Philosophy of Literature edited by schroeder, severin

Schroeder, Severin, ed., Philosophy of Literature. Malden, MA: Wiley‐Blackwell, 2010, 140 pp., $29.95 paper. The essays collected in Philosophy of Literature offer a thoughtful introduction to key issues facing philosophers when they turn to literature. The volume appropriately begins with M. W. Rowe's “Literature, Knowledge, and the Aesthetic Attitude,” a sophisticated defense of the truth of literature with special emphasis on fiction. As Rowe notes, some philosophers and critics have separated the aesthetic enjoyment of literature from what they regard as its questionable truth. Distinguishing the delight readers take in literature from the instruction it cannot provide becomes a way of defending literature as a source of pleasure even in a scientific age. Against this view, Rowe argues that “the ability to impart knowledge can sometimes be a part, and an important part, of a work's aesthetic quality” (p. 3). By “knowledge,” he means not “categorical truths (what is and was)” but “modal truths (what could be and what might have been)” (pp. 7–8): in other words, nonpropositional, general knowledge of human nature acquired from a literary work as a whole, not from any of its particular statements. The knowledge we can get from fiction is akin to a priori knowledge in that it often meshes with what we already know. For Rowe, what oft has been thought gains intensity in being so vividly expressed, allowing him to reinforce William Wordsworth's point that literary truth is not “individual and local, but general and operative” (quoted on p. 17), operative in having an impact on the reader. Another contribution to the volume, Peter Kivy's “Fictional Form and Symphonic Structure: An Essay in Comparative Aesthetics,” further characterizes the reader for whom great novels convey “moral, philosophical, psychological, social, political, and other theses of deep concern to us” (p. 55). Kivy differentiates this “serious thoughtful reader” (p. 55) from other kinds of readers and from “serious structural listeners” of music, as he explores why reading a novel, unlike listening to absolute music, is discontinuous. Unfortunately, Kivy's penchant for multiplying distracting distinctions clogs his argument instead of advancing it, leaving his larger claims about fiction up in the air. Rowe, by contrast, effectively counters many of the objections made against his confidence in the cognitive value of literature. Nevertheless, I can imagine some readers also feeling that the nonpropositional knowledge he champions remains vague. Another essay in the volume, Peter Lamarque's “The Elusiveness of Poetic Meaning,” concedes that literary meaning is “elusive, i.e. obscure and hard to grasp” (p. 24). ‘Concedes’ may be too apologetic a word here. Lamarque embraces this attenuation of literary meaning, perhaps because he shifts from fiction to poetry. In poetry, he notes, we are more acclimated to works that are difficult, elliptical, and suggestive. Extending A. C. Bradley's 1901 Oxford lecture “Poetry for Poetry's Sake,” Lamarque argues that irony, density, and other qualities that critics have associated with poetry are not discoverable properties in poems but a function of reading practices. When we are interested in reading poetry as poetry, literary meaning becomes “fine‐grained and context‐sensitive to a degree that is not exhibited or demanded elsewhere” (p. 41). Put differently, the slow reading celebrated by the American New Critics and others creates ambiguity and nuance instead of discovering them. Other kinds of reading are possible, such as stepping back from the poems of a particular period and generalizing about the cultural trends they manifest. But reading poetry as poetry, in Lamarque's view, means reading it with a kind of close attention that sticks to the distinctive wording of poems and resists paraphrasing them. It remains unclear in Lamarque's account whether poems reward the special attention we pay to them: whether we can read anything as a poem or whether there are properties in a particular text justifying this approach. Most often he suggests that “poetic difficulty arises out of the very expectations that the practice of reading brings to it” (p. 45). Other times, however, “the elusiveness of meaning in particular poems . can partly be explained by the fine‐grainedness of poetic content. The words, images, allusions, and names are rich in range and depth of association” (p. 45). “Partly” makes poetic meaning the joint responsibility of readers and poems. Although I agree with this division of labor, I do not see how Lamarque can support it after attributing so much interpretive power to readers’ interests. Lurking behind these discussions of literary meaning is the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry announced by Plato, who famously attacked the value of poetry along with its truth. Two essays in the volume revisit this quarrel by looking at more recent philosophers who have defended literature: Martha Nussbaum, Stanley Cavell, and Bernard Harrison in Martin Warner's “Philosophy and Literature: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow” and J. L. Austin in Maximilian