straightforward empirical truths from fictions, both about particular
matters of fact and about universal truths.
Gendler calls this inferential process narrative as clearinghouse: I
export things from the story that you the story-teller have intentionally
and consciously imported, adding them to my stock in the way that I add
knowledge gained by testimony.41 This supports complaints (such as the
one by Rushdie of Slumdog Millionaire) about fictions that potentially
mislead, by allowing audiences to infer falsehoods by invoking such export
principles. Friend offers a good discussion of an excellent example, Gore
Vidals Lincoln.42 Here are two further illustrations of this familiar infer-
ence process that advocates of literary humanism have always defended,
from reviews of current cinematic releases, one giving praise and another
criticism. One is provided by Christian Caryls criticism of alleged inac-
curacies in Alan Turings biopic, The Imitation Game (2014), providing
different respects in which the movie is a bizarre departure from the his-
torical record.43 Another comes from a review by Ian Buruma:
The times we live in are often most clearly reflected in the mirror of art.
Much has been written about post-communism in Russia and China. But
two recent films, Jia Zhangkes A Touch of Sin, made in China in 2013, and
Andrey Zvyagintsevs Leviathan, made in Russia in 2014, reveal the social
and political landscapes of these countries more precisely than anything I
have seen in print.44
As Friend45 and Ichino and Currie46 indicate, it is not straightforward

to develop an epistemology that could lend support to such conten-
tions in a sufficiently detailed way. Part of the problem has to do with
the indirectness with which the constative acts that these claims presup-
pose are conveyed, which we will be examining below. There are further
epistemological worries, which Friend and Ichino and Currie discuss,
relating to an apparent excess of credulity that some empirical results sug-

gest readers are prone to incurin particular, data from Daniel Gilbert
and colleagues that Matravers aligns in support of the claims discussed in
the previous section.47 But Friend and Ichino and Currie give good rea-
sons to think that learning from fiction is nonetheless possible. On the one
hand, they provide reasons to take results from the relevant experiments
with a pinch of salt; we have filter mechanisms of epistemic vigilance48
that allow for far less credulity on issues that matter to us. On the other,
they suggest epistemological stories that make the acquisition of knowl-
edge from fiction intelligible.
This possibility relies, in my view, on the assumption that fictions include
constatives of different sorts, including straightforward assertions. Ichino
and Currie accept this, but for a much more restricted set of cases than I
think we should: say, when Walter Scott breaks off the narrative of a story
to tell the reader something about the related local history. The reasons
they provide are in my view questionable. They point out that utterances
within the fiction by characters or a narrator are merely pretend-assertions,
and that other messages are not stated by anyone, fictional or real, but
are rather suggested by the content or tone of the story. Both points are
right, but, so what? Notice in the first place that, strictly speaking, the
first point also applies to those cases they are prepared to accept as asser-
tions; those asides by Scott are prima facie further pretend-assertions by
the narrator. But, more to the point, we make assertions by making other
speech acts. For instance, we make them by asking rhetorical questions: by
uttering, Who the heck wants to read this book? we typically assert the
worthlessness of the book concerned.49
Fricker argues against this,50 but I do not find her arguments convinc-
ing. Consider a stock example in recent debates on the semantics/prag-
matics divide. Peter asks Sally whether John will join them for a dinner
Peter is about to book, and Sally replies, John has had dinner. There
is a primary message here, the assertion that John has had dinner soon
before the dialogue, and a secondary message, the assertion that John will
not want to join them for dinner. According to Fricker, only the primary
message can be asserted, but not the secondary, insinuated or indirectly
conveyed one.51 She offers two reasons. First, a secondary message will be
too ambiguous for the speaker to fully commit to it. Second, the audience
will have to choose to draw certain inferences and it is thus they, not the
speaker, who are responsible for the inferences that they choose to draw.
But notice, first, that, as those debates on the semantics/pragmatics divide
have made clear, the two points equally apply to some aspects of most pri-
mary messages; in our example, that Johns dinner took place soon before
the dialogue, as opposed to, say, three years before, has to be inferred, and
what is meant is, as a result, relatively indeterminate. Second, a merely
hinted or insinuated bribe or request is nonetheless a bribe or request.
The speaker has some motive for merely hinting at thempoliteness and
deniability52; expressive virtues, in the case of metaphorical assertions. But
these are only motives for doing them in a particular way, not for refrain-
ing from doing them.
Ichino and Currie offer an alternative model to explain the acquisition
of beliefs from fictions: readers take the way the work is written to indi-
cate something about the authors serious beliefs, they have some confi-
dence in the reliability of those beliefs and hence some confidence that the
propositions believed are true. I do not think this suffices to characterise
the cases we are discussing, unless we assume what is at stakethat the
relevant content is communicated in the assertoric mode. A proposition p
may be communicated without being asserted; for instance, it is the ante-
cedent of a conditional if p then q, or embedded as in A thinks p or it might
be that p. Given this, there are cases that fit the description that Ichino and
Currie provide, in which criticism and praise such as those illustrated by
the examples from Caryl and Buruma above would be misplaced. For an
illustration, imagine that a friend says this to us about his son: I am wor-
ried he might be considering joining ISIL. We might come to believe that
he fully believes that his son is joining ISIL, and we might come to believe
this as a result of his utterance. Still, it would be wrong to criticise him
afterward in the way Caryl criticises those responsible for The Imitation
Game if we find out that the son is far from considering joining ISIL; he
would be perfectly within his rights in responding that he did not tell us,
or say, such a thing.53 By the same token, it would be bizarre to praise him
for imparting knowledge to us, in the way Buruma praises A Touch of Sin
and Leviathan. We take authors of fiction to be assertorically committed
to some propositions, something that Ichino & Curries model does not
allow.
At the outset, I identified what I take to be the norm constitutive of the
core assertive act, assertion, by which I mean the act that we perform by
default when uttering declarative sentences. As the norm suggests, I take
assertion to be fundamentally intended for the transmission of knowledge
through testimony. In some cases, we can take what are primarily fictions
as also including assertions, understood in this sense. Thus, we might take
the authors of Leviathan and A Touch of Sin to be in a position to have the
knowledge about their societies given by the films. We might take them as
creating the films to put us in a position to acquire it, through something
like the narrative as clearinghouse procedure that Gendler identifies. And
we might respond to the film by accepting the corresponding invitations
to form beliefs. Similarly, Caryls criticism assumes that Turings biopic

invites inferences of the same sort, and questions it based on the falsity of
the beliefs thereby formed.
A detailed epistemic analysis of such inferences would be complicated,
and I cannot undertake one here. Friend uses ideas on safety and epistemic
competence from Sosa.54 Graham provides an evolutionary perspective
that could also be put to use.55 But the account presented in the previous
section is consistent with this broad picture. The films are primarily fic-
tions. They are thereby subject to a norm according to which they should
present us with contents that interested readers thus have reasons to imag-
ine. This is compatible with their including straightforward assertions of
parts of those contents, subject thereby to a norm requiring the provision
of knowledge. It is even compatible with taking their including such asser-
tions as contributing to their satisfying their constitutive norm as fictions,
given conventionally established expectations about the genres to which
they belong.56 Complaints like Caryls or Rushdies are criticisms of the
relevant fictions relative to their meeting their constitutive norms, not just
those of some indirectly conveyed act. On the present view, recognising
contents as straightforwardly asserted in a fiction in no way requires us to
excise them from the full fictional content, and hence the view does not
suffer from the patchwork problem.
The genus of constatives does not only include the species assertion,
as understood here. Claims made in a philosophy talk or paper are not
assertions in this sense; they are not intended to be accepted just by com-
prehending the force and content with which they are presented, plus
perhaps the absence of reasons to distrust the agent, or the presence of
positive reasons to trust her, depending on the correct epistemology of
testimony.57 Their illocutionary point is instead to make or merely present
some claims to the audience, calling their attention to considerations in
their favour. Fictions also include constatives of this kind. This leads us to
the second of the two ways through which we can learn from fictions I
mentioned above, which Lewis also envisaged:
Fiction can offer us contingent truths about this world. It cannot take the
place of non-fictional evidence, to be sure. But sometimes evidence is not
lacking. We who have lived in the world for a while have plenty of evidence,
but we may not have learned as much from it as we could have done. This
evidence bears on a certain proposition. If only that proposition is formu-
lated, straightway it will be apparent that we have very good evidence for it.
If not, we will continue not to know it. Here, fiction can help us. If we are
given a fiction such that the proposition is obviously true in it, we are led to
ask: and is it also true simpliciter? And sometimes, when we have plenty of
unappreciated evidence, to ask the question is to know the answer.58
Gendler calls this second inferential process narrative as factory: I export

things from the story whose truth becomes apparent as a result of thinking
about the story itself. These I add to my stock the way I add knowledge
gained by modeling.59 Thus, to illustrate it again with reviews of recently
released films, Dan Kois writes in The Slate that Richard Linklaters
Boyhood is
both a singular work [] and a universal one, reflecting the elemental for-
mative experiences of nearly every viewer, even those who dont [] have a
lot in common with Mason or Samantha or Olivia or Mason Sr. Its [] a
profound statement about the lives we live.60
Several writers have argued that it is in these acts of putting forward for
our consideration (perhaps in ways that can only be fully appreciated
through the conscious experiences we can obtain from fully worked-out
narratives) that we find the most significant forms of knowledge we can
acquire from fiction. For example, Cora Diamond has argued that litera-
ture provides knowledge by leading us to attend to the world and what
is in it, in a way that will involve the exercise of all our faculties.61 In
deservedly influential work, Martha Nussbaum emphasises how literature
enriches our experience and understanding of the world: The point is that
in the activity of literary imagining we are led to imagine and describe with
greater precision, focusing our attention on each word, feeling each event
more keenly.62 Literature deepens our knowledge, Nussbaum suggests,
by making salient to us details of the world. To discuss this further, I will
appeal to contentions we can find in fictions about the very philosophical
matter we have been discussingthe possibility of acquiring knowledge
from fiction. Being professionally interested in the topic, we should expect
fictions to convey constatives about it. In what remains of this chapter, I
will be examining a few examples of this sort and some issues they raise.
In a previous paper on this topic, I quoted in full (my own translation
of) a short story by Julio Cortzar, A Continuity of Parks.63 It features
a reader transported to what he reasonably takes to be a merely fictional
story which, unfortunately unbeknownst to him, narrates a succession of
events in fact simultaneously unfolding while he reads, eventually leading

to (one infers) his being killed offscreen in the storys denouement. As
I explain there, it is reasonable to take the story to make points about the
topic of this chapter. Which points? An obvious one is modal: there might
be fictions whose contents are entirely true.64 This would be a philosophi-
cal claim, contradicting some views on fiction. Drawing on recent work
on the epistemology of modality elaborates on how fictions support such
modal claims.65 The basic idea is that they make situations conceivable;
under certain assumptions, developed in different ways by different phi-
losophers, this supports a claim that what is thus conceivable is thereby
also possible. Once more, Lewis envisaged this: Fiction might serve as a
means for discovery of modal truth [] Here the fiction serves the same
purpose as an example in philosophy [] the philosophical example is just
a concise bit of fiction.66
The best model for explaining these inferences is that of indirect speech
acts.67 Grice offered a deservedly influential analysis for a specific case,
conversational implicatures, in which assertions are indirectly conveyed
by other assertions.68 The maxims that Grice provided were attuned to
that case and cannot be generalised. For instance, the maxim of quality
(Try to make your contribution one that is true69) cannot be applied to
explain how assertions are conveyed by questions, or to how assertives
are conveyed by fictions for that matter, because questions and fictions
are not constitutively either true or false. But the Cooperative Principle
(make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage
at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk
exchange70), from which Grice derives the specific maxims, should be
invoked in any general account of indirect speech acts. The engagement
with a fiction can be taken as a conversation, a cooperative undertaking
involving authors and their expected audiences; one in which the partners
know little of each other, but this just contributes to delineating how the
Cooperative Principle can reasonably apply.71 Also, as in the previous case
of facts exported from fictions, genre conventions and related assump-
tions will be invoked. We assume that, even though the utterly unexpected
denouement for such a short story already makes it sufficiently gratifying,
it is common for serious literary authors such as Cortzar to use their fic-
tions to make claims like the one I ventured to articulate above.
The two ways of conveying assertives I have discussed rely on herme-
neutical processes. Because of this, they create more indetermination than
that which already afflicts those directly conveyed by uttering sentences
in the declarative mood in default contexts, using expressions in their

straightforward literal way.72 As the debate on the semantics/pragmatics
divide in the past three decades has shown, and I have illustrated above,
this already requires a share of hermeneutics and hence creates a good
measure of indetermination. I was tentative in stating the philosophical
point of Cortzars story, and that was a relatively easy case because it is
so short that it can be taken as a philosophical thought-experiment. One
intended to support exactly which philosophical view, however? It would
not do for me to enlist Cortzar in support of my own views. From what
we know about this author, in all probability the thought-experiment was
meant to support an altogether opposite view about the nature of fiction.
Namely, one close to Goodmans, according to which there is no constitu-
tive difference between fiction and non-fiction, only one of degree relative
to the number of truthsin other words, (for him) propositions counted
as true by some contextually trusted epistemology.73 So Cortzar would
not have put the point of the story as I did two paragraphs back, but per-
haps rather like this: there might be works we take to be fictions that are
not in fact fictions.
This is also the main point of Marass Dark Back of Time. Here the
more essayistic form of the fiction makes it easier to identify it. He declares
right at the beginning:
I believe Ive still never mistaken fiction for reality, though I have mixed
them together more than once, as everyone does, not only novelists or
writers but everyone who has recounted anything since the time we know
began [] words even when spoken, even at their crudest are in and of
themselves metaphorical and therefore imprecise, and cannot be imagined
without ornament, though it is often involuntary; there is ornament in even
the most arid exposition and frequently in interjections and insults as well.
All anyone has to do is introduce an as if into the story, or not even that,
all you need to do is use a simile, comparison or figure of speech [] and
fiction creeps into the narration of what happened, altering or falsifying it.
The time-honored aspiration of any chronicler or survivor to tell what
happened, give an account of what took place, leave a record of events and
crimes and exploits is, in fact, a mere illusion or chimera, or, rather, the
phrase and concept themselves are already metaphorical and partake of fic-
tion. To tell what happened is inconceivable and futile, or possible only
as invention. The idea of testimony is also futile and there has never been a
witness who could truly fulfill his duty. [] Yet in these pages Im going to
place myself on the side of those who have sometimes claimed to be telling
what really happened or pretended to succeed in doing so, Im going to tell

what happened, or was ascertained, or simply knownwhat happened in my
experience or in my fabulation or to my knowledge.74
As I indicated when discussing his comments on the book at the begin-

ning, he seems to understand fiction in the sense of falsehood, and uses
familiar arguments to make his point; one of them is just the observation
by Friend mentioned at the outset, that non-fictions include contents
presented to be imagined and not to be believed. This would also explain
the reasons he provides throughout the book to mock those whom he
takes to mistake fiction for reality. The book discusses the reception of his
earlier novel, All Souls. Once and again, he questions people who (reason-
ably, in my view), taking the book to be a sort of roman clef or autobio-
graphical novel, make narrative as clearinghouse inferences of the kind
we have examined above. His argument against these inferences appears
to be simply that they are wrong in some cases: his nameless narrator has
properties that he himself does not have. His point is well takenthis
is one of the main reasons I mentioned above why the epistemology of
learning from fiction is tricky. However, as I also said above, I do not
think the situation here is constitutively different from the one involved
in learning from testimony in general; as I said, Friend and Ichino and
Currie offer good considerations why exercising an adequate vigilance
suffices to make the beliefs we acquire from fictions justified enough to
count as knowledge.
I will conclude by discussing an illustration of the misunderstandings
we are prone to make in interpreting claims by authors of fictions, on
account of their indirectnessthis time one made by means of the nar-
rative as factory technique. Rowe compares Murdochs The Black Prince
to McEwans Atonement, suggesting that both defend a similar form of
literary humanismthe view that we can obtain knowledge from fic-
tional works.75 Now, this was certainly Murdochs view. We are examining
and illustrating the main weaknesses for fiction to convey truths, deriving
from the indirectness of the different processes. Murdoch clearly appre-
ciated their main strengths for that purpose, in comparison with other
forms such as the philosophical article or the history book: good fictions
focus our attention on the points they convey in a unique way. This is
because, according to her, to create them is to make a formal utterance
of a perceived truth and render it splendidly worthy of a trained purified
attention without falsifying it in the process.76 This should be used for a
fundamental goal: Art is a special discerning exercise of intelligence in

relation to the real; and although aesthetic form has essential elements of
trickery and magic, yet form in art, as form in philosophy, is designed to
communicate and reveal.77 And this was her purpose in writing her nov-
els, including the great ones such as The Black Prince; in particular, they,
like Platos Allegory of the Cave, are intended to help us to overcome [t]
he chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art), personal fantasy:
the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which
prevents one from seeing what is there outside one,78 particularly when
it comes to love.
There are formal parallels between The Black Prince and Atonement
that Rowe rightly mentions: both pose similar paradoxes as they appar-
ently subscribe to positions that undermine the stability of the literary text,
while simultaneously subscribing to the moral tradition of the novel.79
However, I cannot see how the last part of the claim can be justified when
it comes to Atonement. In particular, I think she does not properly inter-
pret a crucial passage in the novel, which she refers to. The book con-
cerns the difficulties that Brionya novelisthas writing a novel that she
intends as atonement for a huge mistake she made in her adolescence:
The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve
atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also
God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be
reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her
imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or
novelists, even if they are atheists.80
As I interpret it, McEwan is here both assuming and putting forward

(using the narrative as factory procedure) the sort of postmodernist
view of Riffaterre and others mentioned above, on which fictions cannot
make reference to the actual world. This is the alleged reason why Briony
cannot ask for forgiveness: the forgiveness she needs should come from
someone outside her, while her fiction only refers to entities she has made.
Rowe writes about this passage:
[B]oth Bradley [Murdochs character] and Briony attempt the kind of art to
which their creators aspire, and both fail. Brionys rationale for trying is the
same as both writers: It was always an impossible task, she says, and that
was precisely the point. The attempt was all.
I think she is here missing the point just made. Murdochs rationale
was not merely to pursue the attempt for its own sake; she was seriously
intending to convey knowledge to real individuals, and would have had no
difficulty in thinking that one can successfully atone by means of a fiction,
in a way McEwan (wrongly, I believe) claims is impossible.
This once more shows that we have to be careful when we engage in
critical conversations with fictions; but I do not find any disparity of sub-
stance between the criticism I think I am entitled to make of McEwan or
Maras, and the one I have made of Rowe, Gaskin and other writers put-
ting forward straightforward assertions. For I have outlined a view accord-
ing to which, although the utterances made by fiction-creators might
constitutively lack any claim to reflect reality (as opposed to providing
contents worth imagining), in many cases, they constitutively make such
claims, because part of what makes some of those contents worth imagin-
ing is that they convey mirrors of reality. This is a controversial view that
some writers (philosophers, literary theorists and novelists) would want to
reject. But I hope I have contributed to articulate a plausible form of what
others take to be obvious.
Notes
1. Cf. Matravers contribution to this volume (chapter What
Difference (If Any) Is There Between Reading as Fiction and
Reading as Non-fiction?), as well as: Currie, G. (1990) The
Nature of Fiction (Cambridge: CUP); Lamarque, P. & Olsen,
S. H. (1994) Truth, Fiction and Literature (Oxford: Clarendon
Press); Davies, D. (2007) Aesthetics and Literature (London:
Continuum,); Stock, K. (2011) Fictive Utterance and Imagining,
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 85, 14562; Gaskin, R.
(2013) Language, Truth, and Literature (Oxford: OUP); and
Searle, J. (1974) The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse, New
Literary History, 6, 31932; also in his (1979) Expression and
Meaning (Cambridge: CUP), pp.5875. These writers are influ-
enced by Kendall Walton (1990) Mimesis and Make-Believe
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), although Walton
himself rejects speech-act accounts.
2. Searle, J. (1969) Speech Acts (Cambridge: CUP).
3. Austin, J. (1962) How to Do Things with Words (London: OUP).
4. Grice, H.P. (1957) Meaning, Philosophical Review, 66:3, 37788.
5. Alston, W. P. (2000) Illocutionary Acts & Sentence Meaning

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press), pp.489.
6. Garca-Carpintero, M. (2013) Norms of Fiction-Making, British
Journal of Aesthetics, 53, 33957.
7. Walton characterises representations as artefacts with the function
of prescribing imagining (Mimesis, p.41).
8. Williamson, T. (1996) Knowing and Asserting, Philosophical
Review 105, 489523; included with some revisions in his (2000)
Knowledge and Its Limits (New York: OUP).
9. Garca-Carpintero, M. (2013) Assertion and the Semantics of
Force-Markers in C. Bianchi (ed.) The Semantics/Pragmatics
Distinction (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press); Pelling,
C. (2013) Assertion and the Provision of Knowledge, The
Philosophical Quarterly, 63, 293312.
10. Friend, S. (2008) Imagining Fact and Fiction in Stock, K. &
Thomson-Jones, K. (eds) New Waves in Aesthetics (Basingstoke:
Palgrave); (2011) Fictive Utterance and Imagining, Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, 85, 16380; (2012) Fiction as a Genre,
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 92, 179208.
11. Friend, Fiction as a Genre, 1823.
12. Friend, Fact and Fiction, p.166.
13. Walton, Mimesis, p.79.
14. Maras, J. (2013) Dark Back of Time, E.Allen (trans.) (New York:
Vintage International).
15. Maras, J. (1998) cited in M. A. Villena, Javier Maras publica
Negra espalda del tiempo, una obra de recuerdos personales, El
Pas: Archivo, http://elpais.com/diario/1998/05/05/cul-
tura/894319203_850215.html, retrieved: 6 Jan. 2016.
16. This is my translation of his own words, el narrador soy yo con mi
nombre y apellido y todo lo que cuento es verdad o son cosas sabi-
das, conocidas o especuladas por m, cited in Villena, Javier
Maras. Davies, Aesthetics, pp.323, discusses a similar example,
Seamus Deanes Reading in the Dark, which won the Guardian
Fiction Prize 1996 in spite of being commissioned as an
autobiography (and published as fiction on Deanes insistence),
and the story corresponding in all significant details to Deanes
own childhood. I do not agree with Davies diagnosis of the case
(p.48) that whether or not the work is correctly classified as fiction
depends on whether Deane was following his fidelity constraint
(more on this below). For all we can tell, both Deane and Maras
were following it, but their works are still fictions.
17. Currie, Nature of Fiction, pp. 425. In two of them, an author
deliberately reproduces truths but presents them as imagined. In
two others, an author unwittingly produces a story that reflects the
factsin one because he doesnt know that his source is reliable,
and in another because he has repressed memories of the events he
describesyet intends it to be imagined.
18. Currie, Nature of Fiction, p.47.
19. Cf. Davies, Aesthetics, pp.446.
20. Lamarque & Olsen, Truth, p.44.
21. Davies, Aesthetics, p.46.
22. Friend, Fictive Utterance, 165.
23. Friend, Fact and Fiction, pp.1589.
24. Currie, Nature of Fiction, pp.489.
25. Rushdie, S. (2009), cited in A.Flood, Rushdie attacks Slumdog
Millionaires impossible plot, Guardian Online, http://www.
theguardian.com/books/2009/feb/24/, retrieved 6 Jan. 2016.
26. Matravers, D. (2014) Fiction and Narrative (Oxford: Oxford

University Press), p.21.
27. Matravers, Fiction and Narrative, p.27; see also his contribution
to this volume (chapter What Difference (If Any) Is There
Between Reading as Fiction and Reading as Non-fiction?)
28. Friend, Fictive Utterance, 165.
29. Matravers, Fiction and Narrative, p.95.
30. Gaskin, Language, p.36.
34. Gaskin, Language, p.38, my emphasis.
35. Friend, Fact and Fiction, p. 188 appeals to a distinction by

Walton: standard properties are those that tend to qualify a work
for membership in a category, contra-standard those that tend to
disqualify it for membership, and variable properties are those
indifferent for the classification (Walton, K. (1970) Categories of
Art, Philosophical Review, 79, 33467 [339]).
36. There are nuances on the matter of what can be learned from fic-
tions that I will be disregarding. We should distinguish whether it
is propositional knowledge we are talking about (the one we can
express without remainder in an utterance) or rather (to the extent

that they differ) practical knowledge, knowledge-how, or experien-
tial knowledge of what-it-is-like. Also, learning does not need to
involve coming to believe new truths, but merely coming to be
closer to the truth. Cf. Ichino, A. & Currie, G. (forthcoming)
Truth and Trust in Fiction in H.Bradley, E.Sullivan-Bissett &
P.Noordhof (eds) Art and Knowledge (Oxford: OUP) for a help-
ful discussion.
37. Cf. Riffaterre, M. (1990) Fictional Truth (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press), p.8; Diffey, T.J. (1995) What Can We
Learn from Art?, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 73, 20411;
Bonomi, A. (2008) Fictional Contexts in P.Bouquet, L.Serafini
and R. Thomason (eds) Perspectives on Context (Stanford: CSLI
Publications).
38. Garca-Carpintero, M. (2015) Is Fictional Reference Rigid?,

Organon F, 22, 14568 and (forthcoming) Tell Me What You
Know (Oxford: OUP).
39. Walton, Mimesis.
40. Lewis, D. (1983) Truth in Fiction in D. Lewis, Philosophical
Papers, vol. 1 (Oxford: OUP), p.278.
41. Gendler, T. Z. (2000) The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance,
Journal of Philosophy, 97:2, 5581 [76].
42. Friend, S. (2006) Narrating the Truth (More or Less) in Matthew
Kieran and Dominic McIver Lopes (eds) Knowing Art: Essays in
Aesthetics and Epistemology (Dordrecht: Springer), pp.3549.
43. Caryl, C. (2015) Saving Alan Turing from His Friends, New York
Review of Books, 62:2, 1921.
44. Buruma, I. (2014) Russia and China: The Movie, Project

Syndicate: Online, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commen-
tary, retrieved 6 Jan. 2016.
45. Friend, Fiction as a Genre.
46. Ichino & Currie, Truth and Trust.
47. Matravers, Fiction and Narrative.
48. Sperber, D., Clment, F., Heintz, C., Mascaro, O., Mercier, H.,
Origgi, G. & Wilson, D. (2010) Epistemic Vigilance, Mind &
Language, 25, 35993.
49. Some writers (cf. Alston, Illocutionary Acts) contend that an asser-
tion of p can only be made by means of a sentence that semantically
encodes p. But, as I have argued elsewhere (Garca-Carpintero, M.
(2013) Explicit Performatives Revisited, Journal of Pragmatics,

49, 117), this unjustifiably makes assertion exceptional among all
other speech acts, even the core ones; it is contradicted by exam-
ples like the one given in the main text, and appears to be moti-
vated only by those philosophers questionable views on
assertion.
50. Fricker, E. (2012), Stating and Insinuating, Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, lxxxvi, 6194.
51. Fricker means by assertion what I mean by saying, in other words,
any act in the constative genus; she calls tellings what I call asser-
tion proper.
52. Cf. Terkourafi, M. (2011) The Puzzle of Indirect Speech, Journal
of Pragmatics, 43, 28615.
53. Creators of fictions appeal in a similar way to the cover that the
indirectness discussed below offers to exculpate their factual mis-
takes (it was just a fiction, you know), but this sounds in many
cases as glib as it does when people do it about primary messages.
Cf. the anecdote that Fricker (Stating and Insinuating, 83)
reports, quite telling against her claims, about Republican Senator
Jon Kyl who, having uttered, If you want an abortion, you go to
Planned Parenthood, and thats well over 90 percent of what
Planned Parenthood does, said that this was not intended to be a
factual statement when the falsity of the claim was made clear.
54. Friend, S. (2014) Believing in Stories in G. Currie, M. Kieran,
A.Meskin & J.Robson (eds), Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind
(Oxford: OUP), pp.22747.
55. Graham, P. (2010) Testimonial Entitlement in D. Pritchard,

A.Miller & A.Haddock (eds) Social Epistemology (Oxford: OUP).
56. Cf. Gaut, B. (2006) Art and Cognition in M. Kieran (ed.),

Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art
(Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 11526 on imaginative projects whose
goal is to learn about the world.
57. Cf. Graham, Testimonial Entitlement.
58. Lewis, Truth in Fiction, pp.2789.
59. Gendler, Imaginative Resistance, 76.
60. Kois, D. (2015) The Academys Failure to Recognise Boyhood Is
Their Worst Mistake in 20 Years, Slate, http://www.slate.com/
blogs/browbeat/2015/02/23, retrieved 6 Jan. 2016.
61. Diamond, C. (1995) Anything but Argument? in C.Diamond,

The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press), p.296.
62. Nussbaum, M. (1990) Loves Knowledge (New York: OUP)

pp.478.
63. Garca-Carpintero, M. (2007) Fiction-making as an Illocutionary
Act, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, 20316.
64. In other words, one about what is possible or necessary.
65. Stokes, D. (2006) Art and Modal Knowledge in M.Kieran and
D.M. Lopes (eds), Knowing Art (Dordrecht: Springer), pp.6781.
Cf. also Ichikawa, J. & Jarvis, B. (2009) Thought-Experiments
and Truth in Fiction Philosophical Studies, 142, 22146.
66. Lewis, Truth in Fiction, 278.
67. Cf. Reicher, M. (2012) Knowledge from Fiction in Daiber, J.,
Konrad, E. & Petraschka, T. (eds), Understanding Fiction.
Knowledge and Meaning in Literature (Paderborn: Mentis),
pp.11432.
68. Grice, H. P. (1975) Logic and Conversation in Grice, H. P.

Studies in the Ways of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press) pp.2240, from which I quote.
69. Grice, Logic and Conversation, p.27.
70. Grice, Logic and Conversation, p.26.
71. Cf. Dixon, P. & Bortolussi, M. (2001) Text is not Communication,
Discourse Processes, 31:1, 125 for considerations against this, and
Gerrig, R. & Horton, W. (2001) Of Texts and Toggles: Categorical
Versus Continuous Views of Communication, Discourse Processes,
32:1, 817, for a rejoinder.
72.
Cf. Buchanan, R. (2013) Conversational Implicature,
Communicative Intentions, and Content, Canadian Journal of
Philosophy, 43, 72040, for a good discussion of the relevant inde-
terminacy, its consequences, and ways of understanding it.
73. Goodman, N. (1976) Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett).
74. Maras, Dark Back, pp.79.
75. Rowe, A. (2007) Policemen in a Search Team: Iris Murdochs
The Black Prince and Ian McEwans Atonement in A.Rowe, (ed.)
Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan),
pp.14860.
76. Murdoch, I. (1997) Existentialists and Mystics, P. Conradi (ed.)
(Penguin Press: London), p.459.
77. Murdoch, Existentialists, p.454.

