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Narrative Companionship: Philosophy, Gender Stereotypes, and Young Adult Literature

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Narrative Companionship: Philosophy, Gender Stereotypes, and Young Adult Literature VRIJE UNIVERSITEIT NARRATIVE COMPANIONSHIP: PHILOSOPHY, GENDER STEREOTYPES, AND YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad Doctor aan de Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, op gezag van de rector magnificus prof.dr. V. Subramaniam, in het openbaar te verdedigen ten overstaan van de promotiecommissie van de Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen op donderdag 17 maart 2016 om 9.45 uur in de aula van de universiteit, De Boelelaan 1105 door Tricia Kay Van Dyk geboren te Iowa, Verenigde Staten van Amerika promotoren: prof.dr. L. Zuidervaart prof.dr. A.W. Musschenga This dissertation is in partial fulfilment of the requirements for a conjoint Ph.D. degree program offered by the Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto and the VU University Amsterdam. Table of Contents Abstract v Acknowledgments vii 1. Introduction of the Problem 1 The statistical mindset 7 Philosophy and stories 16 Diversity of interpretation 21 Reading with purpose? 24 A look ahead 27 2. Situation of the Project 30 Academic and lived philosophy defined 31 Mapping the terrain 36 Key intersections 47 3. Fiction as Philosophy 50 Fiction as philosophy and philosophical commentary on fiction 52 Fiction as critical thinking 57 Stories as history and fiction 61 Form and content: Narrative means and ends 68 Plurality and/or particularity? 75 4. Hermeneutical Situation 89 Imaginative disclosure 92 Philosophical commentary and normativity 98 Revisable, immanent normativity 103 Noncausal interactions 112 5. Narrative Friendship 123 Narrative friendship 125 Criteria for quality 131 Becoming like our friends 134 Evaluating friendships 136 The characters we are 137 Worlds 142 Friend, lover, or companion? 145 Belief and metaphor 149 6. Philosophical Stories 153 Example, hammer, and companion 156 Izzy, Willy-Nilly 160 No Woman Born 177 Tehanu 183 Conclusion 199 Samenvatting 210 Bibliography 219 iii Philosophy that satisfies its own intention, and does not childishly skip behind its own history and the real one, has its lifeblood in the resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of what happens to be the case.1 —Theodor W. Adorno 1 Theodor W. Adorno, “Why Still Philosophy,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 6. iv Abstract This dissertation contends that North American culture is in the grip of a reductionism that neglects plurality while seeking after pseudo-universality and pseudo- individuality, exemplified by the apparently contradictory tendencies to take as normative what can be generalized and to deny universally applicable normativity. I pay special attention to gender stereotypes, in which the particular (individual) becomes irrelevant, ignored, or perceived as a threat unless it can be treated as part of the general (stereotype). I argue that philosophical fiction—and, in particular, young adult fiction— contributes to a principled plurality in both lived and academic philosophy. It does so through its imaginative power to enlarge perspectives, criticize from the margins, and galvanize readers to engage with injustice. I focus on young adult fiction because of its wide reach, relevance for ethical formation, and exceptional tendency to question stereotypical understandings of human existence. After explicating the distinction between lived and academic philosophy and situating my project in the larger conversation about fiction and philosophy, I argue for the ethical significance of philosophical interaction with story. In conversation with Martha C. Nussbaum and Hannah Arendt, I draw together three themes—the integrality of form and content, the ability of storytelling to act as critical thinking in context, and the key role of particularity in the context of plurality—in order to emphasize the need to approach fiction in its intrinsic plurality without losing the possibility of shared criteria. A causal model is insufficient in this regard. Drawing on Lambert Zuidervaart’s conception of imaginative disclosure, I show that art both suggests and requires interpretation and that fiction’s v ethical contribution to philosophy needs to be understood as thoroughly hermeneutical. I settle on “narrative companionship,” a variation of Wayne C. Booth’s metaphor of stories as friends, as a helpful noncausal metaphor for interaction with fiction. Then I seek to demonstrate the fruitfulness of this metaphor, in contrast to academic philosophy’s traditional approaches to fiction as either a tool or an example, by commenting on several stories that have informed my own lived philosophy. vi Acknowledgments I am immensely grateful to my