Abstract
This chapter analyses and questions a philosophical demotion of literature. It does so by proposing a new understanding of truth as not only declarative and conceptual but also relational and dialogical. It investigates and critiques some philosophical reductions of truth to what can be conceptually measured and assessed as declarations. Philosophy declares truth and these declarations are assumed to be active: they are performances of the truthful. Literature, by contrast, is confined to passivity: to representations. The chapter analyses how contemporary philosophers of literature oppose literature’s passivity with the active appearance of truth in works of philosophy. How does this activity unfold? Declarations and conceptions perform actions of truth, according to these philosophers. They thus implicitly contrast literature representations with philosophy’s declarations.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Bibliography
Aristotle. 2010. Poetics. Translated by Richard Janko. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed., ed. Vincent B. Leitch, et al. New York, NY: Norton.
Benjamin, Walter. 1974. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol I/II Abhandlungen. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
Buber, Martin. 1976. Ich und Du. Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider.
Carroll, Noël. 1998. Art, Narrative, and Moral Understanding. In Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, ed. Jerrodl Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cohen, Ted. 2004. Metaphor, Feeling, and Narrative. In Philosophy of Literature: Contemporary and Classic Readings, ed. Eileen John and Dominic Lopes. Oxford: Blackwell.
Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Gibson, John. 2009. Literature and Knowledge. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, ed. Richard Eldridge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
James, Henry. 1995. The Portrait of a Lady. 2nd ed. Edited by Robert D. Bamberg. London: Norton.
Lacan, Jacques. 2001. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. Translated By Alan Sheridan. In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, et al., 2nd ed. New York, NY: Norton.
Lehrer, Jonah. 2007. Proust was a Neuroscientist. London: Canongate.
Mack, Michael. 2012. How Literature Changes the Way We Think. New York, NY: Continuum.
———. 2016. Contaminations: Beyond Dialectics in Modern Literature, Science and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Marx, Karl. 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. Edited by Robert C. Tucker. New York, NY: Norton.
Plato. 2010. Republic ‘Book II’. Translated by Robin Waterfield. In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al., 2nd ed. New York, NY: Norton.
Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated with an introduction by Gabriel Rockhill. New York, NY: Continuum.
———. 2011. The Politics of Literature. Translated by Julie Rose. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Shuttleworth, Sally. 2010. The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mack, M. (2018). Literature as Theory: Literature and Truths. In: Stocker, B., Mack, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_20
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-54793-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54794-1
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)