80. McEwan, I. (2001) Atonement (London: Random House),

pp.3501.
PART 3
Using the Philosophy of Literature in

Literary Studies
CHAPTER 8
Poetic Utterances: Attuning Poetry

andPhilosophy
Maximiliande Gaynesford
Attunement
Poetry and philosophy are often said to be at odds with each other. Not
that all kinds of philosophy are at fault. But merely to turn ones back on
those that are hostile to poetry is no resolution. And it mends nothing to
attend only to those that already try to make a home for poetry. We need
to resolve the antipathy where philosophy treats poetry with contempt
or tries in other ways to exclude it. So I think it is particularly worth
concentrating on the mode of philosophy most notorious for its disdain-
ful treatment of poetry: analytic philosophy, and particularly the speech
act approach within analytic philosophy of language which notoriously
excludes poetryall poetryas non-serious.1
What I try to show, here and in other papers, is that literary criti-
cism of poetry needs speech act philosophy, principally because it sharp-
ens an attentiveness that literary criticism cannot otherwise provide.2
Equally, I try to argue that speech act philosophy needs this attentive-
ness to poetry; poems supply evidential riches that philosophywith its
straightforward prose and unstructured, contextless examplescannot
M. de Gaynesford (*)
Dept of Philosophy, University of Reading, Reading, England
e-mail: r.m.degaynesford@reading.ac.uk

152 M. DE GAYNESFORD
otherwise secure. More specifically, I argue that speech act philosophy

can treat poetry as a reflective study of uses of language, singularly and
uniquely equipped to provide its suitably directed appreciators with
philosophical insights into those uses. The opportunity to appreciate
philosophical distinctions and discriminations in poetry improves our
ability to discriminate features of philosophical significance. And this
opportunity to grapple anew with philosophy in turn heightens our
capacity to appreciate what is rich and subtle in poetrywhich returns
us more richly provided to pursue philosophy, from where we go back
more generously supplied to appreciate poetry, and so on, back and
forth. This vigorous spirallingcircling, but with progressis what I
mean by attuning poetry and philosophy.
In this chapter, I first identify a particular sort of phrase, the Chaucer
type, and describe its four defining features in the way one might expect
of a speech act analysis in contemporary philosophy of language. I then
draw on a rich set of examples from a variety of poems to test this analysis:
examples of utterances with similar forms but a variety of different effects,
examples of utterances with a variety of different forms but similar effects,
examples of utterances which are ambiguous.
The Chaucer Type: ABrief Characterisation

In his celebrated envoi to Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer writes:3
O moral Gower, this book I directe

To the and to the, philosophical Strode,
To vouchen sauf, ther need is, to correcte,
Of youre benignites and zeles goode.
And to that sothfast Crist, that starf on rode,
With al myn herte of mercy evere I preye,
And to the Lord right thus I speke and seye:4
(I directe: I dedicate. To vouchen sauf, ther need is, to correcte: to

ensure you agree, where necessary, to correct it. Sothfast Crist, that starf
on rode: resolute Christ, who died on the cross.)
The phrase-type which plays the cardinal role throughout is first person
in the nominative, present tense, indicative mood, active voice, where the
verb names the act performed in uttering it: I directe, I preye, I speke,
[I] seye. In each case, it would be appropriate to add herebyI hereby
POETIC UTTERANCES: ATTUNING POETRY ANDPHILOSOPHY 153
directe; I hereby preyeindicating the presence of this phrase-type,

where the verb names the act being performed in the uttering.
I shall refer to phrases of this exact form as of the Chaucer type.5 A
preliminary speech act analysis would identify four defining features of
philosophical interest.
First and most obviously, in uttering the phrase, the speaker does some-
thing (beyond the uttering). In uttering I directe, for example, he dedi-
cates a book. I shall call this feature Doing. Now this feature is true of
very many different kinds of utterance. We need further features to give
specificity to our understanding of the Chaucer type.
Second, as is clear on inspection, the sentence uttered contains a sen-
tential clause (I directe) consisting of a subject term (the first person
pronoun in the nominative) concatenated with a verb of doing (first per-
son singular, present tense, indicative mood, active voice), combined with
an explicit or implicit hereby or its equivalent. I call this second feature
Phrasing. Phrasing distinguishes the Chaucer type from other sorts of
performative utterancethose whose verbs are in the second and third
person, for example, or in the plural, or in the passive voice. The hereby
marks that immediacy and transparency between utterance and action that
is so distinctive a feature of the type. Other words and phrases can be used,
of course (hence or its equivalent). Chaucer, for example, uses right
thus here.
Many utterances conform to Doing and Phrasing without being of the
Chaucer type. This is usually because they do not satisfy a third feature:
the verb in the sentential clause is a word for what the speaker does in
uttering the sentence. For example, directe (dedicate) is a word for what
Chaucer does in uttering O moral Gower, this book I directe. I call
this third feature Naming. Naming holds for a limited set of sentences.
Many verbs do not name actions at all. Of those that do, many do not
name kinds of action which can be performed in uttering a sentence. So
Chaucer is careful to choose verbs that clearly satisfy both requirements
for his envoi: direct (dedicate), pray, speak, say. Other poets arouse con-
cerns, court ambiguities, by choosing verbs that do not clearly satisfy both
requirements.
The fourth feature of the Chaucer type follows from the first three, but
is worth making salient and considering in its own right: the act named
by the verb in the sentential clause is assuredly performed in uttering the
sentence. I call this fourth feature Securing. For example, in uttering
O moral Gower, this book I directe, Chaucer does indeed dedicate his
book. The act thus named is successfully performed in the successful per-
formance of the uttering.
It is easy to misunderstand Securing.6 It neither says nor implies that
everything about a Chaucer type utterance is assured. In particular, it does
not imply that the whole sentence is true. If I say I am hereby making a
statement in French, for example, I satisfy Doing (I do something beyond
mere uttering: I make a statement), Phrasing (I use the first person sin-
gular present indicative active with hereby) and Naming (I name what
I do in uttering it). Nevertheless, what I say is false. The point is simply
this: despite the fact that the whole sentence is false, I still satisfy Securing,
for I do indeed make a statement. Moreover, Securing does not claim
that, if the act named by the verb is to be performed, only the uttering
of the sentence is required. In the Chaucer example, for instance, there
needs to be a book, and the speaker needs to be authorised to dedicate
it. Nevertheless, it is not the presence of the book or of the authorised
speaker that performs the act of dedicating. This act is performed in the
speakers producing of the Chaucer type utterance.
The combination of these four featuresDoing, Phrasing, Naming and
Securingdetermines the Chaucer type. But it is the distinction between
the features, the articulation they lend the whole, which aids critical appre-
ciation. Again, phrases of this type occur commonly in ordinary language
and in the most mundane contexts (Im telling you to shut the door!).
But their occurrence in poetry is of particular interest, since poets make
particular use of these features, put them through various forms of stress.
Doubtless there are senses in which Doing may be said to apply to
many, or most, or even all sentences in poetry. But what one does in utter-
ing a sentence is not always named by that sentence. This might make the
relationship between utterance and action unclear. What, then, is done
in the uttering? Moreover, it is possible that what one does in uttering a
sentence is not secured by its uttering. This might make the relationship
between utterance and action unsafe. Is anything, after all, done by the
uttering?
What is peculiar about genuine Chaucer type utterances is precisely
that they do not challenge the relationship between utterance and action
in either of these ways. Naming and Securing modulate Doing so that this
use of language in poetry becomes plainly, unmistakably, blatantly, a form
of action. Phrasing is at the service of both Naming and Securing. This is
the source of the transparency which is one primary manifestation of the
Chaucer type utterance. But it is not always clear whether an utterance is
of the Chaucer type. There are occasions where it is quite clear that depar-
tures from the strict form are made and it is simply left to us to determine
how close or distant the resulting utterance is from the Chaucer type.
The contrast is with occasions where the conditions required by
Phrasing seem to be met, but we are nevertheless in doubt as to whether
we should hear an implicit hereby. Is what is named done in the utter-
ing (Naming)? Is what is done secure, assuredly performed in the utter-
ing (Securing)? Indeed, is anything at all actually being done, beyond the
uttering (Doing)? Where poets leave us in doubt about this, critical atten-
tion provides us with aids to philosophical reflection on the Chaucer type.
I Ask Myself This (Prynne): TheChaucer Type

andContradiction
As a first example, consider J.H. Prynnes Thoughts on the Esterhzy

Court Uniform. The poem is in part a reflection on different ways we
might think over the notion of returning. Aspects of that division are
exposed in play over the Chaucer type:
How can we sustain such constant loss.

I ask myself this, knowing that the world
is my pretext for this return through it, and
that we go more slowly as we come back
more often to the feeling that rejoins the whole.7
I ask myself this. The speaker may beherebyasking himself this

question. Or he may be merely describing himself (even if only to himself)
as one who tends to ask himself this questionin which case, the act of
asking is not actually being performed here (Doing is not satisfied; a cru-
cial aspect of Phrasingthe implicit herebyis not satisfied). The sense
teeters uncomfortably between the options, the straightforward present
indicative and a tense J.L. Austin dubs the habitual indicative,8 widening
an ambiguity in the first sentence. Though phrased as a question, it lacks
a question mark.
The calm urgency in these lines may suggest that I ask myself this does
contain an implicit hereby. The sense might be: There is that about this
moment which forces me to ask this question, to set myself now in search
of an answer, or at least to recognise this as a moment where my attention
is fixed on this: how can we sustain such constant loss? On the other hand,
and with at least equal reason, given the steady follow-through after the
first comma, and the need for a suitable referent for this return, we may
assume that the clause is merely a statement or description about what the
speaker tends to do, and is a habitual indicative, rather than of the Chaucer
type. The sense might then be: This is a question that I have a tendency
to ask myself; I do it habitually, or at least regularly, or at least whenever
prompted; it is a question to which I return.
It is a matter of what the speaker is really attending to. If the utterance
is of the Chaucer type, then the speakers attention, and ours, are fixed on
the question: how is it possible for us to sustain such constant loss? It is this
asking of the question which evokes the feeling that rejoins the whole.
On the other hand, if the utterance is in the habitual indicative tense, a
statement or description about what he tends to do, then the speakers
attention, and ours, are fixed on something other than the question: the
questioner, perhaps, or the fact that the speaker asks the question. Then
the line How can we sustain such constant loss is distanced somewhat, at
best, a prompt or cause for what we are concerned about, but perhaps only
part of the background. On this reading, the options are straightforwardly
contradictory. What is being said cannot be held together in thought, and
the speaker does not try; the reader is forced to invent an interpretation.
This itself is then felt as a loss: we go more slowly as we come back | more
often. This is a possibility. There certainly are two distinct and contradic-
tory movements of thought which the poem sets us: that return is possible
and actual (assumed in the lines quoted: the world | is my pretext for this
return through it), and that return is not actual (stated outright at the
outset: we do not return), perhaps even impossible.
We may think there is too much overt play between the options to
suggest something so decisive and simple. Though one option is meant,
elements of the other may be included. And there are ways for both to lie
before the attention. For example, if we are being brought to attend to
one via the other. So the sentence might be of Chaucer type, but subtly
appealing to the alternative, so as to express something more self-reflective:
It may be that I regularly ask myself this, but that is not important; what
matters here is that there is that about this moment which forces me to
ask: how can we sustain such constant loss?
Equally, the sentence might be in the habitual indicative, a statement or
description of what the speaker tends to do, but one that subtly appeals to
the Chaucer type alternative, so as to intimate something more active and
direct: Whenever I ask myself this, it is this question alone that I attend
to; it fixes my attention.
That both possibilities are alive and active gives proper value to what
follows:
Soon one would live in a sovereign point and

still we dont return, not really, we look back
and our motives have more courage in
structure than in what we take them to be.9
The thought is evidently awkward for the speaker; it cannot be expressed

cleanly. It needs a stress-mark (still) and another go (, not really).
And these attempts at clarity leave the ambiguity in place. Indeed, they
cannot but know that they do so, when the term that is meant to do the
cleaning up (really) is itself a notorious muddier of waters.
We do return, if in an unsatisfactory way, and we look back. We
do not return at all; instead we look back. The movements of thought
may be contradictory, but the speaker will not relinquish either; each is
thought through the other.
What I am trying to show, with this example and those that follow,
is some ways that attunement might be made to work between poetry
and speech act philosophy. I am treating as of particular interest cases
where it is difficult to be sure whether an utterance is of the Chaucer type.
The kinds of ambiguity which poems court here press us to ask questions
that are both philosophical (for example, what exactly is the Chaucer type
form?) and literary critical (for instance, what precise differences does it
make on this particular occasion whether we do or do not read a phrase
as of the Chaucer type?), whereas I hope to be showingwhat we learn
about either immediately informs our awareness of the other.
I Sing What WasLost (Yeats) TheChaucer Type

andAction/Reflection
On some occasions where the ambiguity of an utterance in poetry rests on

whether or not it is of Chaucer type, we may be required to retain both
readings. This is the case with Prynnes poem, I think. I shall now look at
a Yeats poem where we may be required to renounce one of the readings,
however difficult it may prove to relinquish its hold on us. Again, what
will help us appreciate the poem is a sense of the philosophical issues raised
by the Chaucer type, a sense that is itself sharpened by confronting those
issues in the context of poetry.
Yeats short poem, What was lost10 begins:
I sing what was lost
We may take this as an utterance of the Chaucer type, as we are surely

invited to dorecalling this instance in the Aeneid, but also Yeats f ondness
for the form. Indeed, given the title, we may take this as a peculiarly strong
instance of the Chaucer type: one that expands considerably on what it is
self-reflexive about.
Naming tells us that, in a Chaucer type utterance, what the poet does
is named and made explicit in the very act of uttering what he utters. But
usually, this naming extends only to the verb: the poet sings in singing I
sing Here, naming also includes the title: the poet sings what was lost
in singing What was lost. Or perhaps we should say that the poet sings
What was lost in singing what was lost.
This makes no difference to the point about Naming. It does make a
difference to the way we understand the poem. And that in turn reveals
something of interest about Doing and the locution which represents it:
In uttering such-and-such, the speaker does so-and-so. It matters in
which order we fill the gaps; we cannot swap them about ad lib. For as the
poem continues, a difficulty arises:
I sing what was lost and dread what was won,

I walk in a battle fought over again,
My king a lost king, and lost soldiers my men;
Feet to the Rising and Setting may run,
They always beat on the same small stone.
We supply I for the gap indread what was won, treating this ellipti-
cal clause as we treat its structural parallel, the non-elliptical I sing what
was lost.11 And since we treat this latter clause as a Chaucer type utter-
ance, this may mean that we should treat the former in the same way.
The problem is that the elliptical clause does not seem to permit this
reading. The phrasing seems appropriate enough. But this is the only one
of the four features of the Chaucer type that the utterance seems to satisfy.
To dread something is not to do something (however much it may lead
to doing something); this contrasts with Doing. Hence dread is not a
word for what the speaker does in uttering the clause; this contrasts with
Naming. And clearly the speaker need not dread anything in uttering the
words [I] dread; this contrasts with Securing. The reasons why the clause
fails Doing, Naming and Securing respectively mean that we cannot add
hereby or its equivalents to it either. Hence it only appears to satisfy
Phrasing. And since it fails this test also, we should treat the phrase [I]
dread what was won not as Chaucer type but as the alternative: a state-
ment or description.
If reconstruction of the elliptical clause is licensed by a structural par-
allel with the antecedent clause, and the elliptical clause is to be treated
as a statement or description, then that may give us reason to treat the
antecedent clause as a statement or description. On this interpretation, I
sing what was lost could not, after all, be treated as of the Chaucer type
either. It is a statement or description (singing what was lost is something
I tend to do, am in the habit of doing, and do from time to time; it is not
what I hereby do).
We are not forced into this habitual indicative reading, however. It
might be possible to reconstruct the elliptical clause without insisting
on structural parallelism at this deep level, recovering the singular term I
while maintaining our sense of the antecedent clause as it first appeared.
The lexical dependence of a statement or description on a Chaucer type
utterance would be awkward only in syntactic exposition. The condition it
would express is straightforward enough: that one recognises an underly-
ing mood (of dread) as the context in whichor perhaps out of which
one acts (sings).
Nevertheless, we may have better reason to renounce our first impres-
sions. Sing gives purpose to the possibility. It is a word that is sometimes
used to distinguish poetry from prose, and, by extension, what poets do
in each case: producing poetic utterances as opposed to producing utter-
ances about poetry, or reflections on it, or statements about it. In using it,
Yeats draws attention to the distinction, a gap which the lexical suppres-
sion then makes us feel. We realise, with a slight shock, that what we had
taken as transparently an act is in fact a reflection on action. Being made to
feel this gap, in renouncing first impressions, may be part of the extended
reflection that the poem is meant to enact: that reflection on action may
pass as action, and that to be acquainted with this is to be acquainted with
a falling-off, part of the loss on which the poem reflects.
This would make the poem that complex thing: an utterance about
poetic utterance that disclaims its status as poetic utterance while being, or
perhaps in beingperhaps even by beingitself a poetic utterance.
Attunement enables us to appreciate this play between action and

reflectionthe one conditioning the other, each defining itself in con-
tradiction to the othera play teases itself out in Yeats metre. When
we hear the first clause as of Chaucer type, as an action set against the
reflections which follow, we are primed to discern something sprightly
in the final clause, a lightness on the penultimate beat: Thy alwys beat
n th same smll stone. If we cancel the first impression and insist on
a relentlessly reflective reading throughout, we will hear instead a final
molossus: Thy alwys beat n th same small stone. Whichever we
may decide on, the possibility of the alternative continues to niggle away
at us.
I Wonder (Hopkins) TheChaucer Type

andIntimate Struggle
So far, we have been dealing only with parts of poems. It is worth see-
ing whether an attuned approach might be capable of dealing with whole
poems. So in this example and the one that follows, I try to show how
Chaucer type utterances fit into broader patterns, how they serve larger
purposes.
Consider Thou art indeed just, by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Justus quidem tu es, Domine

si disputem tecum; verumtamen justa loquar ad te:
quare via impiorum prosperatur? etc (Jerem. XII 1.)
Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend

With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,

How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes

Now, leavd how thick! lacd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build but not I build; no, but strain,

Times eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
The poem, dated March 1889, is situated exactly between the events
it describes (a retreat made in January 1889, three months earlier) and
Hopkins death (in June 1889, three months later). It is standardly viewed
as the record of a frozen and despairing instant, a falsity that can only be
sustained by very selective quoting from the retreat notes. What those
same notes bear out is something quite differentthe compacting of a
complex development; the turn, turn and upturn of a progress of thought.
The poem is itself leaved and laced with seven instances of the first-
person, present, indicative, active form (I contend; I plead; I endeav-
our; I wonder; I spend; I build; I strain) but only one in which
hereby is implicit. This is I wonder, perhaps the most meagre of the
various acts named, since it requires least of the agent and has least effect
on the world. Hopkins sets it in the exact middle of the string, a journey
towards and away from thoughtful act.
This invests the verb with a significance we might otherwise miss but
that is true to the act being performed in the poems uttering: that I won-
der may mean not only I ponder, speculate but I marvel, gaze in awe.
It also reflects the position of the speaker, caught in intimate struggle
between reflective thought and thoughtful act, unable to settle on the
latter until the very last lines dutiful demand, a call for action, but action
to or on rather than by the speaker: Mine, O thou lord of life, send my
roots rain.
So Hopkins dealings with the Chaucer type support the impression of
a speaker pressed between an acute sense of the injustice of his situation
and an equally acute recognition of the justice of God. This is precisely
Jeremiahs quandary in the epigraph, of course: if one recognises from the
start that God is just, how can justice be ones ground of complaint against
God? But Hopkins plays a mischievous game with his borrowing. His
beginning is Jeremiahthe first two and a half lines are a fairly straightfor-
ward translation of the epigraph from the Latin and into poetry. But the
etc., which implies more of the same, actually marks the exact point of
Hopkins divergence from Jeremiahone that will release him from the
bind in which Jeremiah remainsthat the injustice of his situation and the
justice of God together license his dutiful demand. For where Jeremiah is
stuck wondering at the fruitfulness of the wicked so as to entreat the Lord

to deal harshly with them (in the exuberance of the King James Bible, to
pull them out like sheep for the slaughter, and prepare them for the day
of slaughter), Hopkins speaker wonders at the barrenness of his own
condition, which gives him the platform to demand merciful dealing from
the Lord. For Jeremiah, it is, You are just Lord, but ; the admission is
there to offset the boldness to come. For Hopkins, it is, You are just Lord,
and so ; the admission is part of the same move, the boldness gathering
strength from the admission. This is confidence indeed.
But this point is achieved only via vigorous shuttling: between legiti-
mate complaint and legitimate dependency, being daring and being accept-
ing, initiating action himself and reflecting on action initiated by others,
the good (God) and the bad (sinners). And this tension between being
active and passive, being spontaneous and receptive, is forced up through
the poems handling of the Chaucer type. For although there is no implicit
hereby to six instances of the first-person form, it is precisely these verbs
which name the very acts that the speaker is performing in uttering this
poemI contend, I plead, I endeavour, I [] spend, I build, I
[] strain. So Hopkins takes up these phrases into the speakers shut-
tling, engaged in the intimate struggle between an acting and a reflecting,
a doing and a reporting on a doing.
Particularly interesting in this respect is I that spend, at the very centre
of the poem. It is charged for Hopkins by Shakespeares Sonnets, which
twice run spend against the line-end (as here) when (as here) the speaker
manages to press his addressee for an answer while simultaneously looking
deeply into himself:
Sonnet 4:
Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thyself thy beautys legacy?
Sonnet 149:
Nay, if thou lourst on me do I not spend
Revenge upon myself with present moan?
Shakespeare and Hopkins both draw on the extravagant ambiguities of

spendto exercise, pay out, ejaculate, dispose of, deprive oneself, use
up, exhaust. Hopkins does so to greater effect, perhaps, playing it against
the eunuch-theme: at the heart of his desolation, spend is a prolific
breeder of meaningsspecifically, of names for actsmore specifically

still, of names for acts the speaker is performing in the uttering of this
poem, if not exactly in the uttering of this phrase (there is no implicit
hereby here). Here too, then, a phrase, like its speaker, shuttles vigorously
between action and reflection, and in its fruitfulness, it contains a taste
and presentiment of the resolution to come. And we have arrived at this
thought by attuning philosophy and poetry to each other, raising critical
questions about the precise effects Hopkins achieves by asking philosophi-
cal questions about the nature and role of the Chaucer type.
I Celebrate (Hill) TheChaucer Type

andAvoidance
Geoffrey Hills Ovid in the Third Reich is almost equally well known and
studied, but its dealings with the Chaucer type have also gone unnoticed,
so there is hope that attunement might shed a little fresh light on it.
non peccat, quaecumque potest peccasse negare,

solaque famosam culpa professa facit.
Amores III, iv
I love my work and my children. God

Is distant, difficult. Things happen.
Too near the ancient troughs of blood
Innocence is no earthly weapon.
I have learned one thing: not to look down

So much upon the damned. They, in their sphere,
Harmonize strangely with the divine
Love. I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir.12
I love is the text which the poem works on and around, each word
occurring three times in its course, and the treatment of the phrase con-
firming the steady souring: what is tenuously joined in the first line cannot
be sustained but splits up and is reversed in the last line, Love. I., a full
stop coming down hard like a sword between. Seemingly played against
this movement, and at the very end, I [] celebrate is the only candidate
for the Chaucer type. The in-filling, in mine, separated off fore and aft
by its commas, a punctuated portraying of the speakers sphere, conveys
its hesitations about this. It may be an act performed in the uttering, I

hereby celebrate, or it may be something more low-key, a report about
an attitude, a practiceor, indeed, it may be both: the consensus among
philosophers is that uttering a Chaucer type phrase does not just perform
the act it names, but reports it as being performed. So deciding between
these options takes up the issue that has focused philosophical debate con-
cerning the Chaucer type; it also takes us to the heart of the matter, as we
shall see.
The poem is high altitude stuff: a complex structure, brutal changes of
subject, emphasis and mood, all pressed as thin and flat as the blandness
of the speakerif one thinks plainness must always be bland, consider
Thou art indeed just, whose plainness is simplicity, not blandness. But
it is vampiric also: give it a drop of blood and the whole thing quickens
with life. Lines 34 evoke the Germanic Bahrprobe, the ritual test working
off the superstition that the body of the murdered will bleed again in the
presence of their murderersa crux in the Nibelungenlied. Suddenly we
are on to the speakers twist of mind: thinking of innocence as a weapon;
regretting that in this instance, it is not a weapon; unfazed by the presence
of so much blood, and caught instead by the unfortunate effectthat like
a compass disturbed by too much magnetic material, bleeding where there
are troughs of blood is useless as an indicator.
Hill is as subtle as Hopkins in the game he plays with his epigraph
Anyone who can claim they do not sin is without sin; it is only admitted
guilt that makes a person notorious. What we could not guesswhat
Hills speaker disguisesis that Ovids speaker is not being deeply cyni-
cal at allhis strategy is mortifying, and actually rather endearing, if ill-
advised (dont try this at home). He is pleading with his beloved: Since
you are so beautiful I do not beg you not to sin; I only ask that you do
not force me, miserable as I am, to know about it. I dont ask that you
be chaste, but only that you stir yourself to lie about it. Anyone who can
claim they do not sin is without sin; it is only admitted guilt that makes a
person notorious. By contrast, Hills speaker is not pleading with another
but pleading for himself; he is offering excusesunderstand me, my situ-
ation you will see I am not so far from the standard: I love the usual
things; I find the usual things difficult; and anyway, I was not really the
agent; so you cant blame me.
These remarks return us to the issue: is I [] celebrate of the Chaucer
type or not? What hangs on this? Either way, the thought seems ghastly.
The speaker separates himself from the damnedhe is not of their
spherebut he does celebrate that with which the damned are in strange
harmony: the love-choir. The thought here reflects a familiar proposal
that the divine economy is such that even evil can be made to work out
for good. What horrifies is the thought of the speaker using this proposal
to underpin his excuses, to ground his pleas of innocencehis I []
celebrate is his claiming the right to be unfazed by whatever it is he has
done, or left undone.
And now it is clear why it would fitwould be so savagely appropri-
ateif this phrase were of the Chaucer type. It is in uttering this phrase
and by extension, the whole poem containing itthat the speaker stakes
his right to being unfazed. The speaker hereby justifies speaking blandly of
his association with great evil; he does so in speaking blandly of great evil.
This makes the poem come right with a click like a closing boxto recall
a remark by Yeats that Hill approves ofin this case, a click that shuts off
this speaker in his timeless, airless sphere.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have set out to clarify what I mean by the attunement of
poetry and philosophy. Attunement is a single unified activity, but it helps
to describe it in two complementary ways.
Looked at in one way, the aim has been to sharpen our sense of the
main philosophical questions concerning the Chaucer type by looking
closely at the stresses that poetry exerts on the form. So in studying four
poems, I have tried to see more precisely what Chaucer type utterances
are, to identify what sets them apart from utterances with the same form
(for example, those expressed using the same sentence), to understand
what conditions there are on their successful performance, to appreciate
what kinds of action such utterances are capable of performing and in
what circumstances, to see what role the first person plays.
Looked at in another way, the aim has been to sharpen our critical
engagement with poems, using this philosophical sense that we have sharp-
ened by looking at poetry. So in studying these four poems, I have tried
to identify and order the effects that a Chaucer type utterance achieves, to
say more exactly how such an utterance achieves each of these effects on
each such occasion, to list more precisely the conditions that make these
particular utterances possible, to discriminate more carefully between each
of the functions of these utterance, and thus to identify more closely the
various purposes they serve.
We can describe attunement in either of these two different ways, and

there is no danger in doing so, as long as we recognise what we are about:
taking up two different perspectives on the same activity.
Notes
1. In previous work, I have tried to show that speech act philosophy
is not in fact deeply hostile to poetry: what it intends by calling
poetry non-serious is what poets and critics themselves often
endorse. See de Gaynesford, M. (2009) Incense and Insensibility:
Austin on the non-seriousness of Poetry, Ratio, 22, 46485;
(2009) The Seriousness of Poetry, Essays in Criticism, 59, 121;
(2011) How Not To Do Things with Words, The British Journal
of Aesthetics, 51, 3149.
2. See de Gaynesford, M. (2010) Speech Acts and Poetry, Analysis,
70, 6446; (2013) Speech acts, responsibility and commitment in
poetry in P.Robinson (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary
British and Irish Poetry (Oxford: OUP).
3. Chaucer, G. (2008) Troilus and Criseyde, V.18561870in L.D.
Benson (general ed.) The Riverside Chaucer 3rd edition reissue
(Oxford: OUP), p.585.
4. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, p.585.
5. For a preliminary account of the type, resting on illustrations from
poetry in English, see de Gaynesford, Speech acts, responsibility.
6. Some of the confusion may result from the misleading ways that
philosophers tend to describe this property of Chaucer type utter-
ances: that they are verifiable by their use or self-guaranteeing.
The first assumes what is controversial: that such utterances are
verifiable in the first place. The second leads too easily to inflation
of the claim.
7. Prynne, J.H. (2005) Thoughts on the Esterhzy Court Uniform
in J.H. Prynne: Poems 2nd edition (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books Ltd.,
2005), pp.99100 [99].
8. Austin, J. L. (1962) How To Do Things with Words (London:
OUP), p.56.
9. Prynne, Thoughts, p.99.
10. Yeats, W.B. (1950) What was lost in W.B. Yeats: Collected Poems
2nd edition (London: Macmillan), p.359.
11. This is a basic principle commonly accepted as governing interpre-

tation of verb phrase ellipsis, despite considerable disagreement
about the subsidiary principles to be deployed in subsequent analy-
sis: the lexical suppression of the subject term of the second and
subsequent clause of a structurally parallel construction would
normally invite reconstruction of the elliptical clause on the model
of the complete antecedent clause. See Cornish, F. (1999)
Anaphora, Discourse, and Understanding (Oxford: OUP).
12. Hill, G. (2013) Ovid in the Third Reich in Broken Hierarchies:
Poems 19522012 (Oxford: OUP), p.39.
CHAPTER 9
What Difference (If Any) Is There Between

Reading asFiction andReading
asNon-fiction?
DerekMatravers
At least until recently Anglo-American philosophers have taken the dis-

tinction between fictional narratives and non-fictional narratives to be
foundational for that area of the discipline. To take a couple of examples,
Gregory Currie opens his 1990 book, The Nature of Fiction, thus: There
can hardly be a more important question about a piece of writing or speech
than this: Is it fiction or non-fiction?.1 In their book, Truth, Fiction, and
Literature, Peter Lamarque and Stein Olsen claim: the classification of
narrative into fiction and non-fiction is of the utmost significance.2 The
distinction is the foundation on which a flourishing sub-genre of the dis-
cipline is built: namely, the philosophy of fiction.
The situation is more complicated in literary theory. Terry Eagleton
begins his classic introduction to the topic with a discussion on the dif-
ficulties of distinguishing literature from non-literature (where the for-
mer encompasses fictions and non-fictions). He speculates briefly that the
distinction between fiction and non-fiction might prove more tractable,
but rejects that as well.3 However, the distinction is alive and well, even if
D. Matravers (*)
Dept of Philosophy, The Open University, Milton Keynes, England
e-mail: Derek.matravers@open.ac.uk