father, John Van Dyk, for freely sharing his wide knowledge and experience in philosophy as I worked on this dissertation. Our conversations in person and via email were instrumental in helping me focus, clarify, situate, and articulate my ideas and their expression. His dedication to my project was a lifeline when the going got rough. The mentoring and support provided by Lambert Zuidervaart have shaped and immensely improved my academic experience at the Institute for Christian Studies (ICS). His encouragement and insightful comments on several drafts of this dissertation greatly assisted its development. Likewise, the helpful questions, comments, and suggestions of my second promotor, Bert Musschenga, were instrumental in bringing this dissertation into its current form. Without my beloved husband and life partner, Benjamin Groenewold, I would never have articulated many of the ideas that motivate this project in the first place. His commitment to working together in every aspect of our lives gave me both the opportunity to work out my ideas in conversations together and the hours to research and write while he took primary responsibility for our two small children. vii 1. Introduction of the Problem Buckled into a stiff airplane seat overlooking the St. Louis tarmac, waiting for a slightly delayed takeoff, I focused on the book in my hand and studiously ignored my fellow passengers and the flight attendants bustling back and forth. I have often found the forced inactivity of air travel an ideal time to read the books that sit on my shelf waiting for me to get around to reading them some day. A flight attendant paused by my seat, apparently fixated on the tiny corner of the book’s cover that was visible from the aisle. Bemused, I looked up at the chubby, pink-cheeked face beaming down at me. “Is that Catcher in the Rye?” he burst out fervently. “I love that book! I re-read it every year. I recognized it right away from the cover. Isn’t it great?” He paused, his gaze moving dreamily toward the luggage rack over my head. “Holden Caulfield, you know? He’s so, like, real.” I stared after him as he moved off, still glowing. Returning to the sarcastic, conflicted Holden Caulfield in the book, I found the image of the cheery, chatty flight attendant hovering in the back of my head in incongruous contrast. As the airplane began to taxi down the runway, I wondered: What is it about a good book that can bridge such a gap? Somehow the ebullient, non-fictional adult felt a deep connection to the troubled, fictional teenager, bridging gaps in age, personality, and reality. When I look around me at interactions in politics, economics, and religion—and even hobbies, sports, and education—I see many more walls being built than bridges. In communication, relationships, and institutions, walls are built to separate people; rarely 1 do we focus on bringing people together through the building of bridges over the gaps between us. One of the biggest walls I see is the dire suspicion with which North America’s statistics-loving culture regards deviation from the mean, leading to rejection of those who are not considered to be on the “right” side of the wall. Yet North America is also a culture of writers and readers, telling and responding to stories that bridge many kinds of gaps. Writers can, of course, build either walls or bridges, but even in nations of wall-building, North Americans value novels for their ability to build bridges. At the simplest level, a bridge is built between the reader’s world and the world of the book, and in traveling over this bridge, readers are given the possibility of an expanded perspective on their own lives and the world around them. Although not every reader self-consciously reflects on this phenomenon or articulates a philosophical response to fiction, many recognize that these are philosophical concerns. In this context, I explore in this dissertation the relationship between fiction and philosophy with special regard to the role of young adult fiction in forming or altering people’s philosophies of life. I seek to align myself with the imaginative power of story for enlarging perspectives, criticizing from the margins, and galvanizing people for the fight against injustice. And finally, I seek to demonstrate that a certain kind of young adult fiction does indeed help to inspire the resourcefulness we need in order to accept difference and imagine alternatives to oppression wherever it exists. I focus on young adult fiction primarily because of its wide reach and particular relevance for ethical formation. Literary critic Karen Coats says it well: “Young adult literature exerts a powerful influence over its readers at a particularly malleable time in their identity formation, and yet we still pay more critical scholarly attention to Antigone 2 (Sophocles, c. 442) and
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