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Literary Studies and the Philosophy of Literature Andrea Selleri • Philip Gaydon Editors Literary Studies and the Philosophy of Literature 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 978-3-319-33146-1 ISBN 978-3-319-33147-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33147-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016958287 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub- lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover illustration: © tofino / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland 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 Warwick’s 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, 174–183 (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 Introduction 1 Andrea Selleri and Philip Gaydon Part I Interdisciplinary Interaction in Theory 15 2 Criticism, Philosophy and the Differend 17 Catherine Belsey 3 The Discipline of Literary Studies 37 Stein Haugom Olsen 4 Analytic Philosophy of Literature: Problems and Prospects 65 Jukka Mikkonen Part II Interdisciplinary Interaction in Practice 81 5 ‘I Will Draw a Map of What You Never See’: Cartographic Metaphor in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations 83 Michael Rose-Steel vii viii Contents 6 The Pleasures of Solipsism for Writers and Philosophers 103 Ery Shin 7 To Tell What Happened as Invention: Literature and Philosophy on Learning from Fiction 123 Manuel García-Carpintero Part III Using the Philosophy of Literature in Literary Studies 149 8 Poetic Utterances: Attuning Poetry and Philosophy 151 Maximilian de Gaynesford 9 What Difference (If Any) Is There Between Reading as Fiction and Reading as Non-fiction? 169 Derek Matravers 10 The Opacity of Testimony; or, What the Philosophy of Literature Can Tell Us About How to Read Holocaust Narratives 185 Samuel O’Donoghue Part IV Using Literary Studies in the Philosophy of Literature 205 11 Literary Examples in Analytic Aesthetics: The Claim of the Empirical 207 Andrea Selleri 12 What Do We Do with Words? Framing What Is at Stake in Dealing with Literature 225 Marianna Ginocchietti and Giulia Zanfabro Contents ix 13 Electronic Literature and Its Departure from the Supremacy of the Author Function 243 Heiko Zimmermann Bibliography 267 Index 287 CONTRIBUTORS Catherine Belsey is 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 Gaynesford formerly 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. Manuel García-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 Ginocchietti has 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. Stein Haugom Olsen is at present Pro-Rector at Østfold 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. Derek Matravers 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. Jukka Mikkonen 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 O’Donoghue is 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-Steel is 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 University’s 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 Stein’s 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 Zanfabro has recently completed a PhD in Literary Theory at the University of Trieste with a thesis on children’s literature. She graduated at the University of Trieste with a thesis on J.
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