170 D. MATRAVERS
it is not clear exactly what the distinction is. It can, for example, be found
in this comparison between biographies and the novel in a recent book
by Catherine Belsey. She is discussing Stephen Greenblatts biography of
ShakespeareWill in the World:4
Like novels, biographies invite us to feel close to a single protagonist, to

understand this figure, care about his or her triumphs and disasters, and
at the same time inhabit sympathetically a world that is not our own. Its a
tribute to fiction that life stories prove so seductive. But they are not novels:
biography is its own genre and, as so often, this critical biography claims
to illuminate the work. There is, however, a price to pay for the smooth
unfolding of a narrative that takes us from the experience to the text and
back. The story is told at the cost of the intertextuality that gives the work
its resonance, its layers of meaning. Furnishing the text with a final sig-
nified, an explanatory point of origin outside textuality, critical biography
deflects attention from the links we might find within or between writings
themselves.5
Belsey contrasts novelswhich get their resonance, their layers of mean-

ing, from other textsand biographywhich gets whatever resonance or
layers of meaning she thinks it has from something outside textuality,
presumably the world. This is not to say that literary theory presents a
homogeneous view on these matters, or indeed that this is Belseys consid-
ered view. Indeed, one can find, within literary theory, expressions of the
view similar to those I will go on to endorse in this chapter.6
The distinction between fiction and non-fiction can take many forms. It
sometimes marks the distinction between truth and falsehood; for exam-
ple, in the claim that a witnesss testimony is pure fiction. It sometimes
marks the distinction between the actual and the non-existent; for exam-
ple, in the claim that the Loch Ness monster is a fiction. My principal
interest is its use to mark a distinction between narratives: some narratives
(for example, Fitzgeralds Tender is the Night) are fiction and some nar-
ratives (for example, Churchills Great Contemporaries) are non-fiction.
My arguments will principally be within my home discipline of Anglo-
American philosophy, but they are intended to have broader relevance.
Indeed, they are intended to be relevant to anyone who thinks that there
is a clear difference between reading something as fiction and reading it
as non-fiction.
Philosophers tend to run together two ways of distinguishing fiction
and non-fiction. The first is what has been called, by David Davies, the
fidelity constraint:
WHAT DIFFERENCE (IF ANY) IS THERE BETWEEN READING ASFICTION... 171
To read a narrative as non-fiction is to assume that the selection and tem-

poral ordering of all the events making up the narrative was constrained by
a desire, on the narrators part, to be faithful to the manner in which actual
events transpired.7
By narrator here, Davies means the person responsible for composing the
narrative; that is, the flesh-and-blood author. Furthermore, as he makes
clear in a footnote, by temporal ordering he does not mean the order in
which events appear in the narrative, but the temporal order in which the
narrative represents those events as occurring. When Fitzgerald set out
to write Tender is the Night he was not constrained, in what he put on
the page, to be faithful to the manner in which actual events transpired
because there were no such actual events. To put the matter bluntly, the
constraints under which he laboured were those of physical and psycho-
logical plausibility; within those, he was free to make stuff up. Churchill,
on the other hand, was constrained by actual events. In writing the bio-
graphical sketch of Sir John French, he was constrained in his writing by
the actual events that made up the life of Sir John French.
The second way in which the distinction is made is that, in fiction,
readers are not mandated to believe what they read. In non-fiction, for
example, a reliable newspaper, readers form beliefs on the grounds of
what they find there. By contrast, when they read a fiction, they are not
mandated to believe its content, rather they are mandated to imagine
(or make-believe) it. In short, the appropriate attitude to take towards
the content of a non-fiction is a belief and the appropriate attitude to
take towards the content of a fiction is a make-belief. The mental states
of belief and make-belief can be defined functionally: broadly, beliefs
have a connection to motivation that is not shared by make-beliefs. This
view is sufficiently widely held in the philosophy of fiction to merit being
called the consensus view. As far as I am aware, the only philosopher
(apart from myself) who does not think the non-fiction/fiction distinc-
tion coincides with the belief/imagination distinction is Stacie Friend.
Those who hold the view include Gregory Currie, David Davies, Aaron
Meskin, Kathleen Stock, Kendall Walton, Jonathan Weinberg, and a host
of others. The claim that there is a consensus (or to use their term con-
vergence) about this is made by two advocates of the view: Timothy
Schroeder and Carl Matheson.8
The link between the two views is obvious. If a writer obeys the fidelity
constraint, the claims made on the page will reflect what actually happened
172 D. MATRAVERS
and thus it would be safe to believe it. If a writer is making stuff up, it
would not be appropriate to believe it. However, we have some kind of
attitude to itand given the plausible link between art and the imagina-
tion, it seems plausible that such an attitude is one of imagining (or make-
believing) the content of what we read.
This is not the time to rehearse the problems I have with the consensus
view; I go into the matter elsewhere.9 Suffice to say here that I accept the
first way of making the distinction and reject the second (the reason is, in
brief, that the account of imagination used by the consensus view does not
pick out fictional representations but all representations, whether fictional
or non-fictional). Rejecting the second is not a minor amendment to the
consensus view, however. One of the roles it plays is providing the con-
sensus view with their account of what is distinctive in our engaging with
fiction. Here is Lamarque and Olsen again:
The fictive story-teller, making up a story, makes and presents sentences (or
propositions, i.e. sentence-meanings) for a particular kind of attention. The
aim, at first approximation, is this: for the audience to make-believe (imag-
ine or pretend) that the standard speech act commitments associated with
the sentences are operative even while knowing they are not. Attending to
the sentences in this way is to adopt the fictive stance towards them.10
To read fiction as fiction is to adopt the fictive stance towards itto make-
believe it.11 Make-beliefs have a distinct psychological role from beliefs.
Some consensus theorists even go as far as to say they are processed in
a distinct psychological system, parallel to beliefs.12 Hence, rejecting the
view that there is any special connection between fiction and the imagina-
tion prompts the question: what difference is there, if any, between read-
ing as fiction and reading it as non-fiction?
Let me try to motivate this intuitively. We can all agree that there is a
big difference between being confronted with an angry lion and being
confronted with a representation of an angry lion. Principally, in the first
case, one would be sharing space with the lion and thus action towards (or
more likely away from) the lion would be possible and appropriate. In the
second case, one would not be sharing space with the lion and thus action
towards (or away from) the lion would not be possible. This puts confron-
tations on one side, and representations on the other. The issue for us is
what difference, if any, it makes if the representation is of an actual lion
or a fictional lion. Those who hold the view described above (that there
could hardly be a more important question or that the distinction is of

the utmost significance) seem committed to the view that the fictionality
or not of the lion would make a very big difference. I am sceptical that
there is much in the way of systematic differences within engaging with
representations between the way in which we engage with fiction and the
way in which we engage with non-fiction.
I shall clear a few points out of the way first, lest they confuse the issue.
First, I have agreed that non-fictions are (broadly) those narratives that
obey the fidelity constraint. It follows from this that, if we believe we are
reading non-fictions, we can presume that what we are reading is true, and
hence that it is appropriate to believe it. That is not the case with fictions
(which is not to say that we make-believe the content of fictionsrather,
we simply do not believe them). Thus (roughly) the propositions that
form the content of non-fictions are heading towards our structures of
belief and the propositions that form the content of fictions are not. I am
simplifying for ease of exposition. The relation between narratives (fiction
or non-fiction) and belief is a good deal more complicated.13
Second, non-fictions are generally about things that exist or existed
(or, at least, things that are thought to exist or have existed). Churchills
Great Contemporaries is aboutamong others thingsthe First World
War, Sir John French, and Bernard Shaw. Fictions are also largely about
things that exist or existed; it is only that what is said about those things
need not be true. Of course, fiction is also about things that never existed:
Mark Darcy, Elizabeth Bennett, and Pemberley among them. This raises
questions about the ontology of fictional characters, and the semantics of
sentences containing fictional names. This is not my concern here. Rather,
I am concerned with the question of whether the psychological role of
those propositions that enter our minds on engaging with representa-
tions we believe to be fictional differs from the psychological role of those
propositions that enter our minds on engaging with representations we
believe to be non-fictional. I remain uncertain (and vaguely troubled) by
what exactly is the relation between the two enquiries (that of ontology
and semantics, and that of psychological role).
The third point relies on the distinction related to that which Lamarque
calls the external perspective and the internal perspective. The former
we have when we reflect on, or talk about, the narrative; the latter is the
perspective we have when we are engaged with the narrative, following
its twists and turns.14 Some of the questions we ask of a narrative from
the external perspective would be appropriate for both fictional and non-
174 D. MATRAVERS
fictional narratives. These are questions that pertain to the narrative as

narrative. This would include questions about style, about the use of liter-
ary devices (such as irony or metaphor), questions about structure, and a
myriad of others. However, other questions would not be appropriate for
both fictional and non-fictional narratives. The fact that non-fictions obey
the fidelity constraint rules out certain questions. It is not the case that
authors of non-fictions have no decisions to make as to what to include,
what to leave out, and how to structure the narrative. However, there
are limits to their control over the story. The author of a biography, for
example, cannot choose the time or the manner of their subjects death.
Hence, questions about why, in this narrative, the subject died at this time
or in this manner do not arise.
Let us, then, turn to our question: whether the stance we take (to
use Lamarque and Olsens term) differs according to our belief as to
whether what we are reading is fiction or non-fiction. I shall consider first
Lamarques account of the difference. I shall then (briefly) consider Stacie
Friends view. I should stress that I am not trying to show that our beliefs
as to whether or not a narrative is fiction or non-fiction never makes a dif-
ference. However, as will become obvious, I doubt both whether the dif-
ference is as people take it to be, and whether the difference is particularly
systematic.
Lamarques views are laid out in his paper, On the Distance between
Literary Narratives and Real-Life Narratives. Lamarque argues that there
are five principles that distinguish fictional narratives from real-life nar-
ratives, and that there is nothing to be gained by confusing the stance
we take to fictional narratives with that which we take to non-fictional
narratives. The contrast Lamarque actually draws is not between fictional
and non-fictional narratives, but between literary narratives and real-
life narratives. We can take the second of each pair to be synonymous.
The problem is with the first; the literary is not the same as the fictional.
However, it is clear that although Lamarque is concerned with literary
narratives, for the purposes of this chapter, he is concerned with liter-
ary fictional narratives.15 Hence, we can assume that (for our purposes
here) all literary narratives are fictions, even if all fictions are not literary
narratives.
Lamarques first principle is the character identity principle: in literary
works, character identity is indissolubly linked to character description.16
He claims that this principle immediately shows the gulf between fiction
and reality.17 The example he uses is the despicable Veneering family from
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens:
Mr and Mrs Veneering [] come into being under a description. The nar-
rators perspective on them, including the negative value judgement, is not
just one among possible perspectives; rather, it is definitive in determining
the kind of characters they are. If nothing else, this is a simple consequence
of the fact that fictional characters are created. It is absurd to suppose that a
real person exists under a description.18
We can agree with Lamarques claims here; that is, Mr and Mrs Veneering
come into being under a description and the narrators perspective is not
just one among possible perspectives. However, these are not the issue.
Rather, the issue is whether, the reader, locked into the internal perspec-
tive on the narrative, encounters the Veneerings in a different way in which
he or she would encounter a non-fictional character in a non-fictional
narrative. The relevant perspective is not that of the narrator, but that
of the engaged reader. The engaged reader has only one perspective on
the Veneerings. However, qua engaged reader, the reader of (say) David
Gilmours biography of Curzon has only one perspective on Curzon: they
encounter Curzon as he is presented in that biography. From the per-
spective of the reader what Lamarque presents as a truth about engaging
with fictions is in fact a truth about engaging with narrative. The reader,
engaged with a narrative, engages with the characters and events as pre-
sented in that narrative.
Lamarques second principle is the opacity principle: In literary
works, not only are characters and incidents presented to us but attention
is conventionally drawn to the modes of presentation themselves.19 Once
again, Lamarque argue that this marks a distinction between fictional and
non-fictional narratives.
With biographies and autobiographies, it will not be uncommon for readers

to attend, and be invited to attend, to the narrative vehicle. This, though,
is largely dictated by broader literary concerns with fine writing and stylistic
effect. Like all fact-stating discourses, biographies aim to transmit informa-
tion and are primarily constrained by getting it right. What this means
is that there are natural limits to the opacity desirable or possible in such
discourses. Too much opacity or strictly too much focus on opacity in
reading will frustrate pragmatic discursive purposes. Therein lies the cru-
176 D. MATRAVERS
cial difference. In literary works, opacity is an asset it is sought, and it

enriches character identity while in referential discourses opacity is a weak-
ness, to be minimized, and merely clouds personal characterization.20
There are two claims here. First, that the aim of non-fictional narratives is
to transmit information. Second, that the modes of presentation (I shall
summarise this as the style) stands between the reader and the content as
an opaque layer; one draws attention to the former at the expense of com-
municating the latter. Both of these claims should be rejected.
Stories are told for purposes; to transport readers to another world, to
pass the time, to inform, to lull someone to sleep, and so on and so forth.
This cuts across the division between fiction and non-fiction; both sorts of
narrative can be used for any of these purposes (even if one of these would
be better suited to some purposes than others). The claim that the aim of
non-fictional narrative is (always?) to transmit information is too strong to
be plausible. One only needs to look at the quotations which can be found
on the back of almost any biography to realise that reviews along the lines
of a wonderful story wonderfully told dominate to the near exclusion
of claims as the works veracity. The noted biographer, Michael Holroyd,
puts the point thus:
Biography is no longer simply an instrument of information retrieval,

though historical and cultural information that is retrieved from these expe-
ditions is a bonus. The biographers prime purpose is to recreate a world
into which readers may enter, and where, interpreting messages from the
past, they may experience feelings and thoughts that remain with them after
the book is closed.21
I would venture that, on most occasions, people read extended non-

fictional narratives for exactly the same reason as they read extended fic-
tional narratives; namely, to be transported to another worldwhether
that world has been recreated or created.
The second claim is rather more puzzling. Let us grant some distinc-
tion, within a narrative, between form and content. The former is the
mode of presentation or the style and the latter is the propositional
contentthe information conveyed. It might be, as Lamarque says, that
the form is sometimes such as to obscure the content. However, this
fact (if it is a fact) is a consequence of there being a distinction between
form and content that applies equally to fictions and non-fictions. It is
wholly unclear that any special problem is introduced by the content

being non-fictional. The inverse instance (that is, when the style facilitates
communication of the content) also, surely, applies equally to fiction and
non-fiction.
Lamarques third principle is the principle of functionality: It is
always reasonable to ask of any detail in a literary work what literary or
aesthetic function that detail is performing.22 Lamarque makes a num-
ber of points under this heading. His example in the first is the accident,
in Tess of the dUrbervilles, in which a mail-cart collides with Tesss car-
riage. Lamarque admits that, from the internal perspective, the scene
of the accident is pictured to be just what it seems, a terrible accident
(so presumably there is no contrast with the depiction of an accident
in a non-fictional narrative). It plays an additional role from the exter-
nal critical perspective, however: anticipating, with awful foreboding,
all the main events to come and assigning weight and significance to
them. Lamarque links this to some remarks on symbolism. The mud
and fog in the opening paragraph of Bleak House symbolise features that
the novel will attribute to London (notably chaos). Furthermore, other
details (the example is the opening of Macbeth) link to multiple elements
across the play.23 This seems right; that is, there are episodes that have,
in Lamarques words, a narrative function. Once again, none of this is
distinctive of fiction. It might be that the use of symbolism, or the telling
of incidents that foreshadow other incidents, is more frequently met in
fiction than non-fiction; however, if so, this is an empirical matter and
nothing to do with internal relations or necessary connections. Non-
fiction requires episodes that have a narrative function quite as much
as does fiction.
For Lamarque, however, it is less the role played by these details and
more the principle behind the selection of the details that matters:
Functionality in literature the idea that detail bears a functional role has
an analogue in real-life narratives but should not be confused with it. The
analogue is a principle of selectivity which operates in all narrative. Of detail
in all narrative it can be asked: Why was that detail selected? Immediately,
a difference between fictional and non-fictional narrative is apparent. In
nonfictional narrative detail is selected from preexisting facts; in fictional
narrative, detail is created. Among principles of selection are relevance, sig-
nificance and interest. Among principles of creation are artistic purpose and
thematic connectedness.24
178 D. MATRAVERS
That Lamarques questionWhy was that detail selected?arises implies

that the reader occupies the external perspectivereflecting on the narra-
tiverather than the internal perspectivebeing engaged with the nar-
rative, following its twists and turns. Readers do slip out of the internal
perspective to ask this question so it is fair of Lamarque to raise the issue.
I have already conceded that writers of non-fiction obey the fidelity con-
straint, so have already conceded non-fiction is a matter of selection rather
than creation. The contrast is not, however, all Lamarque claims. The
choice of which detail to include is made under a range of constraints for
writers of fiction and of non-fiction. In both cases, the choice is constrained
(sometimes determined) by what has come before. Writers of non-fiction
have an additional constraint: fidelity to what actually happened. This is,
however, compatible with considerations of artistic purpose and thematic
connectedness. It is not as if writers of non-fiction are simply composing
interesting lists. Consider Churchills account of Arthur Balfours role in
fall of the Asquith Government.
It is impossible here to dwell upon Balfours part in the complex and even
more fateful Cabinet convulsion which resulted in the substitution of Lloyd
George for Asquith in the crisis of December 1916. But nothing is more
instructive than to follow the dispassionate, cool, correct and at the same
time ruthless manner in which Balfour threaded the labyrinth without
reproach. He passed from one Cabinet to the other, from the Prime Minister
who was his champion to the Prime Minister who had been his most severe
critic, like a powerful, graceful cat walking delicately and unsoiled across a
rather muddy street.25
Considerations of artistic purpose and thematic connectedness govern

Churchills selection of details in this quite brilliant pen-portrait of one
of politics most enigmatic characters. Such details were certainly not
selected exclusively on grounds of relevance, significance, and interest.
That details need to be selected does not mean that the selection is based
solely on the fidelity constraint, nor does it mean that the way such details
are presented, and the place they occupy in the narrative, are not governed
by artistic purpose.
Lamarque himself appears to concede this point (and betray what I take
to be the fundamental confusion in the consensus view) in a discussion of
an example from Tess of the dUrbervilles: that Tess is first introduced wear-
ing a red rather than a white ribbon. Lamarque claims that in the literary
context the tiny detail has a function and he goes on to adumbrate various
plausible connotations it might bring to the narrative. He goes on:
If this were a real-life narrative, what matters primarily is that the detail be
accurate. It might be selected in a narrative to suggest the connotations
mentioned, but the fact itself could bear so such intrinsic meaning.26
I have already rejected the first claim: accuracy is at most a necessary con-
dition (the qualification is necessary as non-fiction can contain hyperbole,
metaphor, and so on). It is the second claim that is important. Lamarque
concedes the detail could function equivalently in a non-fictional narra-
tive; it is only the fact itself that could bear no such meaning. The former
concedes my point and the latter is not in dispute. My claim is not that
fictional narratives function in the same way as non-fictional facts (that
is, the actual world); that is plainly absurd. The claim is only that non-
fictional narratives function in broadly the same way as fictional narratives.
My contention, although I cannot make it out here, is that the consen-
sus view systematically claims to contrast engagement with fictions and
engagement with non-fictions, when really the contrast with which they
are operating is that of engagement with fictions and engagement with the
actual world.27 Nobody would dispute the latter contrast.
I shall pass over Lamarques discussion of Barthes reality effect, as
this plainly cannot be relevant to the readers perspective. (The reason,
for those interested, is that the experience of singular terms which refer is
not systematically different to the experience of singular terms which do
not refer.)
This takes us to Lamarques fourth principle: the Teleology Principle
(TP): In literary works, the explanation of why an episode occurs as it
does and where it does often centres on the contribution the episode
makes to the completed artistic structure.28 As Lamarque claims, this does
not mark a contrast within the internal perspective; from that perspec-
tive, whether reading fiction or non-fiction, the explanations of events for
which we reach are causal or rational. Nonetheless, such thoughts could
form part of a readers experience. Lamarque appears to read the Principle
as follows:
TP: In fictional works the explanation of why an event is included and
where in the narrative it occurs centres on the contribution it makes to the
artistic structure. This is not true of non-fictional works.
180 D. MATRAVERS
His argument for TP appears to be that, if it were not true, then dire
consequences would follow.
Narratives find patterns in peoples lives and give structure. There is nothing
wrong with that. But the literary model, in which patterns are deliberately
created and can determine (and thus explain) fictional content, is entirely
inappropriate for narratives of real lives. Explanations for nonfictional events
must stay in the realm of causes and reasons. Nothing in the real world
happens because some structured design determines that it must happen.29
That is, if, in non-fictional works, the explanation of why an event is

included and where in the narrative it occurs centres on the contribution
it makes to the artistic structure, then that is also the explanation of that
event in the actual world.
As we have already seen, TP is not true. Granted the fidelity constraint,
there will be some explanation for the inclusion and position of an event
in a non-fictional narrative in terms of its contribution to the artistic struc-
ture. Take the opening sentence of Carl W.Breihans The Complete and
Authentic Life of Jesse James: On a hot August evening in 1951, in a little
Texas town, a very old man died.30 This, it turns out, refers to the death
of someone who claimed falsely to be Jesse James. The inclusion and posi-
tion of this event are largely explained by the contribution it makes to the
artistic structure; it is an off-beat and arresting way to begin the biogra-
phy. Lamarques argument displays the conflation of non-fictional narra-
tive and the actual world identified above. One can hold that the inclusion
and position of an event in a non-fictional narrative can be explained by
its contribution to artistic structure without committing oneself to the
absurd view that this applies to events in the real world.
Lamarques final principle is the thematic principle: Appreciation of
literary works as literary works is an appreciation of how their subject
acquires significance and unity under thematic interpretation.31 The con-
trast with non-fiction is given as follows:
To study someones life, or ones own, primarily to see how factual detail
coheres under some overarching theme is to direct attention away from the
underlying explanations of a persons actions. Maybe some biographies or
autobiographies aspire to the status of novels and explore literary themes
in a comparable manner. But the very eccentricity of this and the dangers
it brings in accuracy and truth-telling shows that this is not a model that
captures the essence of a real-life narrative.32
I think Lamarque is flatly wrong about this. Rather than being eccentric,
an important and familiar reason for writing a biography or autobiogra-
phy is that a life embodies some overarching theme or value. The narra-
tive of a persons life can reveal that theme or value. The titles of such
books betray this motivation: Robert Rhodes Jamess Churchill: A Study
in Failure 19001939 and George VI: A Spirit Undaunted, and Nelson
Mandelas autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, to name three of many.
Once more, there is no entailment to something that Lamarque rightly
does find objectionable; that events in the real world happen in service of
such an overarching theme (rather than through the usual mechanisms of
cause and effect). That a non-fictional narrative can reveal some overarch-
ing theme does not mean that the unvarnished world can reveal some
overarching theme. However, it is a confusion to think the first has any
bearing on the second.
I think we should give up the claim that there are essential differences
between reading something as fiction and reading something as non-
fiction. There are no essential differences; at best, there are differences
in emphasis. To this extent I agree with the much less ambitious attempt
to distinguish between reading a narrative as fiction and reading a nar-
rative as non-fiction given by Stacie Friend. Friend thinks that fiction is
best construed as a genre. She thinks that according to the genre under
which we are reading, we focus on different features of the work, tak-
ing some aspects as more salient and foregrounding these whilst leaving
others in the background.33 The salient features for fiction she mentions
are free indirect discourse and the interweaving of invented elements and
real things (these are not meant to characterise the genre as such, they
areto an extentan artefact of the example Friend is discussing). The
features that are foregrounded are not necessary characteristics of fiction;
they could appear in non-fictions. It is only that they are standard for the
genre.34
My disagreement with Friend, although it is largely a matter of empha-
sis, is in her claim that the difference between fiction and non-fiction
shapes our practices of understanding and evaluating particular works.35
This is clearly right for some works, however, our ordinary reading prac-
tices require a more pluralistic approach. Even within fictions, there will
be differences. Free indirect discourse might stand out as anomalous in
a fiction told from the perspective of a particular character just as much
as it stands out as anomalous in non-fiction. There are then also all the
standard problem cases such as Truman Capotes non-fiction novel, In
182 D. MATRAVERS
Cold Blood, and genres such as fictional biographies (fleshed out biog-
raphies of a real person) or biographical novels (novels based on actual
lives). There are also standard cases: how should we read Shakespeares
History Plays? Those have plenty of the two features Friend claims are
salient in reading something as fiction, yet they are not obviously fictions.
Friend replies that, freed from the constraint of operating within necessary
and sufficient conditions, we canif only retrospectivelymake definite
classifications: In Cold Blood is definitely non-fiction. Other problematic
cases, including the History Plays, are either borderline cases or both fic-
tion and non-fiction. I am not sure why she wants so doggedly to retain
the single classification of fiction and non-fiction. Faced with recalcitrant
cases I am not sure the reader worries much about whether to read it as
one or the other or both. Rather, the reader feels their way forward as to
what is allowed and what is not allowed. Shakespeares Henry V provokes
no surprise by evoking divine aid. For all the licence we allow the plays
author, however, he would provoke surprise by calling on spaceships to
smite the French.36
Notes
1. Currie, G. (1990) The Nature of Fiction (Oxford: OUP), p.1.
2. Lamarque, P. & Olsen, S.H. (1994) Truth, Fiction, and Literature:
A Philosophical Perspective (Oxford: OUP), p.30.
3. Eagleton, T. (1983) Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford:
Blackwell), p.1.
4. Greenblatt, S. (2004) Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became
Shakespeare (London: Cape).
5. Belsey, C. (2011) A Future for Criticism (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell),
pp.467.
6. Sinnott Jr., P. (2013) Morality, Historical Narrative, and Problems
in the New Formalism, Philosophy and Literature, 37:1, 25765.
7. Davies, D. (2007) Aesthetics and Literature (London: Continuum),
p.46.
8. Shroeder, T. & Matheson, C. (2006) Imagination and Emotion
in S Nichols (ed.) The Architecture of the Imagination (Oxford:
OUP).
9. Matravers, D. (2014) Fiction and Narrative (Oxford: OUP).
11. Samuel ODonoghues chapter in this volume (chapter The

Opacity of Testimony; or, What the Philosophy of Literature Can
Tell Us About How to Read Holocaust Narratives) defends a plu-
ralist approach to the value of testimony about the Holocaust.
That is, adopting a stance towards such testimony appropriate to
sober documentary is compatible with adopting a stance towards
such testimony appropriate to literary fiction. The view expressed
in this chapter is that such stances are a myth. However, this does
not impugn ODonoghues central point that the cognitive value
of such narratives is not exhausted by the list of true beliefs we
would form on the basis of reading them.
12. Meskin, A. & Weinberg, J. (2006) Imagine That! in Matthew
Kieran (ed.) Contemporary Debates in the Philosophy of Art (Oxford:
Blackwell), p.11.
13. See Matravers, Fiction, pp.90101.
14. Lamarque, P. (2014) On the Distance between Literary Narratives
and Real Life Narratives in The Opacity of Narrative (London:
Rowman & Littlefield), pp.6782 [69].
15. Lamarque, On the Distance, p.77.
21. Holroyd, M. (2011) Augustus John (London: Pimlico), p. xxxiii.
23. Lamarque, On the Distance, pp.734.
24. Lamarque, On the Distance, pp.789.
25. Churchill, W. (1942) Great Contemporaries (London: Macmillan
and Co., Ltd), p.185.
27. Matravers, Fiction, pp.4555.
30. Breihan, C. W. (1962) The Complete and Authentic Life of Jesse
James (New York: Collier Books), p.17.
184 D. MATRAVERS
33. Friend, S. (2012) Fiction as Genre, The Proceedings of the

Aristotelian Society CXII: 2, 179209 [198].
34. Friend, Fiction as Genre, 187.
35. Friend, Fiction as Genre, 179.
36. I would like to thank Rafe McGregor and the editors for helpful
comments on this chapter.
CHAPTER 10
The Opacity ofTestimony; or, What

thePhilosophy ofLiterature Can Tell Us
About How toRead Holocaust Narratives
SamuelODonoghue
Among the numerous and profound effects of the Holocaust on con-

temporary thought is its impact on how we write about the past. The
Holocaust has led to our re-evaluating the place of testimony in historiog-
raphy.1 Once approached with caution by historians, who in constructing
their narratives would submit eyewitness accounts to the same rigorous
cross-examination and interrogation they would any other source, tes-
timony is now enveloped in an aura of respectability, indeed even sanc-
tity. The Holocaust has brought in its wake the era of the witness, to
borrow an expression coined by the historian Annette Wieviorka.2 Elie
Wiesel, himself a survivor of the Nazi camps, claims boldly that any
[Holocaust] survivor has more to say than all the historians combined
about what happened.3 Much has been written in support of the grand
claims made for testimony and memory as means of accessing the past.4
Yet the authority and legitimacy of testimony, as these are envisaged by its
numerous proponents, frequently rest on ill-defined and dubious truth-
claims. Testimony, its advocates argue, brings us closer to the truth than
S. ODonoghue (*)
University College London, Ramsgate, England
e-mail: samuel.odonoghue@ucl.ac.uk