de Gaynesford's “Incense and Insensibility: Austin on the ‘Non‐seriousness’ of Poetry.” Austin is an especially interesting case here because as de Gaynesford notes, some poets and critics have objected to what they see as his denigration of poetry as play acting or a nonserious use of language to be set aside when exploring how speech acts work in the real world. De Gaynesford carefully shows that, appearances to the contrary, Austin neither belittles poetry nor marginalizes it. Instead, Austin lays the groundwork for other philosophers (Nussbaum and Cavell in particular) who pick up where he left off and who explore how “poets can be committed and serious in what they say” (p. 111). In different ways, Nussbaum and Cavell answer Plato's concerns by defending the educational value of literature and the other arts. They do not renounce philosophy for literature, nor do they use literary works to illustrate conclusions already arrived at via philosophy. Instead, they see literature as providing an independent perspective on issues that philosophical works also deal with: skepticism, for example, in Cavell's work and ethical understanding in Nussbaum's. The educational role Cavell and Nussbaum claim for literature seems modest in comparison to the political aspirations of the literary critics that Stein Haugom Olsen analyzes in a final essay in the volume, “Criticism of Literature and Criticism of Culture.” Olsen's primary examples are Terry Eagleton and Edward Said, who suggest that the institutionalization of literary criticism has provided academic critics with security at the cost of public influence, especially when contrasted to nineteenth‐century cultural critics such as Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, and John Ruskin. These Victorian sages were engaged with the great political issues of their time and commanded a broad audience. In their hands, literary culture enabled effective social criticism, not just rarefied publications. Olsen calls Said and Eagleton “nostalgia critics” because in his view, the conditions that underlay nineteenth‐century cultural criticism have disappeared. These conditions included an accessible, educated reading public and a widespread sense that the issues of the day, though complex, could be illuminated by cultural commentary. Although Victorian public intellectuals vied with one another, as a group they benefited from an absence of competition from academic experts also claiming the attention of their audience. In more recent times, these conditions have given way to increasingly complex and intractable social issues, the rise of academic specialization, and the consequent fracturing of the reading public into highly specialized subfields, on the one hand, and a less educated, more distracted mass audience, on the other. The oppositional critic championed by Said and Eagleton thus lacks authority, influence, and a widespread audience. “And so,” Olsen concludes, “the death of the common reader becomes the birth of the academic critic” (p. 89), or specialist critics who address their scholarship to peers and transfer their reading and writing skills to (mostly captive) students. Whereas Eagleton and Said chafe at these arrangements, Olsen accepts them. As a university subject, literary study for him retains a social function, though not the direct political force Said and Eagleton long for. Instead, the professor of literature passes on “the skills and the knowledge necessary to appreciate a literary work,” still a valuable role “given the social agreement that ‘familiarity with our literature is desirable’” (p. 89). “Literary criticism is still thriving” (p. 84) and will continue to flourish “as an area of specialist knowledge that has its justification in the social agreement that ‘familiarity with our literature is desirable’” (p. 89). Olsen does not consider the possibility that the social compact encouraging “familiarity with our literature” may be in jeopardy, as economically strapped universities cut back on the humanities, publishers go under, and serious literature competes with multiple, technologically accelerated demands on our attention that make the “thirst after outrageous stimulation” that Wordsworth lamented in his audience look mild by comparison. Although I share Olsen's reservations about the political prospects of cultural criticism, he betrays his own nostalgia for a time when the cultural status of literature and literary criticism was more secure. Here is where the work of Nussbaum, Cavell, and the philosophers they have influenced (most notably Richard Eldridge) may be especially timely. These philosophers argue for the value of literature instead of taking it for granted. Their respect for literature is hard won, earned against the grain of the academic profession of philosophy in which they were trained. I see their work as extending the helpful but circumspect exploration of literature engaged in by the contributors to Philosophy of Literature. The essays in Philosophy of Literature shed light on many important dimensions of literature. Nussbaum and Cavell show why we all should care about literature in the first place.

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