186 S. ODONOGHUE
any historical account of the Holocaust. This is Wiesels suggestion in the

interview I have quoted above. Yet testimonial accounts of the Holocaust,
Wiesels included, are generally presented to readers as literary works.5
These testimonies comprise characters, tropes, dialogues, elaborate nar-
rative styles and frequently supplement the authors lived experience with
a liberal dose of literary invention. Holocaust testimonies are written in
accordance not with the conventions that govern historical writing, but
rather with the customs that characterise literary practice; they are recog-
nised and consumed by readers as literary works.
Analytic philosophers have deliberated at length over the epistemic
validity of the beliefs we acquire through what we are told by others.6 The
literary nature of Holocaust testimony adds a layer of complexity to the
traditional philosophical problem regarding epistemology and testimony.
With a literary testimony it is no longer sufficient merely to question the
authority on which we can be said to know something that someone else
has told us. In a literary testimony the communicative act occurs in a liter-
ary context with its own set of conventions that are irreducible to those
that govern the informative exchanges that take place in our daily lives. In
its examination of testimony, this chapter resituates the discussion away
from an interrogation of the legitimacy of the beliefs we form according
to what others tell us and towards a consideration of the value of these
beliefs in an appraisal of why we read. Here I am concerned less with how
and with what justification we gain knowledge about the real world from
reading fiction and, as with my treatment of the paradox of fiction, I do
not dispute that we can gain perfectly sound knowledge about the world
from fiction or that the emotions the reading of fiction produces in us are
real emotions, but I do question the significance of these beliefs and emo-
tions in an assessment of the value of reading. This is a chapter about why
we read Holocaust testimonies, about what this type of discourse can offer
readers that other kinds cannot.
The fact that Holocaust testimonies are read predominantly as litera-
ture, rather than as history can be explained by the delayed emergence
and belated reception of these works. Before the 1960s, public inter-
est in Holocaust testimonies was scarce. In France, the initial survivor
reports of the Nazi camps were soon silenced by the publics desire to
hear no more.7 In Italy, the manuscript of Primo Levis Se questo un
uomo was initially rejected for publication by a number of large publish-
ers before it was accepted in 1947 by a small publishing house directed
by Franco Antonicelli, which printed only 2500 copies before closing
down.8 The unenthusiastic reception of Levis text, which was all but
THE OPACITY OFTESTIMONY; OR, WHAT THEPHILOSOPHY OFLITERATURE... 187
forgotten until it was reprinted by Einaudi in 1958, is indicative of a

wider trend of public indifference to survivors stories in the decade and
a half following the war. Testimony did not gain greater public recogni-
tion until the 1960s in a change of fortune that was heralded by the trial
of Adolf Eichmann. During the trial in 1961 the prosecution, led by
Israeli Attorney General Gideon Hausner, called on over one hundred
survivors to give evidence. The trial ushered in a surge of public inter-
est in and an increased willingness to hear survivors stories.9 Since the
1960s the golden age of testimony has not waned: survivor accounts now
constitute a significant canon of Holocaust literature to which later gen-
erations of writers born after the Second World War have subsequently
added their own literary accounts of the Holocaust. Given that survi-
vor testimonies gained a wide readership some years after the Second
World War, testimonial texts first registered in the collective conscious-
ness at a time when the historical record of the Nazis Final Solution had
already been established by historians. Raul Hilbergs seminal history
The Destruction of the European Jews was published in 1961 and made
only limited use of survivor testimony, with the majority of Hilbergs
research conducted in Nazi archives. The belated appearance of testi-
mony and its struggle to find a readership mean that testimonial texts
belong, broadly speaking, to the second of two waves of writing about
the Holocaust. Lawrence Langer pinpoints these two sequential stages
of response to the Holocaust: the first is what we know of the event, an
area Langer argues is the province of historians; the second is how to
remember it, which shifts the responsibility to our own imaginations and
what we are prepared to admit there.10 Testimonies appeal not to the
epistemic fact-finding stance in the reader, but rather to his or her imagi-
native response. Testimonies take the historical record of the Holocaust
as a given: very rarely do their authors seek to shed new light or offer
new facts on events that, by the time of the testimonies publication, are
often well documented. Testimonial responses to the Holocaust do not
invite a historical reading among documentarians seeking to establish
facts through cross-checking and corroboration; they invite a different
readingone that is inherently literary. It is the literary status of testi-
mony that makes the genres truth-claims problematic from the perspec-
tive of the philosophy of literature.
Philosophers of literature, notably Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom
Olsen, urge us to view the truth-claims made by critics and authors with
suspicion.11 The value of literature, in Lamarque and Olsens analysis, is
not to be found in its supposed advancement of truths.12 Given their prom-
188 S. ODONOGHUE
inence in Holocaust testimonies and in critical discussions on the genre,

the truth-claims made by authors and critics of testimony merit an exami-
nation from the sceptical perspective developed by Lamarque and Olsen.
Such an examination forms the basis of this chapter, in which I argue that
the emphasis on truth in accounts of the value of testimony is misplaced
and in which I offer an alternative account, based on Lamarques ideas of
thought-theory and narrative opacity, of why Holocaust testimonies
are important.13
Holocaust testimonies are a particularly valuable corpus on which
to test the no-truth position adopted by Lamarque and Olsen, given
that truth-claims abound in this body of works.14 These truth-claims are
frequently found in the paratextual material with which witnesses frame
their accounts. Thus, Anatoly Kuznetsov, author of Babi Yar, subtitles
his novel depicting the massacre of 33,771 Jews in a ravine in Kiev on
2930 September 1941, A Document in the Form of a Novel.15 In this
way the author, who witnessed events in Babi Yar as a teenager, aspires to
a harmonious conjunction of history and fiction, preserving the authen-
ticity of his literary creation with the veridical connotations of the word
document.
Like Kuznetsov, numerous authors of testimonies appeal to their
advancement of truth as a means of legitimising their discourse. Their
insistence on the truth-bearing potential of testimony is, in a sense, a reac-
tion to the hostile reception of the early Holocaust testimonies, which fre-
quently encountered disbelief and outright denial. Elie Wiesels depiction
of the incredulous Jewish population of Sighet, Transylvania in the open-
ing of La nuit is indicative of the prevailing scepticism among European
Jews and others during the war who initially refused to believe the reports
of Nazi atrocities.16 Survivor testimonies were not admitted as evidence
during the Nuremberg trials; witnesses memories were not felt to be
as reliable and believable as written documents.17 Early historians of the
Holocaust such as Raul Hilberg based their research on Nazi archives and
refrained from using testimonies.18 The long-held mistrust of testimony,
which was not overcome symbolically, according to Jessica Wiederhorn,
until the Eichmann trial, in which the testimonies of 111 witnesses were
heard, had a corrosive effect on the confidence of authors of written tes-
timonies.19 The fear that their testimony would not be believed haunts
numerous survivors accounts. Primo Levi describes a recurrent nightmare
that expresses potently the authors fear that his account of Auschwitz
would be believed by no one.20 Levi speculates that his dream of a narra-

tive imparted and yet unheeded perhaps torments other inmates as well.21
The fact that it was some time after the end of the Second World War
before testimonies began to meet with a more favourable reception and
a wider readership lends credence to these fears. Emphasising the truth
of the content of their narratives functions as a defence mechanism for
numerous survivors as they pre-empt the readers disbelief in the enormity
of the events they portray.
In Larbre de Goethe Pierre Julitte gives an account of the sabotage of
the Mibau arms factory at Buchenwald, an operation that was initiated by
a number of political prisoners, including Julitte, and which culminated in
the Allied bombing of the factory on 24 August 1944. Larbre de Goethe,
published in 1965, some twenty years after the events in which Julitte took
part, can be read as a memoir in which the author recounts a historical
event, which he witnessed first-hand as a participant. Yet Julittes account
appears superficially to be a novel. Julitte uses a third-person narrator and
pseudonyms to protect the identities of the historical actors. His narrative
is replete with descriptive passages and lengthy dialogues, which are clearly
too elaborate to be the product of first-hand anamnesis. Despite these fic-
tional aspects, Larbre de Goethe is presented to the reader as a true story:
the story [] is, from start to finish, in accordance with the truth, Julitte
informs the reader in the Introduction.22 Joseph Kessel, in a preface that
precedes Julittes Introduction, insists on the veracity of the authors his-
torical reconstruction: the work does not contain a single made up detail,
[] nothing in it is fictional and [] everything in it is true, including, so
to speak, each and every comma.23 With a touch of hyperbole that verges
on the comical, Kessel suggests that despite the fictional form of this work
presented with the appearance of a novel, everything in it is true, even
the punctuation.24 Julittes decision to present his testimony in the guise
of fiction is motivated, according to Kessel, by his modesty: his aversion to
using the first person, his fear of wearying the reader with a monotonous
account of daily routines, and his reluctance to shame publicly those who
acted with cowardice.25 Fiction would appear to be, for Julitte, merely a
protective screen, but one that in no way impedes the truthfulness of his
story. Other first-hand witnesses attribute their use of fiction to different
motives.
In his testimony of life in the Warsaw ghetto, Chaim Kaplan alerts
the reader to the deficiencies in his factual knowledge of the events he
190 S. ODONOGHUE
describes, yet he decides in the end that factual accuracy is unimportant

for his purposes, and he devises a different concept of truth and an alterna-
tive measure of the value of his testimony:
[F]or the sake of truth, I do not require individual facts, but rather the
manifestations which are the fruits of a great many facts that leave their
impression on the peoples opinions, on their mood and morale. And I can
guarantee the factualness of these manifestations because I dwell among my
people and behold their misery and their souls torments.26
Kaplan appears to refer to what Aleida Assmann has subsequently charac-

terised as experiential, indexical, or symptomatic truth.27 Kaplan claims a
discursive place that is outside of the parameters of a traditional historical
narrative consisting of a reconstruction of actual events that occurred in
the past, but he still aspires to truth. The facts are unimportant for his
purposes; he is interested in how the facts were experienced by people.
Given that the Holocaust is established as factual by historical discourse
and common knowledge and consequently that the accuracy of the tes-
timony [is] less important, Assmann argues that the experiential truth
of how history is felt is more important than representational truth.28
Assmanns argument, which recalls Aristotles distinction in the Poetics
between the universal truths of poetry, unrestricted by empirical verac-
ity, and the comparatively meagre particulars of history, is predicated on
the assumption that we have now entered what Langer terms the second
phase of Holocaust response: we have left the province of history and have
entered that of the imagination.29
Numerous survivors appeal to something like the unorthodox concep-
tion of experiential truth envisaged by Kaplan, rejecting facts in favour
of an ineffable something that they attempt to approximate in their liter-
ary representations of the Holocaust. Jorge Semprn is a particularly elo-
quent proponent of the thesis that the truth of the concentration camps
can be approximated only through literary artifice. He reiterates this
pro-truth stance in his numerous testimonies of life in the Buchenwald
Concentration Camp, in which he was a political prisoner from 1944 until
the liberation of the camp in April 1945. In Lcriture ou la vie Semprn
depicts a conversation among concentration camp survivors, in which they
discuss how they will go about telling their story. One of the discussants,
a professor from the University of Strasbourg, expresses the inadequacies
of historical discourse to transmit the truth of the concentration camp:
I imagine there will be many testimonies [] Their value will be determined

by that of the witnesss gaze, its acuity, its perspicacity [] And then there
will be documents [] After a time historians will gather, draw together,
analyse both types of sources: they will transform them into scholarly works
[] There, all will be said, duly noted [] Everything there will be true
except that something will be missing, the essential truth that no historical
reconstruction will ever be able to attain, no matter how perfect and com-
prehensive it is []30
Semprn thus voices through this character a parody of the method-

ological preoccupations of historians. The epistemological rigour of
historical works is derided as the speaker characterises historians inves-
tigative practice with a monotonous accumulation of verbs in the future
tense: the historians will collect, they will gather together, they will anal-
yse, they will write. The historians labour will yield ouvrages savants,
in which the truth will be consigned by the stamp of the meticulous
methods employed to produce the research. But something will be
missing from these works, Semprn suggests: something that the aloof
gaze of the archival historian will be unable to capture; something that
Semprn terms lessentielle vrit. The professor resumes: The other
mode of comprehension, the essential truth of experience, cannot be
communicated [] Or rather it can be only by literary writing [] By
the artifice of a work of art, of course.31 Semprns message is clear:
only artworks produce the truth. Semprn asserts that the truth of the
concentration camp experience can be approximated only by a narrative
of a certain substance and density, qualities that are achieved, according
to the author, only by reworking the experience of the camps through
artifice:
I am struck by a doubt regarding the possibility of narrating. Not that the

lived experience is unsayable. It was unliveable, which is something else
entirely, as can be easily appreciated. What is at stake is not the form of a
possible narration, but its substance. Not its articulation, but its density.
This substance, this transparent density will be achieved only by those who
are able to make their testimony into an artistic object, a space of creation.
Or of recreation. Only the artifice of a mastered narrative will manage to
transmit partially the truth of the testimony.32
Semprn does not make the customary claim that literary discourse is
superior to historical writing merely for aesthetic reasons, but with his
192 S. ODONOGHUE
appeal to truth he introduces a contentious epistemological dimension

to his eulogy of literature. Semprn devises an oxymoronic measure for
the truth-content of writing about the Holocaust. He decides that imagi-
native writers should aim to achieve a densit transparente in the artistic
reworking of their testimony. The requirement that in order to capture the
truth Holocaust writing must be invested with the quality of a transpar-
ent density appears to exclude the logic and the analysis of the historian.
Semprn decides that this subjective and ineffable quality is paramount for
the creation of truth.
Concentration camp survivors are not alone in their claim that the
sacred discourse of the witness is superior to that of the historian. Scholars
working on survivor testimony also frequently espouse the view that the
truths of testimony are inviolable and cannot be challenged by historical
methods designed to verify the accuracy of witnesses representations of
events. The psychoanalyst Dori Laub recounts a debate that occurred dur-
ing a conference in which he disagreed with a group of historians regard-
ing the value of a testimony given by an Auschwitz survivor, whom Laub
himself had interviewed for the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
at Yale. The historians argued that because of an inaccuracy in the survi-
vors account of the Auschwitz uprising (viz. the survivor claimed that
four chimneys exploded during the revolt, contrary to the evidence that
only one chimney was destroyed), the testimony had no value as a histori-
cal document and could not be trusted. Laub reveals how he objected to
the historians discrediting the survivors testimony because of this factual
inaccuracy:
The woman was testifying [] not to the number of chimneys blown up,
but to something else, more radical, more crucial: the reality of an unimagi-
nable occurrence. One chimney blown up in Auschwitz was as incredible as
four. The number mattered less than the fact of the occurrence. The event
itself was almost inconceivable. The woman testified to an event that broke
the all compelling frame of Auschwitz, where Jewish armed revolts just did
not happen, and had no place. She testified to the breakage of a framework.
That was historical truth.33
In his account of this debate with the historians, Laub uncovers a fun-
damental divergence of attitudes towards survivor testimony. Yet rather
than accept the existence of diverse approaches to the reading of testi-
mony, Laub insists on expressing his own approach, as a psychoanalyst,
in the same terms as those used by the historians. Laub is adamant that
his anti-empirical stance, based on his considering truth-to-experience as
superior to truth-to-fact, can be exported unproblematically to another
discipline. He insists that despite the factual inaccuracy in the womans
testimony, her words nevertheless reveal a historical truth. Yet the
womans assertion that four chimneys exploded during the Auschwitz
uprising is clearly false. It is simply incorrect to maintain that the propo-
sitional content of her testimony is true; historical research proves that
she is mistaken and that her account is an exaggeration. Yet Laub insists
on attributing the value of this womans testimony to its transmission
of truth. The psychoanalyst is unwilling to divorce his valuation of this
testimony from the criteria that historians use to weigh up historical
evidence. Rather than insist on framing his appreciation of the testimony
in terms of the binary of true and untrue, Laub would do well to define
the value of the survivors testimony in terms that are different from
those of the historian. Lamarque and Olsen offer a timely reminder that
reading is a practice grounded in institutionally established rules.34 Laub
does not acknowledge that psychoanalysts and historians read testimo-
nies for different ends. Whereas historians read for truth, psychoanalysts
are not necessarily concerned with evaluating the propositional content
of their object of study. Lamarque offers terminology that is helpful in
distinguishing between the different modes of reading survivor testi-
mony exemplified by Laub, on one hand, and by the historians, on the
other. Narratives can be read, according to Lamarque, either opaquely
or transparently. An opaque reading of a work will pay special atten-
tion to the aspect under which the material is presented to the reader,
recognising that the manner of presentation is an essential part of the
work itself:
[N]arrative opacity says [] that [] the events and characters that make
up the content are constituted by the modes of their presentation in the
narrative. Their identity is determined by the narrative itself such that they
are not merely contingently but essentially connected to the descriptions
that characterise them. Rather than supposing that narrative descriptions
are a window through which an independently existing (fictional) world is
observed, with the implication that the very same world might be presented
(and thus observed) in different ways, from different perspectives, we must
accept that there is no such transparent glass only an opaque glass, painted,
as it were, with figures seen not through it but in it.35
194 S. ODONOGHUE
An emphasis on the literary nature of testimony calls for an opaque reading

of testimonial works: a reader of testimony as literature is not interested
in amassing facts about the Holocaust. Conversely, a historical interest in
testimony necessitates a transparent reading: historians read testimonies
precisely in order to glean facts. Lamarque is eloquent on the distinction
between historical and literary modes of reading:
We read narratives opaquely or transparently in relation to the coarseness

we permit or the fine-grainedness we demand of content. And appropri-
ate modes of reading will be grounded in practices. Historical narrative
belongs in a practice in which appeal to evidence and empirical support is a
major constraint on evaluation. When the perspective of the historian domi-
nates evaluation of the narrative so that opacity becomes the natural mode
of reading, and such that alternative perspectives are excluded and non-
substitutable, then history becomes like literature and is a form of fiction.
But when attention to historical content allows that the very same reality is
accessible in different modes and from different perspectives, and yields to
constraints of fact and evidence, then a more transparent reading is encour-
aged and questions of objectivity and truth gain purchase.36
The historians at the conference Laub describes are willing to exchange

the Auschwitz survivors testimony of the uprising for another: alternative
perspectives are substitutable and their reading is therefore transparent.
Laub advocates an opaque reading of the same testimony: he is interested
in the way the testimonial vision is constructed and what this construc-
tion reveals about the survivors attitude towards her traumatic past. If
we read testimony as literature, then the facts themselves, as James Young
implies, are unimportant: the critical reader accepts that every Holocaust
writer has a different story to tell [] because how victims and survivors
have grasped and related their experiences comprises the actual core of
their story.37 In Youngs analysis, no one survivor testimony is inter-
changeable with another: the perspective under which the Holocaust is
presented to the reader is an integral part of our appreciation of the text.
As Lamarque and Olsen observe:
Just as fictional objects and events owe their identity to the multiple aspects,
descriptive and evaluative, through which they are presented, so too real
objects make their appearance in works of fiction, not through a fully exten-
sional presentation, but only under some set of aspects or other.38
Consequently, Semprns narratives do not offer the reader a transparent

glass through which to view Buchenwald; they offer a unique vision of the
camp mediated and constructed by the authors memory and imagina-
tion. Semprns Buchenwald is not the same as Julittes; and neither is
interchangeable with the Buchenwald depicted by the historian Olivier
Lalieu.39 Semprns and Julittes visions of the camp offer the reader
something different from Lalieus historical presentation of Buchenwald.
But Laub is wrong to dismiss a transparent reading of testimony: reading
for facts is integral to historical research. We can even read Semprns and
Julittes narratives transparently, in search of truths about Buchenwald.
As Lamarque observes, [t]he question is not whether we can learn truths
from fiction that is an inescapable fact but what value to attach to this
learning.40 Clearly we can use survivor testimonies to learn facts about
the Nazi camps, but witnesses are not infallible or omnipresent; of course,
neither are historians, but it is important to bear in mind that historical
narratives are of a fundamentally different nature: they take on referential
responsibilities and are constrained by genre conventions which are not
reducible to those of narrative fiction.41 Testimonies are evidently not the
best place to turn if all we want from our reading is to learn facts.
I would argue that the value of testimony is accounted for more con-
vincingly if we reframe the discussion in order to take account of what dis-
tinguishes it from other forms of historical writing. Lamarque and Olsen
contend that literary value is not reducible to the values of history, phi-
losophy, or science.42 As a literary discourse, testimony too has unique
values that are not reducible to those of any of these other disciplines.
Truth is an inappropriate criterion by which to judge the value of literary
works. As Lamarque argues cogently, fictional works rarely formulate veri-
fiable propositions, and even when if they do, these propositions are not
argued for or defended.43 The themes of literary works can be formulated
as propositions, but the interest and value of the literary work reside in
the working of the theme, not in the themes bare propositional con-
tent, which is often fairly trivial.44 Lamarque offers an alternative theory
to account for the value of literary works.45 He argues that the value of lit-
erature derives not simply from the thoughts it produces in the reader, but
rather from the way these thoughts cluster around events and protagonists
as the narrative develops, thereby producing in the reader an emotional
response. Lamarque uses the example of Shakespeares Othello to illustrate
how thought-clusters work:
196 S. ODONOGHUE
[I]t is not likely to be isolated thoughts that cause significant emotional

reactions. On its own, the thought, say, that Othello killed his innocent wife
Desdemona in a fit of jealousy or, even less so, the generalised thought of
a jealous husband killing his innocent wife is unlikely to elicit strong emo-
tion. The intense and growing emotion in our response to Shakespeares
play arises out of the precise delineation of this event, and events leading up
to it, within a complex dramatic structure. It is the development of thought-
clusters around the characters and around the fictive events and the precise
way those thought-clusters are constituted or formulated that makes these
episodes vivid and moving.46
The value of Holocaust testimony as literature lies in how each account

constructs a unique and compelling vision of this historical experi-
ence. Such a vision achieves its emotional force through the thought-
clusters that aggregate around the events and characters depicted. As in
Lamarques example of Othello, the thought that the Nazis exterminated
six million Jews is, on its own, likely to be insufficient to produce in the
reader a strong emotional response. But narrative has the ability to shape
the thoughts of those attending to it, not merely by imparting beliefs
about narrative worlds but also by informing the thoughts with the unique
perspective through which the worlds are given.47 The value of testimony
lies in its opacity, in its ability to transform the readers understanding
of the Holocaust by presenting historical content from the survivors
perspective:
The cognitive benefits of literature, such as they are, rest not principally
on the acquisition of beliefs or the revelation of truths but in the way that
narrative content lodges in the mind, imagistically or propositionally, under
the very perspectives that inform the content itself. Attending to fictional
particulars under the perspective of authorial and textual control [] can
shape the mind by inducing and guiding thoughts and thought processes.
The building up of thought-clusters [] can reconfigure our minds.48
Resituating the discussion of the value of Holocaust testimony away from

truth and towards an appreciation of how testimonies achieve emotive
force through the use of thought-clusters provides a more convincing
account of the enduring importance of testimony as a window onto the
past. Ubiquitous though they are, survivors and scholars truth-claims
are untenable when subjected to analysis. Langer, for example, quotes an
oral testimony from the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale
given by a survivor who places particular emphasis on the truth of her

vision of Auschwitz.49 The survivor, identified as Irene W., talks about her
daily efforts to live with her oppressive memory of the camp, which she
attempts to suppress through what she terms a schizophrenic division or
compartmentalization of what happened. She claims that her memory of
the camp is
always there; its more a view of the world, a total worldview [] of extreme
pessimism [] of really knowing the truth about people, human nature,
about death, of really knowing the truth in a way that other people dont
know it.50
In Irene W.s testimony, the truth would appear to be a certain vision of

reality, imbued with pessimism and the knowledge that human existence
is a farce obscuring a deep-rooted perfidy in human nature. But is this
really the truth? Is Irene W.s vision one that is shared by a significant
number of other human beings? Can it lay claim to the status of a universal
truth? The answer is that many people who listen to Irene W.s testimony
will fail to recognise in their own experience of reality the truth of Irene
W.s dictum. Her truth is inextricable from the specificity of her experi-
ence in Auschwitz. Irene W.s use of word worldview suggests that what
she means by truth is in reality closer to vision. Her truth cannot be
divorced from Auschwitz; it cannot stand independently as a verifiable
observation on the real world, subject to philosophical proofs and rea-
soning. We should therefore be cautious about accepting that survivor
testimony somehow holds the keys to unlocking the fundamental truths
about human nature.
The conviction that the Holocaust lies beyond our frames of historical
reference and requires survivor testimony to express what is otherwise
incapable of being expressed is, as I have illustrated in this chapter, wide-
spread in the field of Holocaust studies. Langers claim that Holocaust
literature is concerned with an order of reality which the human mind
had never confronted before, and whose essential quality the language
of fact was simply insufficient to convey is by no means uncommon.51
The appeal to truth is never far away from remarks such as these, lurk-
ing beneath the surface of phrases such as order of reality and essential
quality. Ill-defined concepts such as these do not stand up to critical anal-
ysis. Naomi Mandel recognises the tenuousness of such claims in her criti-
cism of the adage that the Holocaust is somehow unspeakable.52 Mandel
198 S. ODONOGHUE
perceives the attribution of the adjective unspeakable to the Holocaust as

indicative of a widespread attitude in Holocaust studies that postulates the
extermination of the Jews as a historical experience beyond the limits of
language, representation and comprehension. But for Mandel, the notion
that the Holocaust is unspeakable is much less a statement of fact than
an ethical injunction, a prohibition, a kind of taboo, itself untouchable,
around which discourse and culture are structured.53 Mandel is uneasy
at the denigration of historical discourse as a means of writing about the
Holocaust and observes that the widespread notion that the Holocaust is
unspeakable leads to an uncritical reverence toward the victims subjec-
tive experience.54 Zo Waxman also voices concern at the elevation of
testimony over history and warns of the dangers inherent in emotional
and uncritical responses to testimony, arguing that the current attitude
towards victim accounts has led to the sanctification of testimony.55
The emphasis on truth in testimony is, as I have suggested here, a reac-
tion to the hostile reception of survivor accounts in the decade and a
half following the Second World War. The truth-status of testimony is
what Terrence Des Pres would term a fiction that has come to gov-
ern Holocaust studies.56 Des Pres argues that Holocaust studies is akin to
other fields of knowledge in that it relies on certain established, tacit codes
of practice, systems of permission and taboo that create what he terms a
regime of truth, which legitimises discourse. Des Pres asserts that these
fictions shape discourse generally and that writing about the Holocaust
is also governed by rulings of this fictional kind.57 Thus scholars work-
ing in the field of Holocaust studies have to work according to certain
widely accepted prescriptions for their work to be accepted by the wider
academic community. Des Pres outlines three of these fictions that gov-
ern Holocaust studies: the first is that the Holocaust is a unique event,
incomparable to any other in history; the second is that representations of
the Holocaust must be accurate and conform to the facts of the event; the
third is that approaches to the Holocaust must be serious and must respect
the solemnity and almost sacred nature of the event.58 That testimony
offers a true vision of the past is merely a convention in the ethical code
described by Des Pres as Holocaust etiquette.59 But this convention is
highly suspect from the perspective of the philosophy of literature.
My intention in challenging this dubious convention in this chapter has
been to give an account of testimony that is acceptable both to historians
and literary scholars. Using the binary suggested by Lamarque of opacity
and transparency, I have sought to show that both historians and literary
scholars readings of testimony are permissible. The value of testimony

is defined by the community of readers who study it for different ends:
historians are correct to read testimony transparently in an attempt to
establish a factual historical record, while for literary scholars the perspec-
tive under which the facts are presented is of paramount importance. By
emphasising the literary nature of survivor testimony, in our estimation
of its value we can safely abandon the terminology of science, philoso-
phy and history, and we can give a more precise and coherent account
of the unique contribution of survivor testimony to our understanding
of the Holocaust. The opacity of testimony offers an explanation for the
enduring significance of survivor accounts. Testimony articulates the way
the Holocaust was experienced by historical witnesses; its use of thought-
clusters can produce a powerful emotional response in readers. Discourse
on the Holocaust would evidently be poorer without testimony, but rather
than upholding vague truth-claims, we need to be clearer about its value,
and the philosophy of literature allows us to achieve this clarity.
Notes
1. For an account of the changing fortunes of testimony over the
sixty-year period following the Holocaust during which eyewit-
ness accounts would change the face of research and education,
not only in the field of Holocaust studies, but across academic
boundaries, see Wiederhorn, J. (2011) Case Study: Above All
We Need the Witness: The Oral History of Holocaust Survivors
in D.Ritchie (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (Oxford:
OUP), p.245.
2. Wieviorka, A. (1998) Lre du tmoin (Paris: Plon).
3. Cargas, H. (1986) An Interview with Elie Wiesel, Holocaust and
Genocide Studies, 1, 5.
4. The founding of the academic journal History and Memory by Saul
Friedlnder and Dan Diner in 1989 can be seen as the culmination
of the sustained endeavour to promote memory as a partner rather
than a rival of history. See Assmann, A. (2006) History, Memory,
and the Genre of Testimony, Poetics Today, 27, 263.
5. Readers are encouraged to approach Holocaust testimonies with
the expectation that they are to engage in a literary reading.
Although the paratextual material with which testimonies are
framed frequently makes reference to the authors actual experi-
200 S. ODONOGHUE
ence of Nazi camps, there is little else to differentiate testimonies

from novels. The use of titles that would not look out of place
when applied to fictional works and the frequent absence of any
explicit declaration of a correspondence between the author and
narrator reinforce the tendency to consume, as Robert Eaglestone
puts it, works of testimony [] in the same way as fiction (2004)
The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: OUP), p.8.
6. See, Lackey, J. & Sosa, E. (eds) (2006) The Epistemology of
Testimony (Oxford: OUP) and McMyler, B. (2011) Testimony,
Trust, and Authority (Oxford: OUP).
7. Lothe, J., Suleiman, S. R., & Phelan, J. (2012) Introduction
After Testimony: Holocaust Representation and Narrative
Theory in J. Lothe, S. R. Suleiman, & J. Phelan (eds) After
Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the
Future (Columbus: Ohio State University Press), p. 3. See also
Wieviorka, A. (1992) Dportation et gnocide (Paris: Plon).
8. See Levi, P. (2005) Appendice a Se questo un uomo in Se
questo un uomo (Turin: Einaudi), p.157.
9. Wiederhorn, Case Study, 246; Wieviorka, A. (2006) The Witness
in History, Poetics Today, 27, 390.
10. Langer, L. (1995) Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays

(Oxford: OUP), p.13.
11. Lamarque, P. & Olsen, S.H. (1994) Truth, Fiction, and Literature:
A Philosophical Perspective (Oxford: Clarendon Press). See also
Lamarque, P. (2009) The Philosophy of Literature (Oxford:
Blackwell), pp. 22054 and (2014) The Opacity of Narrative
(London: Rowman & Littlefield), pp.12139.
12. For a cogent summary (and rebuttal) of the various arguments (for
example, fiction as source of experiential learning, the integral role
of the emotions in literary reading, and clarificationism) put for-
ward by analytic philosophers, authors and literary critics, who
make in varying degrees what might be termed a pro-truth case
for the value of literature, see Lamarque, Philosophy, pp.22054.
13. For an introduction to the concepts of opacity and thought-theory
and how they can be used in conjunction to provide an account of
the value of literature, see Lamarque, Opacity, pp.14167.
15. Kuznetsov affirms that [t]his book records only the truth as it
really happened and explains that the word Document which
appears in the sub-title of this novel means that I have included in

it only facts and documents, and that it contains not the slightest
element of literary invention (1970) Babi Yar, D.Floyd (trans.),
(New York: Washington Square Press), pp.14.
16. See Hannah Arendt for a discussion of the protective wall of incre-
dulity which surrounded their [the Nazis] enterprise [the extermi-
nation of the Jews] (1973) The Origins of Totalitarianism
(Orlando: Harcourt), p. 437. Arendt herself claimed to have
doubted the existence of the extermination camps at first and
describes a conversation with her husband in the course of which
they agreed that the reports were propaganda (1994) Essays in
Understanding, 19301954, J.Kohn (ed.) (New York: Harcourt),
pp.1314.
17. Wiederhorn, Case Study, 246; Wieviorka, Witness, 38990.
18. LaCapra, D. (2014) Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press), p.100.
19. Wiederhorn, Case Study, 246.
20. Levi, Se questo un uomo, pp.534.
21. Levi, Se questo un uomo, p.54: narrazione fatta e non ascoltata.
All translations from French and Italian are my own. The original
text can be consulted in the note following each translation.
22. Julitte, P. (1965) Larbre de Goethe (Paris: Presses de la Cit), p.14:
[l]e rcit [] est, de bout en bout, conforme la vrit.
23. Julitte, Larbre, p.11: louvrage ne comporte pas le moindre dtail
invent, [] rien ny relve de la fiction et [] tout y est vrai, si
lon peut dire, jusqu chaque virgule.
24. Julitte, Larbre, p.11: sous lenseigne du roman.
25. Julitte, Larbre, pp.1112.
26. Kaplan, C. (1965) Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim
A.Kaplan, A.Katsh (trans.) (ed.), (New York: Macmillan), p.189.
27. Assmann, History, p.269.
28. Assmann, History, pp.26970.
29. Aristotle, Poetics, 1451b; Langer, Admitting the Holocaust, p.13.
30. Semprn, J. (1994) Lcriture ou la vie (Paris: Gallimard), p.167:
Jimagine quil y aura quantit de tmoignages [] Ils vaudront ce que

vaudra le regard du tmoin, son acuit, sa perspicacit [] Et puis il
y aura des documents [] Plus tard, les historiens recueilleront, ras-
sembleront, analyseront les uns et les autres: ils en feront des ouvrages
202 S. ODONOGHUE
savants [] Tout y sera dit, consign [] Tout y sera vrai [] sauf

quil manquera lessentielle vrit, laquelle aucune reconstruction his-
torique ne pourra jamais atteindre, pour parfaite et omnicomprhen-
sive quelle soit [].
31. Semprn, Lcriture, p.167: Lautre genre de comprhension, la

vrit essentielle de lexprience, nest pas transmissible [] Ou
plutt, elle ne lest que par lcriture littraire [] Par lartifice de
luvre dart, bien sr.
32. Semprn, Lcriture, pp.256:
[U]n doute me vient sur la possibilit de raconter. Non pas que

lexprience vcue soit indicible. Elle a t invivable, ce qui est tout
autre chose, on le comprendra aisment. Autre chose qui ne concerne
pas la forme dun rcit possible, mais sa substance. Non pas son artic-
ulation, mais sa densit. Ne parviendront cette substance, cette
densit transparente que ceux qui sauront faire de leur tmoignage un
objet artistique, un espace de cration. Ou de recration. Seul lartifice
dun rcit matris parviendra transmettre partiellement la vrit du
tmoignage.
33. Felman, S. & Laub, D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in

Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge),
p.60.
35. Lamarque, Opacity, p.3.
36. Lamarque, Opacity, pp.1920.
37. Young, J. (1988) Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative
and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press), pp.389.
39. Lalieu, O. (2012) La rsistance franaise Buchenwald (Paris:

Tallandier).
40. Lamarque, Philosophy, p.222.
43. Lamarque, Philosophy, pp.2345.

49. Langer, L. (1988) Interpreting Survivor Testimony in B. Lang
(ed.) Writing and the Holocaust (New York: Holmes and Meier),
pp.334.
50. Langer, Interpreting, pp.334.
51. Langer, L. (1975) The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination
(New Haven: Yale University Press), p.3.
52. Mandel, N. (2006) Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the

Holocaust, and Slavery in America (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press), p.7.
53. Mandel, Unspeakable, p.7.
54. Mandel, Unspeakable, p.7.
55. Waxman, Z. (2006) Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony,
Representation (Oxford: OUP), p.9.
56. Des Pres, T. (1988) Holocaust Laughter? in B.Lang (ed.) Writing
and the Holocaust (New York: Holmes and Meier), p.217.
57. Des Pres, Holocaust Laughter?, p.217.
PART 4
Using Literary Studies in the

Philosophy of Literature
CHAPTER 11
Literary Examples inAnalytic Aesthetics:

TheClaim oftheEmpirical
AndreaSelleri
A number of proposals on how literary scholars could benefit from being

acquainted with the philosophy of literature in the analytic tradition have
been put forward in recent work.1 This should not be a cause for concern
for scholars of literature; indeed, acquaintance with this literature could
improve professional practice in literature departments by helping liter-
ary scholars to think through their claims with the aid of the slower but
surer methods of philosophy. That being said, the cross-feeding that we
have tried to kick-start with this volume cannot be a one-way process of
enlightenment, wise master to pliant disciple. In that spirit, here I shall
attempt to reconsider the use of literary examples in analytic aesthetics,
the problems it raises and the opportunities it opens for interaction with
literary studies.
Bluntly put, my claim is that literary studies could indicate to the phi-
losophy of literature that more allowances should be made for the various
ways that literary works have of being themselves: not merely serviceable
instances of whatever general truth or relation one is trying to argue for or
against, but entities whose individual character should be taken seriously.
Works of literature have a proven record of thwarting, complicating or at
A. Selleri (*)
Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies,
University of Warwick, Coventry, England
e-mail: Andrea.Selleri@warwick.ac.uk

208 A. SELLERI
least prompting us to qualify any definitive judgement we may wish to pass

on them.2 In this case, the judgement in question is the reduction of their
particularity to some general category. Literary works demand, as it were,
to be considered in their own terms, the price for not doing so being that
ones theory will not map adequately onto the real world. I shall argue
that it is not only literary scholars who need concern themselves with this
claim of the empirical, and that if aestheticians wish to use literary exam-
ples to illustrate general theses they ought to be alert to how the actual
features of the literary works or passages they choose as examples may have
non-trivial philosophical implications.
An instance of what I take as a defective use of literary examples in

analytic aesthetics is Gregory Curries article, Work and Text.3 While
not recent, this essay has been influential in its field and I regard it as
representative of certain wider tendencies.4 In the article, Currie sets out
to reject the textualist thesis that work and text are one and the same
entity by arguing that a single text (the sequence of words [the author]
intended, spelt as she intended them5) can result in more than one work
(although Currie declines to define this concept, his use of it presupposes
some articulation of text and authorial intention). This he does by creating
a thought-experiment involving Jane Austens novel Northanger Abbey.6
We know that this novel was written by Austen, and we know that it is
a satire on Gothic novels. Currie holds that if we know that this work is
a satire on Gothic novels rather than a Gothic novel in its own right it is
because we know that Austen wrote it with the intention of creating a
satire; if, Currie reasons, Northanger Abbey (text) had been written by
an author who took Gothic novels seriously, such as Ann Radcliffe, then
Northanger Abbey would possess different properties to those it actually
has (in this case, the quality of being satirical). In Curries terms, Austens
Northanger Abbey and the hypothetical Radcliffes Northanger Abbey are
two different works, produced with different intentions, interpretable in
different ways, which happen to have the same text.
The whole conceit, I suspect, will be found rather bizarre by those not
familiar with the argumentative procedures of analytic aesthetics, where
the use of counterfactual reasoning is very common.7 The main stake in
debates about ontology such as this is, I take it, a claim about the rele-
vance of authorial intention in interpreting literature. The example is quite
important in the rhetorical economy of Curries essay: Austens novel and
LITERARY EXAMPLES INANALYTIC AESTHETICS: THECLAIM... 209
its ghostly Radcliffean counterpart are used to provide a concrete illustra-

tion of the thesis that the work, and not the text only, is the proper object
of criticism, by way of showing that by excluding authorial intention from
our purview we ignore at least some elements that are essential to our
understanding of literary works.8 The example relies on something like
the following syllogism:
p1 (We know that) a work possesses certain properties;

p2 It is by virtue of what we know of the authors intention, and not
of any properties inherent to the text, that (we know that) the work
possesses those properties;
c The authors intention is an integral part of the work.
The philosophical problem here is that p2 is false, for at least two rea-
sons. One is that our notions of what Austens intentions may have been
in writing her novel are not, or at any rate are not primarily, derived from
any extratextual evidence (say, letters, diaries, or reported speech); rather,
they are extrapolated from the text of her novel itself, and then solidified
into a conjecture about what the novels axiology (sometimes known as
its implied author) may be, and finally rebranded an authors intention
by positing (with no obvious explanatory gain) that the real author must
have had a satirical intent by writing her novel in that particular fashion.
This readerly procedure has been familiar to literary scholars (whatever the
disagreements about its legitimacy) since Wayne C.Booths The Rhetoric
of Fiction, and is a key concept in much narratology.9
The second reason why p2 is false is that Currie disregards what the novel
in question is actually like. It would be a very distracted reader who could
entertain the notion that Northanger Abbey is a straight-faced Gothic
novel, no matter what they knew or could conjecture about its authors
mental states. Its plot centres on the growth of its heroine Catherine from
a naivet partly caused by her uncritical enthusiasm for Gothic novels to
a worldlier outlook. Ironically enough in the context of this discussion,
Catherine has misread the world because her mind is not attuned to see-
ing the world as it really is.10 Throughout the novel we follow Catherine
trying and failing to interpret the world around her through the lens of
Gothic novels, until she finally recognises that this is not a good strategy.
The tone throughout is unmistakably comedic.11 Northanger Abbey is
about Gothic novels, but does not read like one at all.
Currie is cognisant of this, but thinks it immaterial for his philosophical
purposes, as he explains in a footnote:
210 A. SELLERI
I am aware, of course, that there are passages in Northanger Abbey that

would be incredible if they were not meant satirically. To make the example
a plausible one, we may have to imagine Austens text to be somewhat dif-
ferent from the text she actually wrote.12
It is not just passages of Northanger Abbey that would raise such difficul-
ties if taken seriously as Gothic literature: the whole plot arc would become
unintelligible. To pursue Curries counterexample: if Ann Radcliffe, with-
out changing her mind about the value of Gothic novels, had somehow
come up with Northanger Abbey, then, whether or not she intended to,
she would have written a satirical work. So would Austen if it improbably
turned out that she meant in fact to write a straight Gothic novel with
no satire involved. In short, Curries use of this example to illustrate his
case against textualism is not convincing. My aim here, however, is not to
argue against Curries ontology. What concerns me is how he uses exam-
ples to arrive at his conclusions, and in particular the aplomb with which
he brushes off the significance of the fact that the real-world example he
has chosen to illustrate his thesis does not bear out his argument, and that
in order for the argument to be sound as well as valid, we may (in fact,
do) have to imagine a different version of that exampleone with no real-
world instantiations. Does this really pose no problem for his argument?
I suggest it does, and that this problem has its roots planted quite deep
in the attitudes, procedures and general forma mentis prevalent in analytic
aesthetics. Curries purpose in choosing Northanger Abbey as an exam-
ple, he tells us, was to shut out the noise13 generated by the complexi-
ties of the standard example, Borgess Pierre Menard, the Author of the
Quixote.14 In other words, this example was chosen specifically to avoid
getting bogged down in epiphenomenal detail, to be able to head straight
to the real nature of the relationship between work and text. What
Currie takes as the lesser complexity of Northanger Abbey is meant to
allow the truth of his theory to shine through without disturbance. There
is nothing intrinsically wrong with choosing examples that fit ones the-
ory, provided that this is done responsibly. However, the difficulties in his
choice of example suggest that such complexities are not an accidental fea-
ture of certain complicated literary works, noise to drown out the music
of the spheres; on the contrary, the very fact that Currie has to resort
to a counterfactual example (or, less charitably put, an arbitrarily altered
version of his own real-world example) to make his points, suggests that
literary works are hard cases for aestheticians: entities whose inherent
complexities force one to re-examine ones presuppositions and to think

through ones claims. To be used effectively, they require an adequate
preliminary appreciation of the difficulties they present to the theorist.
Currie, as we have seen, cordons off the issue of fit as irrelevant for
the purposes of his essay. I suspect that his relegation of textual specificity
to the status of noise has to do with the implicit realism with regard to
concepts prevalent in much analytic aesthetics, and its consequent dis-
dain for the merely empirical.15 The work and the text, on his account,
are de facto not reducible to specific instances of works and texts. I am,
of course, not the first to point out that this may be a problem. Anders
Pettersson has argued that analytic aesthetics pays insufficient attention to
relevant empirical evidence.16 Simon Haines has charged that [e]ven the
most alert and well-intentioned of philosophers still read poems or novels
as if they were containers or vehicles with separate concepts inside them,
or as if they were examples of reformulable ideas.17 B.R.Tilghman made
much the same point in saying that The attention [philosophers] have
drawn [to nonsense in the Alice books] has usually been directed towards
picking out the philosophical theses and jokes rather than towards the
larger possibilities of nonsense as a literary device.18 In this volume, chap-
ter Analytic Philosophy of Literature: Problems and Prospects Jukka
Mikkonen criticises analytic aestheticians horror mundi and calls for more
context-sensitivity and attention to the particular.19 Nicholas Wollerstorff
has characterised most analytic philosophers as having the habit of think-
ing the questions philosophers ask as atemporal denizens of some Platonic
realm.20 Is recent analytic aesthetics Platonic, in sharp contrast to its early
twentieth-century roots in logical empiricism?
If this is the case, if one wishes to argue that certain relations occur
between the Platonic ideas of the work and the text, for example, no
matter whether or not such relations actually occur between any real-
world instantiations of said categories, then it is not clear why one should
take the trouble of using examples at all: the heuristic force of exempli-
fication clearly depends on the presupposition that the chosen examples
feature properties that also apply to the conceptual category of which they
are supposed to be the sublunary representatives. If this is not the caseif
ones theory, that is, is supposed to be mappable onto the real world
then one must recognise that in the real world there is no such thing
as the work or the text, only works and texts in the plural. Certainly,
generalisations can be made; that is what theoretical discourse is supposed
to do. Nonetheless, if examples are used, as intuitively they should be,
212 A. SELLERI
as typical instances of the phenomena at hand, then they must be able

to support the generalisations they typify; otherwise, the work and the
text risk going the way of the present king of France.21 The philosophy
of literature cannot afford to believe that its theorisations on literary phe-
nomena are sound if no real-world instances of such phenomena obtain.
To gain in neatness and clarity by misrepresenting reality is a bad bargain.
It might be urged that I have conjured, in quasi-Derridean fashion, a
storm out of a footnote, and that the extension of my already far-fetched
reservations towards a minor matter to a quarter centurys worth of phi-
losophy of literature since Curries article was published is unwarranted.
To the first hypothetical charge I plead guilty, but remain unrepentant.
One of the functions of footnotes in philosophical discourse is to set
boundaries to what one is willing to consider in detail; it is a way of quar-
antining certain aspects of the matter at hand that may be relevant to it but
which, for one reason or another, one declines to tackle head-on. So, if an
influential philosopher writing in a major venue can admit, without con-
ceding that this could be a problem, that the example he has chosen does
not actually fit his argument (something that a literary scholar writing for
a journal of comparable standing would take care to conceal), then it may
be surmised that something of interest is happening, something that has
to do with the differences between the two disciplines respective ideas
of what is important and what can safely be skipped over. What I have
tried to argue is that this footnote, and Curries article more generally, are
symptomatic of a wider disregard for the empirical in his field; further-
more, that this is bad news for analytic aesthetics in that this disregard has
the potential of adversely affecting the soundness of ones theorisations.
As for the second hypothetical charge, of being myself guilty of misus-
ing examples, and in particular of unduly taking Curries essay as repre-
sentative of something much larger than itself: to build up a full, suitably
referenced case for analytic aesthetics use of examples would far exceed
this chapters ambitions, and would have to be undertaken by someone
with a more thorough acquaintance with the field than I can claim. It has
seemed to me, nonetheless, worthwhile to make this attempt at discuss-
ing this feature through an example which I regard as representative. This
feature will perhaps be recognised as at least partly true by the fields prac-
titioners, and will, I expect, intuitively be perceived by scholars working in
neighbouring fields as characteristic of (at least this brand of) philosophy,
and as something that raises difficulties about the feasibility of its interac-
tion with more empirical disciplines such as literary studies.
In this second half of the chapter, I want to suggest that this disregard
for the claim of the empirical need not be perpetuated, and that a fuller
appreciation of the importance of reading closely is not the only advantage
that the philosophy of literature could draw from literary studies. Another
is that the practice of literary studies is a rich quarry of philosophically
interesting practices, ready to be mined. One case in point is the issue of
textual plurality. From Arthur Danto onwards, much has been made in
analytic aesthetics of the issue of whether one single text can result in two
or more works; but could the fact, known to all editors, that one work can
have two or more texts also have philosophical implications?
The relationship between text and work, as well as a third category,
that of the material document, is a central issue for textual scholars, with
very practical consequences on how the texts of the works we read are
established.22 The criteria editors choose for doing what they do, and the
reasons they give for their choices, are certainly within the bounds of phil-
osophical inquiry, so, of all the areas of literary studies, text-editing seems
to me the readiest for interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation. This process
could give editors the chance of drawing on a new source of commentary
that could help them articulate the implications of their choices systemati-
cally, and it could give philosophers a sharper sense of how the richness
and plurality of the real-world relationships between works, texts and
documents could affect their theorisations.
In his landmark The Philosophy of Literature, for example, Peter
Lamarque tackles the conceptual difference between work and text
and reviews the opposition between textualism and contextualism. Like
Currie, Lamarque subscribes to the latter position, though with a greater
emphasis on the institutional dimension involved:
[A literary] work is an institutional object, governed by social conventions

of production and reception. [] What kind of institutional object? An
abstract and complex linguistic structure consisting of a text-type (strictly a
word-sequence type) tied to a specific context of origin.23
The idea of a text-type is based on C.S. Peirces distinction between ideal

type and actual token: a text is a type of a certain sequence of words.
214 A. SELLERI
That is to say, any two or more concrete instances of a word sequence which
share all of the relevant characteristics (correct order, yes; size, colour,
font, writing materials and support, no) of their ideal type are tokens of
the same text. The text-type is subject to this formal definition, the tokens
are noteditions of literary works may contain misprints, for instance,
and I take it that the ideality of the text-type is what allows us to say that
those misprints are mistakes. On Lamarques institutional account, the
text is only one element of the works makeup, and the emphasis in this
discussion is on how the text must be understood in relation to its context
of origin. However, he maintains that the text-type, formally defined as
a sequence of words, is also a necessary identity condition for the work:
Clearly [] A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal has a text-type a linguistic

structure associated with it. Its first line is A slumber did my spirit seal;
it possesses that first line essentially, such that any proper token (copy) of
the poem must also contain the line, and the token shares that line with the
type.24
Of course, it would be hard to argue that a literary work can do without

its text; but there are some empirical complications that suggest that this
formulation should be qualified.
The main such complication is that the text in practice is typically
a less stable entity than this account could lead us to believe. Lamarque
does cite the instance of translation, wherein we speak of, say, War and
Peace and as being the same work although the two do not
share a word sequence or even an alphabet (he takes this phenomenon as
an argument against textualism); but the occurrence of works with more
than one text is not limited to issues of translation: it is at the heart of the
practice of editorship.
For the sake of exposition let us take King Lear rather than A Slumber
Did My Spirit Seal as an example.25 There is, of course, no Shakespeare
autograph of the play. King Lear as we know it today has been collated
in various ways, mainly from two documents, known as the 1608 Quarto
and the 1623 Folio. If we set out to define King Lear as a conjunction
of an ideal text-type and a context, we would have, first of all, to identify
what particular text-type all tokens would have to conform to in order to
be correctin editorial parlance, to establish the text. One first difficulty
is spelling: most modern editions of Shakespeares works alter many of
the spellings and punctuations current in the Elizabethan period to make
them conform to modern usage (note the contrast with Lamarques con-
text of origin). Does the text-type of King Lear begin, as in the 1608
Quarto, with the line I Thought the King had more affected the Duke
of Albeney than Cornewall, or, as in the 1623 Folio, with I Thought the
King had more affected the Duke of Albany, then Cornwall, or yet, as in
modern editions, with I thought the king had more affected the Duke of
Albany than Cornwall? It seems that in this case the idea of a single text-
type is not sustainable.
It could be rejoined that the text-type is not defined by characters, but
rather by words, ideal entities that have a certain meaning in a certain
language, one not reducible to their spelling.26 To insert meaning into the
equation, however, brings us into even deeper waters. Even in the simple
example given here, the meanings of some words have changed. In the
early seventeenth century, to affect could mean to prefer; the name
of the land one ruled could be used to indicate one (Cornwall); then
could mean than. Editors routinely normalise some of these variables
to adapt them to modern usage. Does this mean that the text-type has
changed, or can we regard these variables as a function of the context of
origin? The English of War and Peace and the Russian of are
certainly two different languages; but is Shakespeares English the same
language as ours? And if it is, is Chaucers? The Beowulf poets? Robert
Burnss? My point is that here, as well as in many other cases, the line
between spelling modernisation and translation is porous, so that the one
workplural texts scenario typified by translation turns out to rule out
the very idea of a single ideal text-type, as well as complicating the invoca-
tion of the context of origin as a normative ideal.
Even if the problems related to spelling and linguistic change should be
bracketed, the 1608 and 1623 documents present us with further issues.
That is to say, their texts are very different, so different in fact that they have
sometimes been taken to be two different works, as in Oxford University
Presss 1986 edition of the play. Instead of collating the two texts to estab-
lish a single authoritative text of the work (something approaching a text-
type), the editors Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (the frontrunners of the
disintegrationist school of King Lear textual criticism) treated the two
main documents as separate entities.27 One might say that their King Lear
has two text-types. Other editors disagree, and establish a single collated
text. At least as far as minor points are concerned, we can be reasonably
certain that no two editions of King Lear have exactly the same text. If
we wished to argue that the text-type of King Lear is that of its original,
216 A. SELLERI
we would be faced with the rather awkward fact that there are at least
twowhich, as far as Lamarques strict Peircian definition is concerned, is
tantamount to saying that there is none.
Nor is this an issue that affects only works that are several centuries old.
Oscar Wilde worked in a publishing industry that was in many respects
similar to todays. Editors of Wildes works have the benefit of being able
to work with manuscripts, to compare readily available first editions, to
check Wildes comments about them in his letters and so on. The primary
materials are far more abundant and, one may be tempted to think, less
problematic than in Shakespeare criticism. And yet, even admitting that
the editors task is to recover the ideal text-type as far as is practically pos-
sible, that task is fraught with difficulties with a philosophical dimension.
For example, to what extent is it desirable or feasible to use authorial
intention as a normative ideal?28
These are some of the remarks that Ian Small, the general editor of the
ongoing Oxford English Texts edition of Wildes complete works, offers
about the process. On the question of using an authors final intentions
as the principle of establishing the copy text, Small asks:
Why, a priori, should we assume that the text of a work over which an
author had final control possesses the greatest textual authority? It turns out
that nearly all of Wildes works [] had, in most important senses, Wildes
authority when they were published. Yet all were subject to various forms
of mediation, and often [] that mediation could involve some degree of
coercion. [] Is it not fairer to say that the first-night text of A Woman of
No Importance and the Bodley Head reading text both have Wildes author-
ity, and that an editor should respect both?29
Even if we admit that the editors task is that of recovering the text-type
based on the authors definitive intention, this intention may turn out to
be bound with other peoples, and even the authors own may be plural.
The text which we read, as Small and Josephine Guy point out else-
where, far from being simply there, is more often than not an editorial
as well as an authorial construct.30
It seems intuitive that considerations such as these should inflect philo-
sophical discussions about authorial intention to a significant extent. As
for the ontological conundrum tackled by both Currie and Lamarque,
Small points out that the concepts of the text and the work can shade
off into each other:
What if the variations between the two texts in question are so far-reaching
that we cant properly call them versions or texts of the same work? Are the
Lippincott and Ward, Lock texts that bear the titles The Picture of Dorian
Gray and The Picture of Dorian Gray respectively really versions of the
same thing? If so, what is this thing? Where are we to look for it? Keeping
strict to [] the final intention principle occasionally commits us to locate
(or invent) something that has never existed a perfect, ideal, or Platonic
Dorian Gray, as it were.31
The solution chosen by Oxford English Texts, in this case, is similar to

the disintegrationist King Lear: the two main versions of The Picture of
Dorian Gray are established separately and printed one after the other.
Most editions, however, choose to focus on one of the two: usually the
latter, expanded 1891 version, occasionally the 1890 version, which is felt
by some to correspond more closely to the authors original intentions.32
In short, it is hard to sustain the thesis that The Picture of Dorian Gray
has a single text-type. The principles invoked by the editors (philosophical,
ideological, procedural) can result in vastly different texts: the 1891 version
is almost twice as long, has six more chapters and a preface, many more
changes occur at a local level, and has a claim to being considered a novel
rather than a short story or novella, so even its genre may be said to change.
Examples could be multiplied at will.33 The empirical challenge posed
by the foregoing considerations to Lamarques formal definition consists
in the fact that what we receive as the text of a work is, especially but not
exclusively when we deal with ancient works, subject to a variety of pro-
cesses of mediation, historical vagaries, copyists idiosyncrasies, and not
least editorial choices which are not necessary or objective but based on
protocols which can be debated, justified and contested, and which have a
philosophical dimension, in addition to an ideological one.34 One wants to
keep the sense of unity of significant cultural artefacts such as King Lear or
The Picture of Dorian Gray, but not, I urge, at the price of forgetting the
empirical issues that complicate that unity. I certainly agree with Lamarque
that the institutional context is a crucial element in the definition of liter-
ary works, but I wish to suggest that philosophers ought to reckon with
the empirical fact that institutional (or more broadly social) elements come
into play even in the definition of the text itself. I have no one-sentence
recipe as to how this reckoning should be accomplished; I certainly do
not wish to suggest that the notion of text (and work, and art, and
literature) can simply be dispensed with and replaced with some woolly
218 A. SELLERI
acceptance of the ineffable plurality of being. But if viable principles are to

be reached, whether in textual scholarship or in philosophy, it seems intui-
tively desirable that they should be negotiated both with theoretical rigour
and with an adequate attention to what is actually the case.
I have proposed that if philosophers of literature became better

acquainted with the concerns and practices of literary scholars, they could:
(1) gain a better knowledge of relevant data; (2) be aware of interesting
philosophical issues inherent to the practice of literary studies; (3) accept
complexity and contradictoriness as relevant features of literature; and (4)
avoid the crystallisation of their discursive practice (this last point would
work both ways). To this, by way of conclusion, I shall only add a few
remarks about the suitability of literary studies to take on this preaching
role. I do not claim that all the work in literary studies has paid ade-
quate attention to the empirical; in fact, this is a sore spot with many
schools.35 However, the more empiricist understanding of literature I
have advocated here is one that used to be the undisputed currency in
the academic study of literature in the more or less innocent age that
preceded the advent of psychoanalysis, structuralism, then high Theory,
then New Historicism, cultural materialism, long-distance reading, or,
in short, of all the schools which, in their various ways, have shared with
analytic aesthetics an understanding of literary works as epiphenomena
of some wider category, whether cultural, psychological, philosophical or
socio-economic.36 Strong as the pull of some of these schools still is in
Anglophone departments of literature, it would be wrong to say that they
have managed to bulldoze every semblance of the older conception of
literature into irrelevance. In fact, not only have New Formalist schools
sprung up in recent years, mounting a full-scale defence of the specific-
ity of single literary works against their alleged flattening at the hands of
historicist literary studies:37 much poststructuralism, too, and even some
forms of Marxist scholarship, have shared the notion that literary produc-
tion is relatively autonomous from its conditions of production;38 and
both in everyday research and in teaching it is no exaggeration to say that
close readingthe obvious methodological extension of the view I have
argued foris still a bulwark within the field, indeed, as has been argued,
its most characteristic procedure.39
Ultimately, like philosophy, the academic study of literature has to

negotiate a tension between the institutional necessity of formulating
large-scale theses (whether historical or theoretical) and maintaining fidel-
ity to the small-scale data which constitute the real-world referents of said
theses. As David Lodge put it with reference to the classification of novels,
Even if one could hold all the relevant data in ones head at one time
which one cannot and could formulate a typology into which they would
all fit some novelist would soon produce a work that eluded all ones
categories, because art lives and develops by deviating unpredictably from
aesthetic norms.40
Nevertheless, Lodge continues, the effort to generalise, to classify, has

to be made.41 The question is, how to do it in a way that is both concep-
tually solid and predicated on an accurate notion of what is actually the
case.
Literary studies and the philosophy of literature look at their subjects
in different ways, have different modes of arguments and reach different
kinds of results. Nevertheless, they share both an object and the necessity
to theorise it, and this seems to me a good enough basis for a more sus-
tained interdisciplinary dialogue than has hitherto been the case. If any of
the arguments I have made and any of the objections I have raised in this
chapter are perceived by any philosopher of literature as either possessing
some degree of justification or at least as being intelligible in philosophical
terms however misguided my treatment of them, I shall take it as a sign
that Catherine Belseys worry that the two disciplines are separated by an
unbridgeable differend may be assuaged after all.42
Notes
1. To cite a few: Swirski, P. (2010) Literature, Analytically Speaking:
Explorations in the Theory of Interpretation, Analytic Aesthetics,
and Evolution (Austin: University of Texas Press); Lindstrom, E.
(2013) Sense and Sensibility and Suffering; or, Wittgensteins
Marianne? English Literary History, 80:4, 106791; Wright, D.
(2014) George Eliots Vagueness, Victorian Studies, 56:4,
62548; Gang, J. (2015) No Symbols Where None Intended,
PMLA, 130:3, 67983; Zumhagen-Yekpl, K. (forthcoming) The
World as Bloom Found It: Ithaca, the Tractatus, and looking
220 A. SELLERI
more than once for the solution of difficult problems in imaginary

or real life in K. Zumhagen-Yekpl and M. LeMathieu (eds)
Wittgenstein and Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press). Given the limited scope of this chapter, I shall bracket the
whole question of the relationship between analytic aesthetics
proper and those branches of aesthetics inspired by ordinary lan-
guage philosophy which rely on close reading considerably more
than their analytic counterpart.
2. To give just one example, Paradise Lost has variously been read as
allegorical or as non-allegorical, and both sides have been able to
invoke actual textual features and a number of arguments in sup-
port of their view. See Brljak, V. (2015) The Satanic or: Milton
and Protestant Anti-Allegorism, Review of English Studies, 66,
40322. Derek Attridge provides a theoretical articulation of this
feature in his (2004) The Singularity of Literature (London:
Routledge). Also see Ginocchietti and Zanfabros chapter What
Do We Do with Words? Framing What Is at Stake in Dealing with
Literature in this volume.
3. Currie, G. (1991) Work and Text, Mind, 100:3, 32540.
4. Among the contributions to scholarship directly influenced by
Curries approach are Livingston, P. (1996) Arguing over
Intentions, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 50:198, 61533;
Gracia, J. (2001) Borgess Pierre Menard: Philosophy or
Literature?, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 59:1, 4557;
Levinson, J. (2007) Aesthetic Contextualism, Postgraduate
Journal of Aesthetics, 4:3, http://www.pjaesthetics.org/index.
php/pjaesthetics/article/view/58, retrieved 6th January 2016.
5. Currie, Work, 326.
6. For ease of exposition, I refer to Northanger Abbey considered as
text as Northanger Abbey, and to Northanger Abbey considered
as work as Northanger Abbey.
7. For an introduction to the schools typical modes of argument, see
Glock, H. (2008) What Is Analytic Philosophy? (Cambridge: CUP).
8. Since this is not the subject of this chapter, I shall refrain from
expanding on the divergences between the various schools of
intentionalism on the point of that at least.
9. Booth, W. C. (1983) The Rhetoric of Fiction, second edition
(London: The University of Chicago Press). For an overview of
the issues surrounding the notion, see Kindt, T. & Mller, H.
(2006) The Implied Author: Concept and Controversy (New York:

Walter de Gruyter).
10. Gill, R. & Gregory, S. (2003) Mastering the Novels of Jane Austen
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), p.25.
11. Lewis, C.S. (1954) A Note on Jane Austen, Essays in Criticism,
4:4, 35971.
12. Currie, Work, 329fn.
13. Currie, Work, 328.
14. It is interesting to note that the two articles he cites as noise are
both arguments against Arthur C. Dantos cavalier treatment of
the literary specificities of Pierre Menard, including speculations
about Borgess point, in his pioneering take on the ontological
significance of the text/work conundrum. Tilghman, B.R. (1982)
Danto and the Ontology of Literature, Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism, 40:3, 2939; Wreen, M. (1990) Once Is Not
Enough?, British Journal of Aesthetics, 30:2, 14958.
15. Cf. Literature sets up obstacles to the passage of semantical theo-
ries which would go through a great deal more easily if literature
did not exist. Danto, A. (1985) Philosophy as/and/of Literature
in J. Rajchman & C. West (eds) Post-Analytic Philosophy (New
York: Columbia University Press), p. 68. Richard Rorty pointed
out that this is a feature that analytic philosophy shares with law in
(1982) Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press), esp. p.160.
16. Pettersson, A. (2008) Three Problematic Aspects of Analytical
Aesthetics, The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 35, 6074.
17. Haines, S. (1998) Deepening the Self: The Language of Ethics
and the Language of Literature in J.Adamson, R.Freadman, &
D.Parker (eds) Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy and
Theory (Cambridge: CUP).
18. Tilghman, B. R. (1990) Literature, Philosophy and Nonsense,
British Journal of Aesthetics, 30:3, 256.
19. See p.72in this volume, p. 69.
20. Wollerstorff, N. (2003) Why the Philosophy of Art Cannot

Handle Touching, Kissing and Crying, The Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism, 61:1, 1727.
21. The locus classicus is Russell, B. (1905) On Denoting, Mind, 14,
47993.
222 A. SELLERI
22. For an articulation of this conundrum from the perspective of a

textual scholar, see McGann, Jerome (1983) The Text, the Poem,
and the Problem of Historical Method, New Literary History, 12,
26888.
23. Lamarque, P. (2009) The Philosophy of Literature (Oxford:

Blackwell), p.78.
25. For an analysis of the textual complications around Wordsworth,
see Caraher, B. G. (1991) Wordsworths Slumber and the
Problematics of Reading (University Park, Penn.: Penn State
University Press), esp. pp.26370.
26. This is Curries position (Work and Text, p.325), which Lamarque
regards as too strict (Philosophy, p.73).
27. Taylor, G. & Warren, M. (eds) (1983) The Division of the Kingdoms:
Shakespeares Two Versions of King Lear (Oxford: OUP). See espe-
cially Wells, S. Introduction: The Once and Future King Lear,
pp.122.
28. The philosophical literature on this issue is vast. A useful overview
is contained in Livingston, P. (1998) Intentionalism in Aesthetics,
New Literary History, 29:4, 83146.
29. Small, I. (2014) Editing Wilde and the OET Complete Works,
The Wildean, 45, 39.
30. Guy, J. & Small, I. (1993) Politics and Value in English Studies
(Cambridge: CUP), p.138.
31. Small, Editing Wilde, p.39.
32. For example, Wilde, O. (2011) The Picture of Dorian Gray: An
Annotated, Uncensored Edition, N. Frankel (ed.) (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press).
33. Ghostwriting represents another interesting case which I lack space
to go into here. Is David Beckham the author of his autobiogra-
phy My World?
34. I can only skirt the issue here. One could suggest, for example, that
the fact that Shakespeares works come to us in modernised form
is not ideologically innocent, the suggestion being that Shakespeare
is, in Jan Kotts phrase, our contemporarythe same ideology,
perhaps, that underlies the Royal Shakespeare Companys passion
for machine guns, electric torches and beatboxes.
35. For a taste of the debate, see Wolfson, S.J. (2000) Reading for
Form, Modern Language Quarterly, 61:1, 116; Best, S. M. &
Marcus, S. (2009) Surface Reading: An Introduction,

Representations, 108, 121.
36. For an articulation of the distinction between immanent and
transcendent approaches to the study of literature, see Hansen, J.
(2004) Formalism and Its Malcontents: Benjamin and De Man on
the Function of Allegory, New Literary History, 35:4, 66383.
37. A useful overview is contained in Levinson, M. (2007) What Is
New Formalism?, PMLA, 122:2, 55869.
38. See, for instance, Bourdieu, P. (1992) Les rgles de lart (Paris:
ditions du Seuil).
39. Gallop, J. (2007) The Historicization of Literary Studies and the
Fate of Close Reading, Profession, 1816.
40. Lodge, D. (1984) Mimesis and Diegesis in Modern Fiction,

SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, 1, 89.
41. Lodge, Mimesis, p.89.
42. See her chapter Criticism, Philosophy and the Differend in this
volume.
CHAPTER 12
What Do WeDo withWords? Framing

What Is at Stake inDealing withLiterature
MariannaGinocchietti andGiuliaZanfabro
In this chapter we investigate how the tensions between literature and phi-
losophy have been grounded on a fundamental dichotomy. This polarising
dichotomy conceives of, on the one hand, philosophy as the authentic
rationalisation of logically valid arguments and, on the other, literature as
imaginative activity more concerned with emotions than with arguments.
On this view, literature and philosophy are two different and discontinu-
ous intellectual enterprises.
The chapter is structured into three parts. In Philosophy versus
Literature? we begin with an analysis of Bence Nanays rejection of the
discontinuity thesis and go on to argue that:
1. There is something usually left out from accounts of the disconti-

nuity thesis in philosophy of literature in the analytic tradition:
literary theory.
2. Whether or not one is inclined to endorse an analytic or a conti-
nental perspective on literature, it seems rather obvious that in deal-
ing with literature the boundaries between these two academic
environments are inevitably crossed.
M. Ginocchietti (*) G. Zanfabro

University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy
e-mail: m.ginocchietti@gmail.com
e-mail: giulia.zanfabro@gmail.com

226 M. GINOCCHIETTI AND G. ZANFABRO
3. As a consequence, the main difference is not to be found between

philosophy and literature but between, on the one hand, literature,
and, on the other, all theoretical discourses defining themselves as
philosophy or literary theory.
We conclude this section by claiming that, whether or not one is willing

to endorse a continental or an analytic perspective and whether or not
such a distinction is pertinent, the main difference between philosophers
of literature in the analytic tradition and literary theorists seems to lie in
the definition of literature.1 To simplify matters, one can say that while
the former are particularly interested in defining what literature is, the
latter are sceptical towards the possibility of defining literature at all and
acknowledge the singularity of literature precisely in order to resist this.
In Staging versus Explaining? we consider J.M.Coetzees Disgrace2
before arguing that:
1. The main difficulty both philosophers and literary theorists face in

dealing with what they consider to beat a given time and in a
given spacea literary work lies in the fact that an explanation is
always needed. Whether the explanation is to be found in philoso-
phy or in literary theory, the main difficulty lies in the gap between
two different orders of discourse: on the one hand, literature, and
on the other, theory (philosophy or literary theory).
2. Literature stages what philosophers and theorists have, ultimately, to
explain.
3. Literature happens and its main features seem to lie precisely in this
happening and in the possibility to stage without necessarily endors-
ing any particular point of view.
4. The happening of literature creates the conditions for the reader to
be in a position to exercise responsibility towards her understanding
of what she readsCoetzees Disgrace will serve as an example of
the process that the reader can activate in reading.
In the concluding section, The Singularity of Literature, we partly

endorse Attridges analysis of the singularity of literature and we claim
that if there is something to be acknowledged as peculiar of literature it is
its capacity: (1) to stage everything that philosophers and theorists have to
explain; and (2) to escape any act of definition or categorisation.
WHAT DO WEDO WITHWORDS? FRAMING WHAT IS AT STAKE INDEALING... 227
Our main concern is to frame the relation between philosophy and lit-
erature without accepting the established boundaries between philosophy
of literature in the analytic tradition and literary theory. Our perspective is
consistent with an understanding of literary theory and philosophy of lit-
erature as two different academic disciplines that could combine to answer
shared questions.
Philosophy Versus Literature?

According to what Bence Nanay calls the discontinuity thesis, litera-
ture and philosophy do very different things. Although discontinuity
does not necessarily establish a hierarchy, Nanay underlines how, for
those who endorse this thesis, literature is mainly used in order to popu-
larise philosophical arguments and, hence, can never count as authentic,
genuine philosophy; while, on the other hand, the main feature of phi-
losophy is presenting valid arguments in favour of or against statements
formally constructed as precise and logicalsomething literature does
not do. The consequence of such a thesis is that philosophers dont
lose out on anything if they dont read literature.3 However, as has
been acknowledged by Nanay himself, the discontinuity thesis goes
well beyond the claim that philosophy and literature are different intel-
lectual activities. By negating the discontinuity thesis, in fact, Nanay is
not denying that there are differences between literature and philoso-
phy, he is just claiming that the barrier between them is permeable. This
claim is fully consistent with a view that acknowledges deep specificities
to philosophy and to literature. In his article, Nanay constructs logically
valid arguments in order to sustain the rejection of the discontinuity
thesis. His conclusions can be roughly summarised as follows: not only
can we learn from literature, or from art in general, we can even learn
philosophy from them, hence philosophy has no excuse for ignoring
literature.4
In his essay, Nanay distinguishes two strategies that can be used to
question the discontinuity thesis. The first onedont underestimate
Literatureconsists in arguing that literature can do what philosophy is
generally taken to do. The second, converse strategydont overestimate
philosophyclaims that philosophy is not the presentation of logically
valid arguments in favour of or against formulated statements. In fact,
what philosophy does is closer to what literature is generally taken to do.
In order to argue that philosophy is not as intellectually straightforward

as it is advertised to be and literature is not as intellectually impoverished
as it is generally taken to be,5 Nanay uses a combination of these two
strategies. In arguing against the discontinuity thesis, Nanay acknowl-
edges a sort of potential to literature and to art in general, taking literature
as relevant to the domain of philosophysomething analytic philosophers
do not generally do. Literary theorists, on the other hand, have long been
working with both philosophy (continental philosophy more often than
analytic philosophy) and literature without necessarily polarizing them.
In 2011, Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge edited a volume on literary
theory. At the very beginning of the volume the editors claim:
Whether the news is met with celebration or lamentation, there seems to be

little disagreement that the era of theorys dominance has passed whatever
theory might mean or have meant. The story of theory, as it is usually told,
has thus solidified into a recognizable narrative of declension shared even by
theorys adherents.6
According to this funeral narrativeas Elliott and Attridge call it

theory may have fallen from grace.7 However, despite this fall, theory
continues to have a role and to be present in academic debates. In Theory
after Theory, Attridge and Elliott want to suggest that where theory
continues to thrive, it increasingly adopts positions that challenge some of
the fundamental intellectual stances that once defined Theory.8 On the
other side of the debate, philosophy of literature has long been declaring
the end of theoryeven longer than the funeral narrative has. It seems,
in fact, undeniable that philosophy of literature has never loved literary
theory. Paradigmatic of this lack of sympathy are Olsens words in The
End of Literary Theory.9 Although the volume was published almost thirty
years ago, it seems quite interesting to recall Olsens joy for the end of
literary theory:
Literature is a value concept, and the literary work is defined through the
value which it is expected to yield. Literary theory has never been able to
come to terms with this. If, with deconstruction, literary theory has entered
a crisis from which it does not recover, this may be no bad thing. Problems
that arise in connection with literary value can be fully discussed in literary
aesthetics. Literary theory is thus not only impossible but also unnecessary
and, because it has to deny that value is central in an explanation of litera-
ture, undesirable.10
Hence, according to Olsen, not only is literary theory impossible, but also
unnecessary and, ultimately, undesirable.
The question of what is literature? is, as Olsen puts it, the starting
point of literary aesthetics.11 According to Olsen, the question is not
a request for information about what texts are literary works and it can
only be asked by those who know literature and know the literary canon.
Moreover, the question what is literature? does not merely ask for a defi-
nition of literature. When this kind of question is raised, what is asked for
is an account of the characteristic features and functions of literature.12
If these characteristic features and functions are explained, the account
should also explain why it is worthwhile to single out certain texts as lit-
erary works. It must display those features which define and justify that
interest which members of the culture take in its literature.13 The ques-
tion and its setting can only be understood against a cultural background
where literature figures as an important cultural value.14 The possible
answers to the question what is literature? can be structured, accord-
ing to Olsen, following two paths: (1) a reductive answer is concerned to
determine those textual features that are necessary and sufficient in order
to classify a text as a literary work (in other words, emotive theories, theo-
ries of mimesis, rhetorical theories, semantic and structuralist theories, and
so on); and (2) a non-reductive answer rejects, on the other hand, that
those features which make a text a literary work of art (aesthetic features)
can be defined as sets of textual features.15 A non-reductive answer, then,
denies that the notion of aesthetic feature is superfluous, something that
is, in turn, implied by reductive theories:
Consequently, a non-reductive theory has to give an account of literary aes-

thetic features making it clear in what sense, since they are not to be defined
as bundles of textual features, they can be said to be properties of literary
works.16
It is not only literary aesthetics that is concerned with the definition of lit-
erature. What literature is, what makes a text literary and how we explain
what literature does with words are key questions for literary theorists too.
Throughout the centuries, influential thinkers have struggled to provide
answers to such far-reaching questions and have hardly tried to pin down
the essence of literature. In his 2004 volume, The Singularity of Literature,
Derek Attridge invites the readers to take this resistance to definition as a
starting point. This resistance to define what literature is may be what is at
stake in analysing the disciplinary boundaries between literary theory and

philosophy of literature.
In this chapter, we do not intend to enter into the merits of the debate
involving analytic and continental philosophy on the definition of lit-
erature, nor do we intend to establish boundaries for or provide answers
to ontological questions such as what is literature? or what is philoso-
phy? Our main concern is to outline: (1) how philosophy and literature
can be concerned with similar theoretical clusters; and (2) that the main
difference is not to be found between philosophy and literary theory, but
between, on the one hand, what is conceived as literature and, on the
other, all other theoretical discourses that categorise themselves as phi-
losophy or as theoryand not as literature. The core difference seems
to lie in the fact that, as Nanay puts it, philosophy traditionally requires
logically structured argumentations in favour of or against precisely for-
mulated statements. But this is something literary theory requires too: in
providing interpretations and analyses of literary works, no matter which
critical perspective we endorse, we must frame our analysis, make explicit
the perspective we endorse, follow some kind of logic argumentation and,
thus, explain. On the other hand, literature stages what we, as critics or
as philosophers, try to explain. It is not necessary for literature to be con-
cerned with logically and formally valid arguments in favour of or against
precisely formulated statements. By saying this we are certainly not claim-
ing that literature may proceed without obeying any norms of consistency
or rationality broadly conceived: literature presupposes both a reader and
a general idea of literature that makes it possible for a categorisation of
the literary to exist. What then are the norms according to which we
acknowledge something as literature, while dismissing something else as
non-literature?
Derek Attridge claims that all attempts since the Renaissance to deter-
mine the difference between literary and non-literary language have
failed,17 and the fact that they have failed is a necessity. To fail here is a
necessary failure, one by which literature as a cultural practice has been
continuously constituted.18 In other words, what we conceive as litera-
ture has always been formed by processes of inclusion and exclusion that
have defined something as literary while dismissing something else as
non-literary. The distinction between what is literature and what is not
is contingent and has been typically regulated by aesthetic, pedagogical,
educational, ideological, and other norms. The attention we choose to
address to these norms and to their functioning is, therefore, crucial in
order to determine what our perspective on literature is. But then the
question what is literature? resurfaces.
According to Olsen, what is literature? can only be asked by those
who know literature and know the literary canon.19 In Attridges perspec-
tive, what we conceive of as literature is always determined by processes
of canonisation that typically work by means of exclusions. The question
what is literature?, hence, only makes sense within a specific literary sys-
tem. The expected answer will be concerned more with the norms regu-
lating what is literature and what is not than with the definition of the
necessary and sufficient features for a work to be considered as literature
or with the analysis of an already established literary canon. What is at
stake is how and why a literary canon is constructed and who the agents
acting in its formation are. In turn, when the constitution of a literary
canon is considered to be entirely determined by literary value, whatever
literary value might mean, then literature is an institution, as Olsen would
put it, but in a rather stricter sense. Because it is an institution, literature
involves a group of people among whom literary works are produced and
read.20 What makes it possible for such an institution to exist are: (1) a
background of concepts and conventions which create the possibility of
identifying literary works21 and which can provide a framework for appre-
ciation; and (2) people who actually apply these concepts and conventions
in their approach to literary works. In Olsens view:
[A] literary work must then be seen as being offered to an audience by an

author with the intention that it should be understood with reference to a
shared background of concepts and conventions which must be employed
to determine its aesthetic features. And a reader must be conceived of as a
person who approaches the work with a set of expectations defined in terms
of these concepts and conventions.22
Therefore, in Olsens view, the question is not how the canon is formed.
In fact, questions involving how and why a work is considered as literature
while another is not do not seem to be of any interest to the proponent of
this approach. Rather, the existence of a canon is what makes it possible
for an idea of literature to exist and, hence, the existence of a canon seems
to be, in and of itself, uncontroversial: There will at any time be a num-
ber of demarcation disputes concerning whether or not a text is a literary
work, but this is a discussion which only makes sense if there is agreement
about a canon.23
It seems undeniable that, as Attridge and Elliott claim in Theory after

Theory, most philosophy in the English-speaking countries has been
rather impervious to the upheavals created over the past 40years in neigh-
bouring disciplines by the explosion of Theory.24 The reason for this
lack of involvement lies in that it was continental philosophy from which
theoretical work took its bearings, and continental philosophy remains a
minority enterprise in the Anglophone arena, dominated as this arena is
by the analytic philosophy.25 Whether or not one is inclined to endorse an
analytic rather than a continental perspective on literatureand whether
such a distinction between analytic and continental is pertinentthe fact
that analytic philosophy is absolutely resistant towards continental philos-
ophy and towards anything that might be generally categorised as theory
seems to be uncontroversial: After all, the institutional doxa of analytic
philosophy is precisely that Lyotard, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and the
like had absolutely nothing to do with philosophy.26
To go back to the main issue at hand, the perspective we endorse con-
siders literature as a cultural, social, public, inter-subjective and hence
historical phenomenon. Literature is, in this sense, a cultural product,
although it is never simply contained by a culture.27 We therefore con-
sider literature in its broader sense, that is, more as a complex literary
system than as something that has to be ontologically defined.28 Our view
does not presuppose that there is such a thing as one given literary value
or a literary essence; it is more concernedthough without abdicating
to a reflection upon literary valuewith how and why literary value is
established, who establishes it, how the canon of what we consider litera-
ture has been forming, and, consequently, how the criteria for exclusion
and inclusion work. Indeed, even if it is true that [although] within a
given culture at a given time there will be a certain body of works that
are widely received as literary, the slightest acquaintance with literary his-
tory shows that it is a far from stable category.29 Moreover, since it is
a property of any canon to be grounded on what it excludes, and since
cultureat least as we understand itcould not exist without canonic
processes at all levels of its functioning [] there is no question of eradi-
cating this source of exclusion.30 Once the existence of such processes of
canonisation and exclusion is acknowledged, the leading question shifts
from what is literature? to how is the canon defined? How the canon
is defined and who defines it are then central issues in dealing with what
is conceived as literature. In fact, the literary canon is defined by at least
three different aspects: (1) economic aspects: publishers, prizes, literature
departments and their scholars concurring in order to institutionalise what

literature is; (2) ideological aspects: educational, political, and pedagogi-
cal norms historically defining what literature should be; and (3) aesthetic
aspects: aesthetic norms regulating what is historically conceived as lit-
erary valuethese norms strongly depend on ideological, political and
generally extra-literary phenomena. These three aspects concur to deter-
mine what is conceived as literature and what is not. This is not to say
literary scholars should not be concerned with literary value, however;
the way they operate to acknowledge literary value and the definition
they provide for it are never obvious or neutral. Literary value can only
be assessed a posteriori and the criteria concurring to determine it are not
merely literary: We rightly value the works belonging to the tradition of
literature for a number of different things they are capable of being and
doing, most of them not strictly literary.31 This premise may sound redun-
dant to those working in the domain of literary theory, but, it seems to
us, not to those working in the field of philosophy of literatureespecially
within English-speaking departments.
Staging Versus Explaining?

In the first section we outlined that traditional accounts for and against
the discontinuity thesis typically leave out literary theory. We have then
stressed that literature, philosophy of literature and literary theory are
not discontinuous enterprises as they are usually taken to be, and that
the relevant difference that seems to distinguish philosophical and critical
approaches mainly lies in the definition of literature. We have stressed the
historicity of literatureand hence of the literary canon defining itand
we have referred to what is conceived as literature by a given culture and
not to literature. In this section we will provide an example of a narrative
academically and institutionally conceived of as literature.32 J.M. Coetzee
is particularly relevant here for at least three reasons: (1) both philoso-
phers and literary theorists consider him to be particularly engaged in
what are usually taken to be philosophical issues; (2) his novels have been
analysed as instances of literature that may activate the ethics of reading
in Attridges sense; and (3) Coetzees fiction is rather difficult to define
and can make a case for the resistance ofwhat we callliterature to be
defined. We will use one of his best-known novels, Disgrace.
The novel can be summarised as follows: David Lurie has raped
Melanie, one of his students. Even if he accepts culpability, he is firmly
convinced that what has been defined as a rape by the committee, as an

abuse against human rights, does not define what he did. Lurie claims he
is not responsible for what he did, since, as he claims, his case rests on the
rights of desire [] on the god who makes even the small birds quiver.33
His certainties (not a rape, not quite that34) start to waver only when
something happens to his daughter Lucy. Lucy is raped too. David doesnt
know what happened to his daughter while he was locked in the bathroom
and his daughter refuses to tell him. David can only suppose what has hap-
pened to Lucy. It is at this point in the narrative that the reader is asked
to compare the two rapes, Davids and the one Lucy has been victim of.
Only at this point can the reader be quite sure that David too has raped
a girl, and that he does not differ very much from the three men who
have raped his daughter, despite the continuous justifications and excuses
David offers to the reader. It is only after his daughters rape that David
visits Melanies parents in order to apologize for the grief [he has] caused
[them].35 The story goes on with Lucy deciding to continue with her
pregnancy and to marry Petrus, the neighbour and the uncle of one of the
rapists. David does not understand his daughters choices (she is a lesbian,
she has been raped, she has decided to keep the baby and to marry a man
involved in the rape), but his daughter is firmly convinced this is the only
way to start from again []. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With
nothing. Like a dog,36 claims Lurie, in the end.
The whole novel is focalised through David Lurie and neither Lurie
nor the reader have any access to Lucys point of view.37 The consequence
of Disgraces relentlessness in keeping the focalisation confined to David
Lurie is that Lucy is resolutely denied focalization.38 According to
Spivak, the reader is not willing to share Luries point of view and, hence,
his inability to read Lucy as patient and agent; the reader refuses to
be content with acting out the failure of reading, that is, the impossibil-
ity to read Lucy.39 In Spivaks analysis, this is the rhetorical signal to the
active reader, to counterfocalize.40 Spivak defines counterfocalisation as
a shuttle between focalization and the making of an alternative narrative
as the readers running commentary.41 In her definition of counterfocali-
sation Spivak moves from the narratological term focalisation, as under-
stood by Mieke Bal,42 in order to theorise the possibility for the reader to
resist focalisation and, hence, to counter the endorsement of the perspec-
tive of the focaliserLurie in this case. Counterfocalisation is a textual
device through which the text asks the reader to question her position
in the focalisation. Spivak sees counterfocalisation as something political:
since the reader is unwilling to endorse the perspective of the character

through which the novel is focalised, she counterfocalises. In Spivaks
perspective, the counterfocalisation makes it possible for the reader to
question her own complicity with the main characters perspective and,
hence, activates the attempt on the part of the reader to make an alterna-
tive narrative for what has been excluded and marginalised by the main
narrative. Spivaks analysis is quite complicated, and we will not follow
her arguments in this chapter. What needs to be noted is the fact that,
as she claims, the second half of Disgrace makes the subaltern speak,
but does not presume to give voice, either to Petrus or Lucy.43 It is
only through an active counterfocalisation on the part of the reader that
Lucys nothing, obscure to David, gains another meaning and allows
another interpretation to exist, it is only by engaging in this responsibil-
ity that the reader acknowledges Lurie to be responsible for a rape too:
Lurie did rape Melanie, as the three men raped his daughter. Attridge
calls this kind of dynamics taking place in the act of reading the ethics
of reading.44
In 2010, Anton Leist and Peter Singer edited a book on Coetzee: J.M.
Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature.45 Leist and
Singer are philosophers. In the Introduction to the volume they claim
there are some peculiar features that make Coetzees novels philosophi-
cal: (1) they present an unusual degree of reflectivity;46 (2) they express
an attitude of paradoxical truth seeking, that is, the belief that truth
most relevantly is the truth of truth-fullness and that truth-fullness is
the engagement in a never-ending spiral movement that at no point leads
to full truth.47 There is always a counter-argument to an argument,
there is always another story to be told, another description to the one the
reader has read before; (3) the thematic centre of his novels is the eth-
ics of social relationships,48 this means that the writers eye concerning
personal relationships is not fixed on values or rights but is attentive
to the social and psychological mechanisms structuring relationships.49
While these features of Coetzees novels have long been analysed by lit-
erary scholars, it is particularly interesting that a volume exclusively on
Coetzees work has been published and edited by two philosophers. There
is no question that Coetzees novels tackle philosophical questions con-
cerning authority, power, agency and subjectivity, and responsibility, and
it is always very difficult to give an account of, to explain, what Coetzee
does with words, what he does with literature. Whether the explanation
is to be found in philosophy or in literary studies, the main difficulty lies
precisely in the gap between two different orders of discourse: on the one
hand, literature, and on the other, theory (philosophy or literary theory).
The brief reference we have made to Disgrace has been instrumental in
order to exemplify the difference between something that is narrated and
staged in a novel and its analysis. Moreover, Disgracemore overtly than
other novelsstages the responsibility of the reader to understand what is
going on in its pages.50 Even though we will probably not know what this
going on is aboutwe will not be certain of what happened as readers
we are asked to be responsive and, hence, responsible for our reading. We
are asked to focus on this going on and, more specifically, on what is
this nothing Lucy claims the right to. This demand of responsibility that
many critics have individuated as peculiar of this noveland of Coetzees
fictionconfronts the reader with the unpredictability of literature, some-
thing which is strictly connected, in Attridges perspective, with its singu-
larity and, ultimately, with its resistance to be defined.
The Singularity ofLiterature
In the first section of this chapter we outlined the continuities between

the philosophy of literature and literary theory, the latter often being left
out by accounts of the discontinuity thesis. We then made explicit how
our interest lies in the processes that concur to define what is conceived
as literature rather than in literature. In the second section we used the
example of the counterfocalisation in Disgrace as an instance of how this
novel, academically and institutionally conceived as literature, can activate
the mechanism Attridge defines as the ethics of reading. The brief analysis
of the novel and the dynamics it presents have provided a sense of what the
difference between staging and explaining could be. In this concluding
section, we partly endorse Attridges analysis of the singularity of literature
and we claim that, if there is something to be acknowledged as peculiar of
what we conceive as literature, it is its capacity to escape any act of defini-
tion and categorisation. The singularity of literature is not, therefore, a
request for definition or a demand for the necessary and sufficient features
for a work to be classified as literature.
We have already seen how, according to Attridge, literature as a cul-
tural practice has been continuously constituted by a necessary failure: all
attempts since the Renaissance to determine the difference between liter-
ary and non-literary language have failed and [] this is a necessary
failure, one by which literature as a cultural practice has been continuously
constituted.51 These failures underline both the contingency of what we

conceive as literature and its resistance to be ultimately defined. What is
at stake in Attridges Singularity of Literature is precisely this question of
literatures evasion of rules and definitions.52
Attridges analysis is detailed and involves other theoretical issues we
have not mentioned in this chapter.53 There are, however, at least three
points Attridge underlines which we are interested in: (1) the fact that
singularity is defined as the resistance of literature to be defined; (2) the
treating of literature as a practice and as an institution; and (3) its partici-
pation in the realm we call the ethical.54 Attridges claim is, in short,
that literature, understood in its difference from other kinds of writing
(and other kinds of reading), solves no problems and saves no souls,55 but
is nevertheless effective, even if its effects are not predictable enough to
serve a political or moral program.56 Indeed, the effects of what Attridge
calls the literariness of certain linguistic works (be they conventionally
classified as literature or not) are not predictable and do not arise from
planning.57 This unpredictability of the effects of literature is what is at
stake in the opening of new possibilities of meaning and feeling that lit-
erature may provideeven if we would not think of this unpredictability
as a sufficient and necessary feature for a work to be classified as literature.
Starting from the rejection of the discontinuity thesis we have
included literary theory in the debate and tried to show that philosophy
of literature in the analytic tradition and literary theory have more in com-
mon than they are usually taken to have. Our main concern, then, has
been to focalise on what is conceived as literature and on its capacity to
stage what philosophers and theorists explain and on the characteristic
feature of literature to escape any simple categorisation. Indeed, literature
is always something more than the category or entity it is claimed to be
and it is valuable for something other than the various personal or social
benefits that are ascribed to it.58 We have understood literature as resis-
tant to definition and we have taken into account literature as a cultural
product whose individuation is strictly connected to processes of canoni-
sation and exclusion. We have then claimed that the relevant question to
be asked is not what is literature?especially if by asking this question
we are expecting an answer concerned with the sufficient and necessary
conditions for a work to be classified as literaturebut how is the literary
canon defined? and who are the agents acting in its formation? What the
narrator of A Room of Ones Own claims at the very beginning of Woolfs
text seems rather appropriate to conclude this chapter: when a subject is
highly controversial [] one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only
show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.59
Notes
1. We intentionally use literary theorists instead of literary theory
to emphasise the multiplicity of methodologies, approaches and
aims in literary theory.
2. Coetzee, J.M. (2000) Disgrace (London: Vintage).
3. Nanay, B. (2013) Philosophy versus Literature? Against the
Discontinuity Thesis, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
71:4, 349.
4. Nanay, Philosophy, 358. How and when can philosophy learn
from literature? Proponents of aesthetic cognitivism argue that lit-
erature can teach philosophy in virtue of its capacity to lead the
imagination up to knowledge; see, for instance, Currie, G. (1997)
The Moral Psychology of Fiction in Stephen Davies (ed.) Art
and Its Messages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press); Currie, G. (1998) Realism of Character and the Value of
Fiction in Jerrold Levinson (ed.) Aesthetics and Ethics (Cambridge:
CUP); Novitz, D. (1987) Fiction and Imagination (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press). Hillary Putnam argues that although lit-
erature does not provide solutions, it helps us in re-constructing
moral troubles and moral reasoning (1976) Literature, Science,
and Reflection, New Literary History 7:3, 48391. Eileen John
has also defended the idea that our response to literature can
involve the pursuit of conceptual knowledge, where that pursuit is
one form of philosophical activity (1998) Reading Fiction and
Conceptual Knowledge: Philosophical Thought in Literary
Context, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56:4, 331.
On the other hand, Lamarque and Olsen offer a view against litera-
ture as a source of conceptual knowledge and label other views that
give literature a philosophically oriented cognitive role as philoso-
phers theories of literature (1994) Truth, Fiction, and Literature
(Oxford: Clarendon Press), p.397. Derek Attridge claims that lit-
erary works do possess unusual wisdom and that there is much
to be gained from experiencing their works, however this value is
not [] a distinctive property of literature (2004) The Singularity
of Literature (London: Routledge), p. 161. For a more recent
foray into the relation between literature and knowledgewhere

knowledge is not philosophical knowledge, but it is intended in
the most quotidian way possibleGreen, M (2010), How and
What We Can Learn from Fiction in G. L. Hagbert & W. Jost
(eds) A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell), p. 364. See also Nussbaum, M. (1990) Loves
Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: OUP).
5. Nanay, Philosophy, 350.
6. Attridge, D. & Elliott, J. (eds) (2011) Theory after Theory
(London: Routledge), p.1.
7. Attridge & Elliott, Theory, p.2.
9. Olsen, S. H. (1987) The End of Literary Theory (Cambridge:
CUP).
10. Olsen, The End, p.211.
11. Olsen, S. H. (1981) Literary Aesthetics and Literary Practice,
Mind, 76, 521.
12. Olsen, Literary Aesthetics, 521.
17. Attridge, Singularity, 1.
18. Attridge, Singularity, 1.
25. Attridge & Elliott, Theory, pp.1213.
26. Dubreuil, L. (2011) Literature after Theory, or: The Intellective
Turn in Attridge & Elliott, Theory, p.238.
27. Attridge, Singularity, p.6.
28. As far as the ontology of literature is concerned, see Currie, G.
(2010) Actual Art, Possible Art, and Arts Definition, The Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 68: 3, 23541. In this essay, Currie
is concerned with claims about the nature of art (even if, as he
admits, these claims might be in some way connected to those
concerning the meaning of art). In his view, an adequate meta-

physics of art should be responsive to how we intuitively think
about arts nature and especially to how we think art might or
would have been different in different circumstances (p. 235).
With respect to literature as an institution: even if it is true that
Olsen compares literature as an institution to an economic system,
when we speak of literary system we are referring, here, to another
critical apparatus, one that was originally concerned to question
the effective existence of a dichotomy having (high) literature, on
one side, and, on the other side, that literature called
Trivialliteraturor mass literature, or consumer literature. Even if
these concerns go far beyond the topic of our chapter, it seems
quite interesting that, in order to question the effective existence
of that dichotomy, these critics referred to the definition of the
particular literary system that made it possible for such a polarisa-
tion to exist; see, for instance, Schulz-Buschhaus, U., et al. (1979)
Trivialliteratur? (Trieste: Lint); Schulz-Buschhaus, U. (1985)
Livelli di stile e sistema dei generi letterari nella societ di massa
in G.Petronio, et al., Livelli e linguaggi letterari nella societ delle
masse (Trieste: Lint); Petronio, G. (ed.) (1979) Letteratura di
massa, letteratura di consumo: guida storica e critica (Bari: Laterza).
In a quite similar way, English cultural studies have been concerned
in the attempt to weaken a strong conceptualisation of Literature;
see, for instance, Williams, R. (1963) Culture and Society (New
York: Columbia University Press). In all these views, though in
significantly different ways, what is included in the category we
label literatureand what is notceases to depend on a sup-
posed aesthetic value.
30. Attridge, D. (2004) J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading:

Literature in the Event (Chicago: University of Chicago Press),
p.84.
32. Coetzee is widely studied in literary departments all over the world.
In 2003, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
33. Coetzee, Disgrace, p.89.
37. Focalisation is a term used in narratology to define a selection or

restriction of narrative information in relation to the experience
and knowledge of the narrator or of other characters in the narra-
tive. Mieke Bal refers to focalisation as the relation between the
vision, the agent that sees, and that which is seen (1999)
Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press), p.146.
38. Spivak, G.C. (2002) Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee and
Certain Scenes of Teaching, Diacritics, 3:4, 22.
39. Spivak, Ethics, 22.
42. Bal, Narratology, pp.14261.
44. Attridge, Coetzee.
45. Leist, A. & Singer, P. (eds) (2010) J. M. Coetzee and Ethics:

Philosophical Perspectives on Literature (New York: Columbia
University Press).
46. Leist & Singer, 2010, p.6.
50. Attridge understands responsibility as connected to what he calls
the ethics of reading. On his view, there is [] an ethical dimen-
sion to any act of literary signification or literary response
(Attridge, Coetzee p.11). The literary text is an event of significa-
tion and, as such, the demands it makes [] may be ethical in a
fundamental, nonmetaphorical sense (p.11). We cannot provide a
complete account of his concept of readers responsibility here.
What is, however, important in our perspective is the fact that the
reader must be responsive and responsible to and for what she
reads (Lurie did rape Melanie, to go back to the example at hand).
Philosophers within the analytic tradition have developed different
closely related but distinguishable senses in which an agent can be
held responsible, that is, different meanings of responsibility. For
a fivefold classification of responsibility ascriptions, see Feinberg, J.
(1970) Action and Responsibility in Doing and Deserving: Essays
in the Theory of Responsibility (Princeton: Princeton University
Press); for a more recent structured taxonomy of responsibility
concepts, see Vincent, N.A. (2011) A Structured Taxonomy of

Responsibility Concepts in N.A. Vincent, I. van de Poel, & J. van
den Hoven (eds) Moral Responsibility (London: Springer).
53. In other words, Attridge takes innovation as inseparable from the
singularity of literature, but innovation is a feature of what Schulz-
Buschhaus calls the bourgeois literary system, and not necessarily of
all literary systems. The pre-bourgeois literary system, for instance,
was mainly based on social hierarchies that determined what was
considered as High-Literature and what was taken to be Low-
Literature (see Schulz-Buschhaus, U. et al. (1981) I canoni letter-
ari (Trieste: Lint)).
59. Woolf, V. (1995) Una stanza tutta per s. A Room of Ones Own
(Milano: Einaudi), p.4. The status of Woolfs text is controversial
as is Coetzees (2004) Elizabeth Costello (London: Vintage): are
they novels or essays or something other?
CHAPTER 13
Electronic Literature andIts Departure

fromtheSupremacy oftheAuthor Function
HeikoZimmermann
In his seminal talk Quest-ce quun auteur? (What is an author?), Michel

Foucault reacted to what his fellow French philosopher Roland Barthes
had called the Death of the Author two years earlier.1 This, in turn, was
a reaction to the then prevailing mode of reading literary texts in France,
the so-called explication de textes, which sought to establish the corre-
spondence of a literary work to the biography of its author.2 The exam-
ples of the school of New Criticism in the United States of America and
Wolfgang Kaysers Das Sprachliche Kunstwerk in Germany illustrate the
rising interest in intrinsic readings of literature in the 1940s3 very much
like the phenomenological mind/entity poetics of Gertrude Stein (cf.
chapter The Pleasures of Solipsism for Writers and Philosophers) had
sought to remove authorial nature/identity from the writing process. An
awareness of the academic, cultural and political backdrop of Foucaults
talk as comment on and criticism of the methodological conservatism of
the French academy in the 1960s can help us understand the peculiarities
of the published context and paratext as well as the choice of intertex-
tual references as signs of a strong timeliness of tone and argument. The
knowledge of the status of Foucaults text as part of a more extensive
historical debate, however, does not disavow the validity, the relevance
H. Zimmermann (*)
University of Trier, Trier, Germany
e-mail: public@heikozimmermann.de

ofLiterature, DOI10.1007/978-3-319-33147-8_13
244 H. ZIMMERMANN
and the general applicability of Foucaults findings today. This chapter

will show new aesthetic practices in the field of electronic writing that call
into question the validity and the relevance of his argument. The findings
of an empirical analysis of a corpus of works of electronic literature will
highlight the necessity to reconsider established evaluations of Foucault in
literary theory and philosophy alike.
Foucault maintains that contemporary readers can only accept liter-
ary discourses if they are governed by what he calls the author function.4
According to Foucault, every publication of poetry or fiction is obliged to
state its author, and if, by accident or design, the text is presented anony-
mously, we can only accept this as a puzzle to be solved, or, one could add,
as exceptional experiment about authorship that is verifying the rule. Since
the publication of Foucaults essay in 1969, profound changes in all forms
of social interaction have taken place. These developments are induced by
the digital revolution and the availability of the networked computer. As
Marshall McLuhan has shown, this new medium is massaging, shaping
and changing the structures and the very foundation of society.5 Literary
ways of expression are affected, too, as can be seen in the rise of the new
genre of electronic literature.
These pieces, which are often labelled avant-garde, break the ground
for new developments in the field of aesthetic literary production. Among
them is a change of the seemingly irrevocable rule of the author in liter-
ary discourses. In the realms of electronic writing, there are a group of
texts that seem to systematically depart from the supremacy of the author
function. If these texts still pass as literary works, they prove Foucault
wrongor as prophetic in terms of what might happen in the future or
has already started to happen. Of course, Foucaults observations have
not been uncontested. His sloppy line of argument can be a particular
anathema to analytic philosophers. Peter Lamarques excellent dissection
of the speech shows Foucaults inconsistencies that are undeniable if one
takes Foucaults rendition out of the context outlined above. Lamarque
confesses that he will not be discussing in any detail the broader context6
of the paper. Still he believes he can shed light on the precise implica-
tions7 of Foucaults speech. As Foucault is more interested in ideas and a
dialogue about themhe drops hints at deliberate vagueness and open-
ness of his line of argument all over his speech and the introduction to
itit seems doubtful, at first sight, that there can be precise implications to
it at all. However, ignoring Foucaults dialogic approach, Lamarque can
legitimately criticise Foucaults argument:
ELECTRONIC LITERATURE ANDITS DEPARTURE FROMTHESUPREMACY... 245
Foucault cannot have it both ways: he cannot distance the authored-text

from the author-as-person and yet at the same time mount his attack on the
authored-text on the grounds that it perpetuates the bourgeois ideology of
the individual, that it elevates the author into a position of God-like power
and authority, enshrined in law. It is as if Foucault has not fully assimilated
the implications of his own Author Function Thesis.8
Lamarques criticism of Foucault is logically well founded, but ignores the

fact that life and culture are not always based on logic. Foucaults ideas are
founded on the reality of the French academia of the 1960s, and the very
structure of Foucaults speech reflects the problems of literary analysis at
the time. Foucault, on the other hand, engages with both philosophical
and logical criticisms as well as contextual realities. He summarises and
structures what people believe authors and authored texts to be. Thus,
his text can be understood as cultural history rather than philosophy.
However, he also programmatically criticises this approach to literature.
This is why he can remodel the author as a function of the text and, at
the same time, criticise the prevailing understanding of authors as people
whose lives and utterances are perceived as being relevant for the analysis
of literature. What is interesting about Lamarques autopsy of the dead
author is its conclusion. He maintains that it was always more interest-
ing, more demanding, more rewarding for understanding, to consolidate
meaning, to seek structure and coherence, to locate a work in a tradition
or practice.9 Disregarding the fact that Lamarques criticism of Foucault
ignores its very tradition and embeddedness in a wider debate, and ignor-
ing the unverifiable status of Lamarques statement, it still seems worth-
while to note that the criticism, with its universal claim (always more
interesting), might carry some ideological bias. Undoubtedly, Foucaults
speech bears ideological prejudices, too, but it does not make a claim to
an objective truth. One way of avoiding a potential bias in general and
especially in a discussions about the ontology of entities like author, reader
and editor, is by situating the analysis within a frame of empirical data.
In this chapter, I will attempt such an empirical analysis and look at the
production and reception processes of a number of canonical electronic
literary texts, among them Toby Litts blog fiction Slice,10 the huge col-
laborative writing project A Million Penguins11 and Rene Turners mash-
up fiction She.12 They all share what I call delayed textonic authorship:
contributions to and modification of the text that happen further towards
the end on the continuum of production and reception. They also share
246 H. ZIMMERMANN
various expressions of uneasiness with traditional authorial roles and ulti-

mately a departure from the supremacy of the author function. Before
one can discuss the implications of the specific structures of these texts for
questions concerning authorship, however, one will first have to define the
object and the method of analysis: here electronic literature and the model
of the textual action space.
Electronic literature is literature that uses the computer as an aesthetic

means in its production and/or reception processes. Aesthetic here
means that the respective works of art could not have been produced with-
out a computer and that they cannot be read or received without either.
Therefore, e-books as digitised texts do not qualify as electronic literature.
They have often been scanned and converted into machine-encoded text,
and they can theoretically be reproduced on paper. Roberto Simanowski
has found that, as result of this media fastness, works of electronic lit-
erature show one or more of the following features: combinatorics, inter-
activity, intermediality and performance.13 Most of these properties can
already be found in pre-electronic literature.
Combinatorics can be found in everyday book use. Reading a p-book (a
printed book) from the first page to the last page, starting at the top and
then line by line from left to right is, of course, not the only possible way
of reading a book. Publications in scientific journals are usually read from
the list of works cited, to the abstract, to the conclusion and, if necessary,
to the rest of the text. Monographs invite non-linear reading by including
indexes, cross-references and lists of contents. However, their materiality,
layout and internal structure set a default route for traversing the text:
readers read page by page, projecting these textons (the elements of the
text such as read pages, paragraphs, lines or words) in their minds and
creating a script for themselves that follows the order of pages. There has
been literature that invites readers to adopt a different way of traversing
the textual topography, and the recombination of received or projected
elements, the textons, in the reading process can happen in different ways,
for example, by not printing in a book volume but on cards that can be
shuffled or by giving the reader the instruction to break away from the
usual pattern of reading. Such structures can be found in Baroque combi-
natorial poetry, in the criture automatique of the Surrealists or in works
by avant-garde groups like Oulipo (Ouvroir de littrature potentielle).

Raymond Queneaus printed volume of poetry, Cent Mille Milliards de
Pomes,14 for instance, contains 1014 different sonnets. The pages are cut
between the lines, so that the poems can be accessed by randomly turn-
ing lines instead of pages. P-books can be combinatory without tamper-
ing with the integrity of the page. The chapters of Julio Cortzars novel
Rayuela can be read in the order of the bound pages of the book, in the
opposite order, in the order given at the end of each chapter, in the order
recommended in lists within the book or at random, thereby wilfully cre-
ating a variety of different readings in one book.15 Vladimir Nabokovs
Pale Fire achieves the same by organizing the reading process as a scaven-
ger hunt through the critical apparatus of a long poem, making the reader
choose from a selection of references to other parts of the book.16
While the combinatory properties of such texts can be modelled as
effects of human-machine interaction, there have been texts that exist
because of their intrinsic interactive features. In 1944, Christopher Dilke,
et al., for example, created their Three Courses and a Dessert: Being
a New and Gastronomic Version of the Old Game of Consequences.17
The wartime detective story was composed by the authors consecutively
adding a chapter to the text. In this case, being aware of and dissatisfied
with the contribution of the other authors shaped the content of the short
story.
Intermediality can be found in pre-electronic art as forms of multi-
codal and multimodal narratives in hieroglyphs, friezes, illuminated manu-
scripts, medieval paintings or in the works of the cantastorie, who travelled
around to stage performances in which they would make use of illustra-
tions and supportive music to tell their accounts of mostly sensational and
scandalous incidents. The latter is already a form of performance.
Next to the obvious forms of performed literature, such as theatre, spo-
ken word and readings, there have been experiments with the longevity of
ink and paper to lend the printed word itself some performative qualities.
One example might be William Gibsons plan for his enigmatic Agrippa
(A Book of the Dead), which originally was to contain not only a floppy
disk with a programme that would display a scrolling text on screen which
would be encrypted on the disk at the same time, so that users could read
the text only once.18 According to the original plan, the complementary
material on paper was meant to be light-sensitive and would slowly turn
black once the book was opened and the pages exposed to light.
248 H. ZIMMERMANN
These examples might suffice to show that the genre features of elec-
tronic literature are not entirely new in literary history. The defining fea-
ture is the function of the computer. As stated above, it takes on the role
of an aesthetical means so that electronic literature is chiefly electronic
in an aesthetic sense, very much like electronic music sounds electronic
while other music might be recorded, edited, distributed, and listened to
on computer devices without acquiring this aesthetic quality.
One important structural feature of electronic literature is that the

text and the script diverge from each othervery much like the written
script diverges from the multimedia performance on the theatre stage.
The text perceived by the reader of electronic literature does not need to
resemble the text as stored on the computer in any waynot even on the
abstraction level of words and sentences. The HTML text of a literary
blog (such as Toby Litts Slice), looks unfamiliar to the non-programmer
due to the HTML tags embedded, that are interpreted by the readers
browser, which might or might not use them to project the text on the
screen in a specific layout. The blog consists of hundreds of individual
HTML pages, which in their sum make up the entire text and which,
as pages, paragraphs, lines, and words were above, can be described as
textons. The question of the database in the background shall be ignored
for the time being. Depending on the links a user chooses to click on, the
textons are triggered to be projected into a variety of scriptons (the text
which a reader can see on their screen). These possible and multiple tra-
versions of the reader through the text, structurally depend on the features
of the text, which can, for instance, offer links, change their representa-
tion on the screen depending on the time accessed or even on a random
variable. Such qualities of the text, which steer the reading process in the
way described, can be grouped together and modelled into what Espen
J.Aarseth has called the traversal function.19 Not only can this traversal
function help with categorising different types of electronic literature, it
can also help with understanding the various possible readerly and writerly
setups. These, in turn, can be compared to designations or hints at author-
ship, readership and editorship.
A prerequisite to understanding the concept and the implications of
thetexton-scripton model is a common notion of the ontology of a text.
In order to include ergodic or dynamic specimens (in other words, texts

that contain mechanisms beyond narrative that produce events on the
screen), Aarseth needs to extend the definition of text.20 For him, texts
are such disparate objects as poems, computer programmes or databases.21
They are observable objects, indeed, but they are more than mere catena-
tions of linguistic signs. Instead, they represent textual machines for the
production and reception of verbal signs. In contrast to other definitions
of textuality, Aarseths text is a potentiality that is defined by the interde-
pendent triad of verbal sign, medium and user/reader. This potentiality
can only be fully realised in the script, in other words, the projection of a
text in the reading process.
Though a debate about concepts and terminology might be essential at
times, concepts such as author, reader, editor and text have been functions
of, among others, time, schools of thought and ideology (see above). In
their state of perpetual negotiation, they have posed as obstacles to the
analysis of literary works in the emerging field of digital writing. This is
why I have chosen to create a visual model that works without defining
the concepts of authorship and readership prior to looking at a primary
text. What I have presumed, however, is that it is people who are involved
with a text, who do something with it, act with it. These agents are com-
monly referred to as readers, editors, marketing personnel of the publish-
ing houses, graphic designers, developers and a number of others. In the
model of the textual action space, the first interest is in what people do and
when and not what they should be called. However, the self-designation
and the designation by readers, scholars and society can be added as fea-
tures to the agents within the action space. In it, the type of action (what
they do) is categorised following an adapted version of Aarseths traversal
function. The dimension user function can contain the values textonic
(when a user adds or modifies textons), explorative (when a user wants to
learn about the scope and the structural features of a text), configurative
(when a user modifies the way the textons are being projected into scrip-
tons) and unspecific (when a reader tries to make sense of what they are
reading22). If one can assign a value of the user function to every agent of
a given text, one can visualise this. For the textual action space, this is done
using the values textonic (T), configurative (C) and explorative/unspecific
(E/U) as dimension in a two-dimensional matrix over the temporal or
causal-sequential position of the action in a continuum between produc-
tion (P) and reception (R). The result is a TeCEU chart (see Fig. 13.1).23
250 H. ZIMMERMANN
T
Author
writes, configures and edits
according to rules set by editors/publishers,
holds copyright
au
tho
Editor/Publisher
r
ho author
c
ose
C s, advertises , holds
a tt
nd pu b li s h e
e
s, r pay
ma
rk e
copyright to s,
pu
ts , b
pay
s, a
lis
ut h Publisher
he
o r
r
reader
Reader
E|U
reads
P R
Fig. 13.1 A schematic TeCEU chart of a p-book
By creating such a chart, every agent can be assigned a unique position

within the textual action space of a given text. This position does not depend
on the denomination of the agent and is, therefore, not subject to termino-
logical uncertainty. The charts can reveal and depict a specific configuration
of the authorship and readership of a given text (see below). In comparing
the charts of the textual action spaces of a number of electronic texts and
traditional printed texts, diverging roles and interactions between the agents
can be illustrated. Figure 13.1 shows the properties of an idealised printed
book. Characteristic of such a p-book is the diagonal orientation of the
agents in the TeCEU chart. The agent that is called author acts chiefly tex-
tonically by drafting and writing the text (2). The reader, on the other hand,
can only explore and receive the text unspecifically, trying to interpret it.
The action of the author happens before the action of the reader and is thus
situated on the left-hand side of the chart. Such charts contain further infor-
mation: for example, the interaction arrows, self-denominations, and the
like. This can be revealing for works of electronic literature as it can reflect
the gulf between actual position and the space traditionally occupied by an
agent of the same type or the same denomination. A detailed discussion of
the benefits and the disadvantages of the chart and the model can be found
in a more extensive study.24 For that study, a number of TeCEU charts were
created and analysed. One finding was an effect that occurred every time
textonic action happened rather late (on the right-hand side of the chart) as
shown in Figs. 13.2, 13.3, and 13.4the TeCEU charts for the texts to be
discussed in the rest of this chapter.25
While textonic action takes place early in the production-reception
process of a p-book, the TeCEU diagrams in Figs. 13.2, 13.3 and 13.4
show how electronic literature might depart from this traditional mode
of genesis. In all three examples, there are agents, who are called readers
and who add to or modify the existing text rather late in the mentioned
process. If one wants to call these agents textonic authors, one can name
this form of activity delayed textonic authorship. The reasons for delayed
textonic authorship in electronic literature are manifold, as a closer look at
the three examples will show.
Rene Turners She (2008) is an on-line mash-up fiction that com-
bines articles from news websites like the BBC or the Guardian and
YouTube videos with fictional text vignettes to tell about the possible
discrepancy of the public perception of women such as Hillary Clinton,
Lady Diana, and Sharon Stone and the fictional inner reality of these
fictionalizes, writes
about
te abou
wri t
Hillary Clinton
Diana
Britney Spears
T
Elisabeth Fritzl Journalists
Marie Smith Jones write
Rene Turner
... (type B) writes (type A),
configurates and edits ,
claims copyright of ,
publishes on the web
Reader
ission
comm
C
BBC, Google, Guardian, YouTube
configurate and publish (type B) on the web
e. g. Sharon Stone:
s
ate real person
cre
(private)
re sp o
reads and
is bas
n si b
configurates ,
le
brand/construction
ed o n
writes (type B)
for
(public, medial)
d
igi
al
t
na
rra
E|U tiv
e
fictionalized , st
ory
spa
ce
a nd
s ou n
ds
P R
Fig. 13.2 TeCEU chart of Turners She

252 H. ZIMMERMANN
Blogs, Flickr, LiveJournal, Twitter construct

reade
r
mod
era
te
T loper
d e ve
him n
to atio
s
tor
rs
ers per
nta
ato

ref oo
ite nt
me
n rt
dit
Sta es Litt
nc
w r me
e a Sta
om
de
rt, i
om
lc
y
to
lc
b
na
th on To
rea
to rat
rat
Six
tio
u
fic
gu
Six fig
nfi
Penguin
co
wi , c
C advertises
s
ite
is h
rat ers
wr
gu
har
ti n
e
d s
t o di
nfi ad
au
co Re
th o r
com identica
gu
m i ss
io n , p a y l R
a u thor Litts Website
nd
T
Toby Litt
da
rea writes
cal
nti
E|U ide C
co
m
m
en
ts,
re a
d e r Readers
E|U
P R
Fig. 13.3 TeCEU chart of Litts Slice
mentioned in
the credits
without function lek ge r
d Jo
nE ullin
s, P

a n m a
cr
n o
ause edit
subset of
, Th edit
ow
ngh and ents e and

d
Etti figurate
, d
m y U Studnfigurat
e s p i se
Jere co n
Penguin DM co
C
ers
advertise
of tera ,
n
ad
ktio
e
pa d in urat
om
Re
c
are g an nfig
mi
ssi o
Line Industries n , c o ll a b o ra te
in c o
e
tiv
configurate system
tag d
rt
o ffici als
f-s an
Ac
sel rite
co user
mm
w
issi o n
Readers
read and
E|U configurate
P R
Fig. 13.4 TeCEU chart of A Million Penguins

people in given situations. In the readerly traversion through Turners

text, the reader alternatingly encounters screens with three embedded
inline frames showing the content of the news websites and a page with
a fictional account of impressions and emotions of one of the characters.
The scripton Sharon, for instance, contains the heading Sharon Stone
says earthquake in China could have been karma. Underneath this head-
ing, there are three inline frames. The first contains a Guardian article
by Henry Barnes, published on 28 May 2008, which reports about the
Chinese reactions to Stones comment about the Sichuan earthquake and
the Tibet policy of the Peoples Republic of China. Barnes article refers
to a YouTube video, which can be found in the second inline frame on
the page. Barnes also reports about the luxury goods producer Christian
Dior, who had removed all advertisements featuring the actor Sharon
Stone from their billboards in Beijing. Additional information about this
reaction can be found in the last inline frame, which contains the article
Dior Drops Sharon Stone in China published by BBC News on 29 May
2008. Next to this inline frame, there is the linked text Oh God, here we
go again, which directs the reader to the next scripton, which contains the
fictional text vignette about the character.
As is reflected in the respective TeCEU chart (Fig. 13.2), the textons of
Turners text have been created by: Sharon Stone (giving the interview);
the journalists who wrote about the incidents; and Rene Turner, who
added the fictional parts. These texts have been configured by news agen-
cies and aggregators or publishers like the BBC, Google, the Guardian
and YouTube as well as Ms. Turner. The most striking position within the
textual action space, however, is held by the readers who have a multitude
of possibilities to add textons or configure the text. The readers can, for
instance, comment on the YouTube videos or the articles on the news
websites, thereby adding text. They influence the advertisements shown
in front of the YouTube videos by their browsing behaviour or their geo-
graphical location. They can browse the news websites and search them to
see the weather forecast for their local area, for instance, within the frame
of She.
Toby Litts work Slice is a part of Penguins 2008 digital publishing
initiative We Tell Stories. Over a period of six weeks, six authors created
six worksand a hidden seventhof electronic literature based on six
Penguin classics. Litts contribution is a hybrid of hypertext narrative,
blog fiction and alternate reality game (ARG). Using two blogs, Twitter,
Flickr and a number of LiveJournal accounts, Slice tells the story of a
254 H. ZIMMERMANN
troubled girl and her parents. In the week Litts story was first published,
new blog entries would appear every day, as well as comments on these
entries. These comments were posted partly by the publishers as part of
the story and partly by readers trying to interact with the characters or with
other readers. What is noteworthy about this text is the use of the author
function in text and paratexts. The subtitle of Penguins series of elec-
tronic fiction reads Six Authors. Six Stories. Six Weeks (emphasis added).
Moreover, the focal text itself reflects Litts involvement. One example is
a photograph in Slices first blog post, which shows the bookshelf in her
new room. This shelf holds, among other noteworthy objects, a copy of
the first edition of Litts 2001 novel deadkidsongs. Another instance is the
riddle about the appearance of a mysterious hare and the disappearance of
the family that is being discussed in comments on Slices blog and leads
the reader to the authors professional website, on which the reader can
embark on a scavenger hunt for the hare. That was in 2008. Today, Litts
website has undergone some refurbishments and most of the links have
disappeared, as has the reference to Litts involvement with Slice, which is
quite surprising as the number of readers would most probably have put
Litt into the top ten books list at the time if Slice had been a p-book.
The agents in the textual action space (see Fig. 13.3) cannot be clearly
distinguished from one another. First, the publishing house commissions
the digital agency Six to Start to collaboratively conceive a text, thereby
configuring it. After this, Toby Litt drafts the text in collaboration with
the agency. It is hard to tell who of the two agents is responsible for what
aspect or content of Slice. They act collaboratively both configuratively
and textonically. Precisely because of this, it is astounding that the two
agents are denominated differently. The publishing house, as well as the
developers, model Toby Litt as the author of the text. As shown above,
the text itself also refers to Litt. The readers, who are designated as such
by all other agents, act on all three levels of the textual action spaceagain
in a delayed fashion. The readers who act textonically and configuratively
are, in most cases, commentators on the blog entries. Especially striking is
the contrast between the part of Slice published by Penguin and the part
which is a continuation of the hunt for the hare on the authors website.
On Slices and on her parents blog, the real commentators are accompa-
nied by a fictional counterpart: fictional commentators. In other words,
commentators that are only fictional and serve the telling of the story. The
moment the text breaks away from the project commissioned by Penguin
towards the website of Toby Litt, the textual action space changes dramat-
ically and becomes the epitome of authorship and readership in traditional

literature with a very strong authorial voice and readers who can only act
unspecifically (see the small box in Fig. 13.3).
A Million Penguins was one of the biggest collaborative creative writing
efforts on the Internet so far. Organised by Penguin and the De Montfort
University in 2006/2007, the writers set out to produce a novel. The
result of the project, however, defies all possible definitions of the genre.
Setting, plot and the characters of the text that was created in the form
of a Wiki are chaotic, incoherent and cannot be summarised in any way.
The first section of the text (after the end of the active project time) is
about the two fictional authors Tony and Jim, a walrus, Artie the hump-
back whale, the two mice Fred and Larry, Schrdingers cat Fluffy, who is
presumably dead and alive, its owner Mark, Gina, Mary, James, George,
Chad, Bella, a couple of penguins, as well as the minister for environment,
fisheries, and customs Sahra Wagenknecht. During the projects duration
1500 registered people edited the text 11,000 times.
In contrast to traditional book production, much configurative action
happened before the majority of textons were added to the text. As the
TeCEU chart illustrates, Penguin takes care of the marketing of the proj-
ect and commissions the company Line Industries to create the Wiki plat-
form. Jeremy Ettinghausen and Jon Elek, who work for the publisher,
configure the project further and in collaboration with students of the
university partner take up the moderation of the massive user input. After
the end of the active project, the Wiki remains static and can only be read
by users.
As an in-depth analysis of several works of electronic literature has

shown, delayed textonic authorship is usually accepted neither by authors
and editors nor by the readers.26 This is expressed in various ways, as
another look at the three texts illustrates.
Turners She uses a multitude of copyrighted material from the BBC,
the Guardian, YouTube and other sources. Depending on the law appli-
cable in this case, such a project might or might not need to obtain the
rights for doing so. On her page of credits and further information at the
end of her text, she states under the heading Copyright (wrong) left:
Sound: All sound files are licensed under Creative Commons Sampling
Plus 1.0 License [sic] in keeping with the protocol of thefreesoundpro-
256 H. ZIMMERMANN
ject.27 This is about the audio recordings used as background sounds

that accompany the fictional text vignettes. Some of the sounds used in
She were recorded by Turner herself and are released for use by oth-
ers according to this licence. The Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0
licence allows users of sounds published under this licence to commer-
cially and non-commercially use them if they are creatively transformed
by being remixed, sampled, and mashed-up. However, next to her own
recordings and remixed recordings from elsewhere, there are sounds in
She coming from thefreesoundproject that were not altered. According
to the licence, they can only be used for non-commercial purposes in
this case. In order not to breach the licence, Turner can only publish her
project non-commercially. This is precisely what she is doing. The licence
therefore further states, This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.28 Under this licence,
people can share and adapt She in their own non-commercial creative
works as long they credit Turner and the other copyright holders, and pro-
vide a link to the licence. This licence, however, is highly problematic as it
would allow, again depending on the law applicable in this case, people to
use all parts of She for free, including the content of the inline frames.
As discussed above, this would de facto include the whole of YouTube, the
website of the Guardian, the website of the BBC and others. Of course,
one cannot use the contents of these websites at discretion and Turner
is most certainly not in a position to grant such a generous licence. The
embedded websites are protected by copyright and a number of licences
for material they contain. This copyright issue bespeaks a dramatic con-
fusion about authorship and what, according to Foucault (see below),
comes with it: certain rights, and certain responsibilities.
Next to the confusion about the identity of authors and implications of
authorship, the uneasiness of agents in texts with delayed textonic author-
ship can be expressed as denial of authorship or escape from the new form.
Both can be found in Litts text Slice. As described above, the readers of
his blog fiction were directed to his professional website. This is a move
away from a rather open form to a website where he is the sole, strong
author, who is even more powerful than in a printed book as he can restrict
the access to parts of the text. He is obscuring the path to the individual
scriptons by posing puzzles and creating mazes through his website. This
expresses a deep dissatisfaction with the configuration of authorship and
readership within the Penguin project. This reading is supported by what
he eventually utters about his experience with the readers and the form
on the last website of his maze: disappointment with the readers, who
would not understand his numerology or other hints within Slice. Today,
all references to his authorship of Slice have been purged from his website.
With his denial of authorship, he is not alone. Other examples could be
mentioned, among them a text that appeared as part of the same initiative
of Penguin: Charles Cummings The 21 Steps, which was praised by the
digital publisher Adrian Hon in a Google talk but does not appear as part
of the literary uvre on the authors website.
An extreme approach was followed by the organisers of A Million
Penguins. They went so far as to dispraise the textonic authors. At the
end of the project, they published a note on the first page of the Wiki
novel commanding, Okaythats it. Stop writing and put your pencils
down. That is what some teachers would tell their students at the end
of an exam. However, the wording does not seem appropriate in a situ-
ation where literary authors are trying to write a work of fiction. There
are other instances that show the disdain of the organisers towards the
textonic authors. The title as such can be understood as a reference to the
million monkey theorem, a thought experiment in probability calculus,
which states that you would eventually have some monkey create a work of
Shakespeares if you had an infinite number of monkeys sitting in front of
typewriters and gave them infinite time to type randomly. Moreover, the
organisers repeatedly called their authors the crowd, for example, on the
about page (where they also ask if writers [can] really leave their egos at
the door?). It is hard to imagine a situation in which publishers would ask
p-book authors to leave any autobiographical references or idiosyncrasies
of style out of their work. The climax of questioning the authors, however,
is the page of credits, which only lists the organisers from Penguin and the
DMU and the programmers of the Wiki system. In the official report of
the project, the textonic authors are not credited either.29
These three examples shall suffice to illustrate the ways in which author-
ship becomes a muddle if textonic action happens late in the continuum
between production and reception of electronic literature.
In order to see if the idea of the author in Foucaults sense can be

applied to such texts at all, it is worthwhile to have a closer look at the
properties the French philosopher has ascribed to the author function.
The name of the author, he writes, is a proper name and so shares all the
258 H. ZIMMERMANN
problems of a proper name. It has other than indicative functions. It is

more than a gesture []; it is [] the equivalent of a description. []
Furthermore, a proper name has other functions than that of significa-
tion []. The proper name and the name of the author oscillate between
the poles of description and designation.30 However, the link between
a proper name and the individual being named and the link between an
authors name and that which it names are not isomorphous.31 This is
because an authors name is not simply an element of speech but rather a
function that serves as a means of classification as it groups together some
texts and thereby differentiates them from others. It also characterises a
specific type of literary discourse. A discourse that possesses an authors
name is not to be immediately consumed and forgotten []. Rather, its
status and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it
circulates.32 While a proper name moves from the interior of a discourse
to the outside, to a real person, the name of the author remains with
the text, defines its form and its mode of existence. Foucault is speaking
about a plurality of egos, which signals that the reference is partly to the
outside of the literary discourse, too. However, this is not the essence of
the authors name.
Trying to apply Foucaults assessment to the primary texts shows how
problematic the application is. In Slice, the coexistence of real and fic-
tional commentators does not allow the readers to differentiate between
the proper names of real people and names of de facto functional char-
acters. That Toby Litt is not mentioning his authorship of Slice on his
website means in turn that he is, first, not really attaching his name to his
work and, second, that the classification function of the authors name is
rejected by Litt. This observation can serve only as circumstantial evidence
as there are dozens, if not hundreds, of prime literary authors publishing
in anonymity or pseudonymity. In Litts case, however, the retroactive
rejection after the public recognition is a remarkable act which signals that
Slice is no longer a work by Toby Litt. Maybe it never has been. A Million
Penguins does not mention the names of the textonic authors, and, if
they had been given, they would instead point at people outside of the
discourse. In She, the names of the women and the names of the authors
of the news articles do not characterise the mode of existence of the liter-
ary discourse at all. These people were entirely unaware of their textonic
authorship. It is noteworthy that the discussion of the failure to apply
Foucaults proposed meaning and function of the authors name to the
primary texts leads directly to the question of power structures in literary
communication in the medium and the literary market and to questions

about control and distribution.
According to Foucault, the author function has several features, of

which he discusses four: (1) the author function creates objects of appro-
priation; (2) it is not a universal or constant feature of all texts; (3) it is not
formed spontaneously; and (4) it makes a text bear signs that refer to the
author in a specific manner.
Historically, Foucault alleges, speeches and books were assigned real
authors only when the author became subject to punishment.33 One
cannot punish transgressive words or sentences, for example, texts con-
travening law or moral standards or, as it were, being heretical. If these
words are, however, assigned to some real person, namely, the author,
this person can be held responsible for the writing. At the same time, the
author obtains the rights to their wordsnamely, the copyright or the
right to decide on the distribution of their work. Ownership and respon-
sibility are essential features of authorship. In fact, as Pfister points out in
his essay about the French privileges system, the history of the allocation
of authorial rights is more complicated than Foucaults brief summary of
the development of the idea implies. Indeed, some authors had already
been granted royal privileges for the protection of their books in the six-
teenth century.34 As this was done upon their request only, this practice
opposes the very idea of any natural right. Moreover, books subjected to
this process needed to be approbated by a censor.35 This is the contrary of
what Foucault describes as entanglement of authorial rights and respon-
sibility. After the incorporation of Parisian booksellers, and printers had
seized more rights at the expense of the privileges of authors in the early
seventeenth century,36 the idea of the author as natural owner of his text
gained momentum in the second half of that century when such a notion
became profitable because it would remove the source of rights from royal
authority and eventually put it into the hands of the author as part of the
book trade.37 Mark Rose addresses the question of the responsibility of
authors in his essay on Milton and the emergence of the public sphere in
England. For Milton, he argues, Copyright may have been a guild mat-
ter, but publishing in the sense of speaking in public was an affair of the
author in relation to the commonwealth.38 Parallel to the developments
in France at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eigh-
260 H. ZIMMERMANN
teenth centuries, the Statute of Anne of 1710 gave private persons legal
recognition by vesting literary property first in the author.39 It presents
the author as the person ultimately responsible for a book.40
None of the primary texts discussed in this chapter are commercially
exploitable. One of the reasons is the doubtful ownership of the texts.
As pointed out above, She is marked by uncertainties about owner-
ship and the validity of usage licences. In Slice, the contributions of the
real commentators pose a similar issue for the publisher. Moreover, the
figurehead or bearer of the name on the cover, Toby Litt, does not want
to own the text, and he does not seem to be eager to be responsible for
such a text.41
Before the time of the alleged total domination of literary texts by the
sovereignty of the author,42 there were aesthetic texts, artistic or literary
works, which did not require authors. Foucault does not only mention
folk tales, jokes, anecdotes, myths and legends, but also stories, epics and
tragedies as [t]heir anonymity was ignored because their real or supposed
age was a sufficient guarantee of their authenticity.43 In other fields like
mathematics, biology and medicine, the authentication of the texts is
founded on evidence, techniques and experimental material; this does not
hold true for literary texts. It is striking that the most successful (canoni-
cal) works of electronic literature seem to be those whose distribution
was either accomplished by a well-known publishing house, like Penguin
or Eastgate Systems, or published with a plethora of paratextual mate-
rial such as press releases, marketing campaigns and interviews. Why does
electronic literature seem to need the hallmark of a famous publisher,
extensive media coverage or an exuberant apparatus of paratextual mate-
rial? Maybe this is because there is the sense that the name of the author
on the cover of the publication alone would no longer suffice to create the
gravity necessary to guarantee the expressive authenticity of the respective
literary work. For Slice, a relatively famous author was found to stick his
nametag onto the product. Additionally, this was embedded into a gigan-
tic marketing campaign. In the list of organisers of A Million Penguins,
there are academics and famous novelists to vouch for the authenticity of
the project. She uses the epitomes of trustworthy news coverage to give
the project some brush of (artistic) credibility. The extraordinary ways in
which these texts go beyond the mentioning of an author to try to evoke
the feeling of authenticity supports the idea that the author function does
not govern these discourses.
The author function, Foucault maintains, is not formed spontane-

ously but results from a complex operation whose purpose is to con-
struct the rational entity we call an author.44 Among these operations
is the selection of attributes of a person, which are mostly based on
biographical facts. The author can then serve to lend some unity to the
work. Changes and unevenness of production can be ascribed to changes
in the life of the author. The author, thus, becomes a standard for the
level of quality, conceptual coherence, stylistic uniformity, and embed-
dedness in history. This is precisely what Toby Litt is doing by collecting
a list of his works, his uvre, on his website. Slice, meanwhile, does not
appear on this list of texts that are in line with the authorial standards. It
is expelled from the uvre by the author himself and stands without one.
The name of the author on its cover, thus, does not serve to describe
the qualities of the text, and, conversely, these qualities are not meant to
shape the readers impression of what works by Toby Litt are supposed
to look like.
The last feature of the author function, according to Foucault, is that
texts that are governed by it bear signs that refer to the author. Personal
pronouns, adverbs of time and place and the conjugation of verbs have a
different significance in texts with and without author function.45 Without
the author function, they refer to the speaker. With the author function,
these signs refer to some other instance, some plurality of selves.
It is well known that in a novel narrated in the first person, neither the first
person pronoun, the present indicative tense, nor, for that matter, its signs
of localization refer directly to the writer, either to the time when he wrote,
or to the specific act of writing; rather, they stand for a second self.46
For Foucault, this second self is not only Wayne C.Booths implied author
but, from what he discusses about mathematical treatises, a number of
similar but not fully congruent textual functions like narrators, focalisers
(Genette), personae, life legends (Tomaevskij), and the like. For Foucault,
the author function is characterised by a plurality of egos.47 Looking at
the primary texts, one can observe that this plurality or diversification of
the reference to the author does not apply. There is no plurality of egos
of one voice but of a multitude of them. In She, these voices are, for
instance, Sharon Stone the private person and Sharon Stone as the public,
performed persona of the former; there is the fictional reconstruction of
the former and there are reports about the latter that refer to the medium
262 H. ZIMMERMANN
they were originally published in. In Slice, these voices belong to Toby
Litt, the digital publishers and the real commentators whose voices are
intertwined in such a way as to obstruct the perception of the plurality of
an author in either of them. The same holds true for A Million Penguins,
in which one cannot observe such a plurality of one author because of the
sheer mass of different egos, which had not been left at the door as the
organisers suggested.
As we can see, the characteristics of Foucaults author function cannot

be found in the literary texts discussed: not in the legal and institutional
embedment, the complex process of its creation, the function of authenti-
cation or the reference to a plurality of subjective positions individuals may
come to occupy. None of the three literary discourses is governed by what
Michel Foucault has called the author function. Nevertheless, these three
texts are literary texts, which can allegedly only be accepted if they bear
the author function. This leaves two alternative solutions. First, these texts
are not acceptable as literary texts. Indeed, unease with the new authorial
setup is expressed in the described denial of authorship, the disrespectful
treatment of the authors, confusions about authorship, an escape into more
traditional forms or the lack of archiving activity.48 She is meant to deteri-
orate as a text while the embedded sources become unavailable.49 A Million
Penguins has gone off-line and is not scheduled to return. The Internet
domain has a new owner now. Slice seems not to be actively maintained
either. While a neglected p-book lasts a century or more, these texts have
already started to disappear and will not be retrievable after some more
time has elapsed. If this is, however, not an expression of the unacceptabil-
ity of these discourses as literature, this would either mean that Foucault
erred in his statement about the necessity of the author function in literary
discourses, or that he was prophetic: We can easily imagine a culture where
discourse would circulate without any need for an author. Discourses, what-
ever their status, form, or value, and regardless of our manner of handling
them, would unfold in a pervasive anonymity.50 Indeed, Foucault sees the
author as an ideological construct that is the opposite of what it pretends
to be. It is an expression of societys fear of the proliferation of meaning. It
restricts possible readings and possible interrelations of works.
*
As I pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, society is dramatically

changing because of the impact of the World Wide Web, and so are litera-
ture and the literary market. Electronic literature might be at the forefront
of these developments. Printed authors have tried to utilise this impetus
(Jeanette Winterson re-enacted the constraints of email communication
in The PowerBook and Margaret Atwood used an online community as an
intermediate step to publishing her The Heart Goes Last) and fan fiction
becomes bestsellers (Fifty Shades of Grey). Instead of questions of original-
ity, authenticity and identities, Foucault envisions other questions to be
asked after this liberation from the author:
What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used,
how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the
places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these
various subject functions?51
Precisely these questions are what I have touched in my attempt at describ-

ing the peculiarities of the primary texts and in my search for the author
function in Slice, She and A Million Penguins. The voices of general crit-
icism of Foucaults speech uttered from various fields have been audible.
At times, however, they settle on theoretical grounds only and neglect the
original object of the speech: literary texts. Looking at the mere rheto-
ric, at the plausibility and conclusiveness of the intrinsic line of argument
might not suffice any longer. My confrontation of Foucaults argument
with the empirical reality of a number of works of electronic literature has
shown that in the face of new electronic literary practices, there are issues
which seem to need addressing by both literary theorists and philosophers
of literature.
Notes
1. Foucault, M. (1995) What Is an Author? in Sen Burke (ed.)
Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press).
2. Cf. Jannidis, F., Lauer, G., Martinez, M., & Winko, S. (eds) (2000)
Texte zur Theorie der Autorschaft (Stuttgart: Reclam), p.181.
3. Kayser, W. (1948) Das sprachliche Kunstwerk: Eine Einfhrung in
die Literaturwissenschaft (Bern: Francke).
4. Cf. Foucault, Author?, pp.23540.
264 H. ZIMMERMANN
5. Cf. McLuhan, M. (1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of

Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), p.158
and (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New
York: McGraw-Hill), p.8.
6. Lamarque, P. (1990) The Death of the Author: An Analytical
Autopsy, British Journal of Aesthetics, 30:4, 319.
7. Lamarque, Death, 319.
10. Litt, T. (2008) Slice (London: Penguin), We Tell Stories, http://
www.wetellstories.co.uk/stories/week2/, accessed 25 August 2010.
11. A Million Penguins (2006) (London: Penguin), accessed 25
August 2010.
12. Turner, R. (2008) She (Fudge the Facts), http://www.fudgeth-
efacts.com/she_/launch.html, accessed 25 August 2010.
13. Simanowski, R. (2000) Einige Vorschlge und Fragen zur

Betrachtung digitaler Literatur (LMU Munich) IASL
Diskussionsforum online: Netzkommunikation in ihren Folgen,
http://www.dichtung-digital.de/IASL-Forum/Simanowski-3-
Juli-00.html, accessed 16 June 2004.
14. Queneau, R. (1961) Cent Mille Milliards de Pomes (Paris:

Gallimard).
15. Cortzar, J. (1963) Rayuela (London: Pantheon).
16. Nabokov, V. (1968 [1962]) Pale Fire (New York: Berkley).
17. Dilke, C., Forster, E.M., Coppard, A.E. & Laver, J. (1944) Three
Courses and a Dessert: Being a New and Gastronomic Version of
the Old Game of Consequences in E.M. Forster (1972) The Life
to Come, and OtherStories (London: Edward Arnold).
18. Gibson, W. (1992) Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) (Kevin Begos Jr.).
19. Cf. Aarseth, E. J. (1997) Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic

Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).
20. In de Beaugrande, R.A. & Dressler, W.U. (1981) Einfhrung in
die Textlinguistik (Tbingen: Niemeyer), p.3, the authors define a
text as a communicative occurrence which meets a set of criteria
such as: cohesion, coherence, intentionality, and acceptability. This
definition is a pragmatic tool for the use in linguistics. In (2009)
The Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell), pp.703, Peter
Lamarque discusses diverse different approaches to the concept of
what text and work might denote. Given the dual character of text/
script in electronic literature, the questions posed might be given
even another twist: code which is not perceived by the reader is not
text if one understands a text to be a mental construct of the indi-
vidual reader. A script which is different for every reader and every
reading, in turn, renders the notion of text as a physical entity
problematic.
21. Aarseth, Cybertext, pp.201.
22. This is why Aarseth calls this value interpretative.
23.
Translated and adapted from Zimmermann, H. (2012)
Rekonfigurationen des textuellen Handlungsraums digitaler
Literatur unter besonderer Bercksichtigung der Autorschaft:
Geschichte, theoretische Ansprche und deren Wechselwirkung in der
digitalen Medienpraxis (University of Trier: Dissertation) p.151.
24. Zimmermann, H. (2015) Autorschaft und digitale Literatur

(Trier: WVT).
25. Translated and adapted from Zimmermann, Rekonfigurationen,
pp.185, 197, 223.
26. Cf. Zimmermann, Autorschaft.
27. Turner, She, Chapters and Credits.
28. Turner, She, Chapters and Credits.
29. Mason, B. & Thomas, S. (2008) A Million Penguins Research
Report (De Montfort University: Institute of Creative Technologies),
http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/documents/amillionpenguinsreport.
pdf, accessed 26 April 2011.
30. Foucault, Author?, p.233.
33. Foucault, Author?, p. 235.
34. Pfister, L. (2010) Author and Work in the French Print Privileges
System: Some Milestones in R. Deazley, M. Kretschmer &
L. Bently (eds) Privilege and Property: Essays on the History of
Copyright (Cambridge: OpenBook), p.117.
35. Pfister, Author and Work, p.119.
36. Cf. Pfister, Author and Work, p.123.
37. Cf. Pfsiter, Author and Work, p.128.
38. Rose, M. (2010) The Public Sphere and the Emergence of

Copyright: Areopagitica, the Stationers Company, and the Statute
of Anne in R.Deazley, M.Kretschmer & L.Bently (eds) Privilege
266 H. ZIMMERMANN
and Property: Essays on the History of Copyright (Cambridge:

OpenBook), p.77.
39. Rose, Public Sphere, p.82.
40. Rose, Public Sphere, p.83.
41. It might be worth noting at this point that, in print, Steins aes-
thetic programme of reducing the influence of authorial nature/
identity on the writing process (cf. chapter The Pleasures of
Solipsism for Writers and Philosophers in this volume) might have
contributed to the relative obscurity of her uvre and meagre sales
numbers of her books before the publication of the more conven-
tional Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas in 1933.
42. Cf. Foucault, Author?, p.237.
45. Cf. Foucault, Author?, p.239.
48. Zimmermann, H. (2014) Performance and Social Interaction:
New Challenges for the Archiving of Digital Writing in
M.Zalbidea, M.C. Marino & A.Lpez-Varela (eds) New Work on
Electronic Literature and Cyberculture, CLCWeb: Comparative
Literature and Culture, 16.5, http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/
1481-4374.2495.
49. Turner, R. (2010) She: A Collage of Fact and Fiction in

binarykatwalk:v.02c (SoZo), accessed 21 June 2011.
51. Foucault, M. (1984) Truth and Method in Rabinow, P. (ed.) The
Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon), p.120.
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Index
A author
aesthetics, 10, 12n9, 21, 22, 668, 71, function, 10, 24366
72, 74, 75, 77n12, 77n13, textonic, 245, 249, 251, 2558
79n26, 84, 93, 94, 97n1, 141n1,
20723, 228, 229, 238n4
analysis B
concept, 9, 50, 56, 66, 67, 715, Belsey, Catherine, 9, 1719, 34n8,
84, 86, 113, 197, 231, 249 170, 182n5
constructive, 73
descriptive, 172, 194
empirical (see empirical, analysis) C
literary (see literary, analysis) criticism
philosophical (see philosophical, interpretative, 435, 47, 48, 50
analysis) literary (see literary, criticism)
Attridge, Derek, 220n2, 22830, 232, meta-, 71, 76n1
2357, 238n4, 239n6239n8, philosophical (see philosophical,
239n17, 239n18, criticism)
239n24239n27, 240n2930, queer, 103
241n44, 242n518 criticism meta, 71
attunement, 1512, 157, 160, 163, critic, the, 21, 4852, 58, 72
165, 166 Currie, Gregory, 12n10, 74, 80n425,
Austin, J.L., 12n9, 80n39, 141n3, 1259, 1324, 139, 141n1,
155, 166n1, 166n8, 219 143n17, 143n18, 143n24,
Note: Page number followed by n refers to notes.

of Literature, DOI10.1007/978-3-319-33147-8
288 INDEX
144n36, 144n46, 145n54, 169, K

171, 182n1, 20811, 213, 216, knowledge, 3, 5, 6, 8, 11n4, 12n9,
220n3, 220n5, 221n12, 221n13, 13n11, 3746, 48, 50, 528,
238n4, 239n28 59n3, 70, 108, 1235, 1316,
139, 141, 143n36, 186, 189,
190, 197, 198, 218, 238n4,
D 241n37, 243
Davies, David, 127, 141n1, 142n16,
143n19, 143n21, 170, 171,
182n7, 238n4 L
differend, 9, 1735, 219 Lamarque, Peter, 11n6, 19, 25, 28,
disciplinarity 32, 34n4, 34n6, 34n1014, 68,
inter-, 3 72, 73, 75, 77n10, 77n12,
multi-, 5 78n17, 78n19, 79n33, 79n35,
trans-, 5, 6 80n39, 80n4651, 127, 129,
discipline, 27, 9, 19, 21, 3764, 67, 131, 141n1, 143n20, 169,
68, 71, 75, 84, 90, 91, 105, 130, 1729, 181, 182n2, 182n10,
169, 170, 193 183n1420, 183n224,
183n26, 183n28, 183n29,
183n31, 183n32, 187, 188,
E 1935, 198, 200n1114,
Eagleton, Terry, 12n10, 21, 34n5, 73, 202n346, 202n38, 202n408,
79n27, 80n41, 169, 182n3 213, 214, 216, 217, 222n23,
empirical 222n24, 222n26, 238n4, 244,
analysis, 71, 75, 84, 194, 244, 245 264n69, 265n20
claim of the, 10, 79n29, 84, and Olsen, 25, 34n6, 34n1113,
20723 68, 75, 78n17, 78n19, 79n35,
evidence, 74, 75, 193, 194, 211 80n39, 80n47, 127, 129,
141n1, 143n20, 169, 172,
182n2, 182n10, 187, 188,
F 1935, 200n11, 200n14,
fiction 202n34, 202n38, 202n41,
-ality, 10, 67, 71, 74, 126, 127, 173 202n42, 238n4
as distinguished from non-fiction, language
10, 257, 31, 12331, 138, games, 857
141n1, 143n27, 16984 opacity of (see opacity, of
-making, 12331 language)
Friend, Stacie, 126, 127, 12932, 135, philosophy of (see philosophy, of
139, 142n1012, 143n22, language)
143n23, 143n28, 143n35, literary
144n42, 144n45, 145n54, 171, analysis, 9, 30, 33, 49, 50, 56, 67,
174, 175, 181, 182, 184n335 71, 73, 75, 84, 95, 137, 187,
INDEX 289
194, 225, 226, 230, 231, Nussbaum, Martha, 136, 146n62,

2357, 244, 245, 249 239n4
criticism, 9, 1921, 28, 4354,
569, 67, 70, 71, 735, 128,
132, 141, 151, 209, 215, 243, O
245, 263 Olsen, Stein Haugom, 12n10, 25,
examples, role of, 2, 9, 42, 44, 49, 34n6, 34n1113, 3764, 68, 75,
53, 57, 71, 74, 248 78n17, 78n19, 78n23, 79n35,
history, 2, 11n5, 425, 48, 49, 57, 80n39, 80n47, 84, 127, 129,
58, 60n18, 141n1, 219n1, 141n1, 143n20, 169, 172,
222n22, 223n36, 232, 238n4, 182n2, 182n10, 187, 188,
248 1935, 200n11, 200n14,
studies, 14, 7, 9, 10, 3765, 70, 202n34, 202n38, 202n41,
76, 84, 207, 213, 218, 219, 202n42, 229, 231, 238n4,
235 239n916, 239n1923, 240
theorists, 11n5, 73, 79n37, 141, opacity, 10, 2733, 175, 176, 183n11,
226, 228, 229, 233, 237, 185203
238n1, 263 of language, 32
theory, 11n5, 43, 48, 49, 73, 169,
170, 22530, 233, 236, 237,
238n1, 244 P
literature philosophical
and education, 41, 199n1 abstraction, 68, 71, 83101
electronic, 10, 24366 analysis, 9, 23, 25, 66, 67, 71, 75,
history of, 20, 25, 32, 45, 57, 59, 77n10, 84, 86, 95, 97n2, 113,
65, 66, 69, 72, 259 137, 152, 153, 197, 218, 235,
singularity of, 220n2, 226, 229, 245
2368, 238n4, 242n53 criticism, 9, 1735, 67, 70, 71, 74,
175, 197, 209, 216, 245
method, 66, 83, 86, 87, 89, 94
M technique, 86, 96, 139
Matravers, Derek, 10, 31, 35n17, 129, philosophy
132, 141n1, 143n26, 143n27, analytic, 9, 10, 11n5, 17, 6580,
143n29, 144n47, 16984 151, 211, 220n7, 221n15,
metaphor, 9, 42, 83101, 105, 174, 228, 232
179 continental, 4, 77n8, 225, 226,
228, 230, 232
history of, 20, 25, 65, 66, 69, 72,
N 76n1
narrative of language, 10, 31, 33, 68, 85,
as clearinghouse, 132, 134, 139 93, 95, 151, 152, 154,
as factory, 136, 139, 140 198
290 INDEX
philosophy (cont.) 120n446, 122n637, 122n703,

of literature, 14, 810, 11n6, 169, 187, 243
1720, 23, 25, 27, 6580,
183n11, 185203, 207,
21113, 219, 225, 227, 228, T
230, 233, 236, 237 testimony, 10, 132, 134, 135, 138,
of science, 59n3, 71, 74, 199 139, 170, 183n11, 185203
poetry text, 29, 30, 42, 43, 46, 51, 70, 84,
and philosophy, 10, 41, 15167 85, 97n1, 97n2, 140, 145n49,
163, 170, 186, 194, 201n21,
20817, 221n14, 229, 231, 234,
S 237, 241n50, 24351, 25362,
Searle, John, 4, 12n7, 141n1, 141n2 265n20
speech-act, 12n10, 125, 126, 141n1 digital, 244, 253, 254, 257, 262
Stein, Gertrude, 9, 25, 3764, 68, 75, theory
84, 103, 105, 10810, 11215, literary (see literary, theory)
119n23, 119n24, 120n26, queer, 103, 106, 107, 119n20
120n27, 120n2933, 120n359, threshold concept, 7, 14n24

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Literary Studies

and the Philosophy

Edited by Andrea Selleri

Literary Studies and

ISBN 978-3-319-33146-1ISBN 978-3-319-33147-8(eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016958287

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Cover illustration: tofino / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

This book is a distant offshoot of the conference 21st-Century Theories of

Part I Interdisciplinary Interaction in Theory15

2 Criticism, Philosophy andtheDifferend17

3 The Discipline ofLiterary Studies37

4 Analytic Philosophy ofLiterature: Problems andProspects65

Part II Interdisciplinary Interaction in Practice81

5I Will Draw aMap ofWhat YouNever See: Cartographic

6 The Pleasures ofSolipsism forWriters andPhilosophers103

7To Tell What Happened asInvention: Literature and

Part IIIUsing the Philosophy of Literature in

8 Poetic Utterances: Attuning Poetry andPhilosophy151

9What Difference (If Any) Is There Between Reading

10The Opacity ofTestimony; or, What thePhilosophy

Part IVUsing Literary Studies in the Philosophy

11Literary Examples inAnalytic Aesthetics: TheClaim

12What Do WeDo withWords? Framing What Is at Stake

13Electronic Literature and Its Departure from the

Catherine Belseyis Professor Emeritus at Swansea University and Visiting

philosophy of literature and literary aesthetics as well as a number of articles of

Fig. 13.1 A schematic TeCEU chart of a p-book 250

The Author(s) 2016 1

discussions about intentionality undertaken in the philosophy of literature

In contemporary Anglophone academia, literature is part and par-

of literature. These differences are rarely addressed head on and have,

linger between analytic and Continental approaches to philosophy.5

been interpreted as containing a normative element insofar as some of

A threshold concept can be considered as akin to a portal, opening up a new

we can identify two potential candidates: literature and knowledge. As

engaging thoroughly with the requirement of communicability. We also

contemplations of literature, tragedy, and the moral life by Hume,

N. (2013) Philosophy of and as Interdisciplinarity, Synthese, 190,

as well as Meyer, J. & Land, R. (eds) (2006) Overcoming Barriers

Criticism, Philosophy andtheDifferend

The Author(s) 2016 17

as a newcomer to the field, I may have missed distinctions and develop-

each discipline tends to take for granted are sufficiently heterogeneous to

older, cosier, monocultural world, where academics in book-lined studies

It seems to emancipate people from the burden of culture, telling them

What anxiety is indicated by those quotation marks round as good as?

much more expressive conventions, does Dorothy Wordsworths record

But opacity is a start. Most critics would subscribe to a much stronger

critical view of opacity by the argument Derek Matravers puts forward in

to devour me opens wide.19 Satans cry of unfathomable despair is no

plausibility from that common recognition. However, on this interpreta-

The Discipline ofLiterary Studies

The sequence of formation of academic disciplines that Shumway and

S.H. Olsen (*)

The Author(s) 2016 37

up into social sciences, they had to strive to conform to a disciplinary ideal

The Study ofLiterature

It is not of course necessary for a field of intellectual activity or a field

In classical antiquity, the study of literature was an important element

The Method for Studying the Belles-Lettres of Charles Rollin, a moderately

And outside the systems of education, literature was read, interpreted,

Part I Interdisciplinary Interaction in Theory15

2 Criticism, Philosophy andtheDifferend17

3 The Discipline ofLiterary Studies37

4 Analytic Philosophy ofLiterature: Problems andProspects65

Part II Interdisciplinary Interaction in Practice81

5I Will Draw aMap ofWhat YouNever See: Cartographic

6 The Pleasures ofSolipsism forWriters andPhilosophers103

7To Tell What Happened asInvention: Literature and

Part IIIUsing the Philosophy of Literature in

8 Poetic Utterances: Attuning Poetry andPhilosophy151

9What Difference (If Any) Is There Between Reading

10The Opacity ofTestimony; or, What thePhilosophy

Part IVUsing Literary Studies in the Philosophy

11Literary Examples inAnalytic Aesthetics: TheClaim

12What Do WeDo withWords? Framing What Is at Stake

13Electronic Literature and Its Departure from the

Fig. 13.1 A schematic TeCEU chart of a p-book 250