Garry L. Hagberg

This book examines the relationship between philosophy and literature. It encompasses political philosophy, the philosophy of language, ethics, and the philosophy of mind. It also includes a section on philosophical interpretations of literature. This volume offers analytically acute and culturally rich ways of understanding how it is that literature can illuminate philosophical topics and what kind of distinctive conceptual progress is thereby secured. Given the extremely widespread interest in how literature can assist in the search for meaning and truth, this volume will strike resonant chords far and wide. Literature in the Light of Philosophy is essential reading for all scholars and researchers of aesthetics, especially those focusing on literary aesthetics. It is also ideal for literature scholars with an interest in the relationship between philosophy and literature.

Departing from observations taken from the legal judgment that lifted the ban on _Ulysses_ that concern the intricate way that Joyce in his novel portrays “the screen of consciousness,” this chapter first examines the classical empirical model of human perception where the eye is modeled on the lens of a camera. Moving to a consideration of what that model misses in terms of the webs of associations woven into perception by the experiential history of the perceiver and some philosophical arguments critiquing that oversimplified model, the chapter then looks into some details concerning acts of remembering, moments of recognition, the understanding of human motives, and the way the past can overlay the perception of the present, all of which challenge any reductive model of mere ocular sensation as the fundamental content of perception. With this background the chapter then moves to its main project, a reading of Joyce’s great novel that sees the work as an expansive and encompassing study of the nuances of perception, of the relationally complex ways in which the mind organizes and interacts with the world, and of the structuring power that our language exerts within perceptual consciousness.

_Oedipus Tyrannus_ is an exacting study in philosophical psychology, portraying a mind that oscillates between competing conceptions of the sources of knowledge, between layered self-deception and moments of self-knowledge, and between competing self-narratives or self-descriptions. This essay explores the philosophical significance of this play by examining these inner tensions as they manifest in thought, word, and deed. This significance is described in terms of a self gradually becoming able to imagine itself and to describe itself in ways initially believed to be the imagining and describing of an unknown other, where a kind of “spectral presence” by steps becomes ever closer to the mind of Oedipus. This culminates at the final point where that imagined presence comes to correspond identically and tragically with the uncovered self that is the true Oedipus.

This essay offers readings of episodes from _Crime and Punishment_, in particular Raskolnikov’s receipt of the letter from his mother and his discussions with Zametov and with Porfiry Petrovich, with a view to identifying how Dostoevsky depicts the nature of the mind. In Dostoevsky’s picture, it is shown, mental privacy is itself socially grounded and contextual, and subject to destabilizing self-descriptions; mental contents are knowable only through our discursive connection to others; and the expressive potential of language far exceeds anyone’s intentional control. Dostoevsky’s presentation of the mind is compared to the philosophical views of Wollheim, Moran, and Murdoch.

This monumental collection of new and recent essays from an international team of eminent scholars represents the best contemporary critical thinking relating to both literary and philosophical studies of literature. Helpfully groups essays into the field's main sub-categories, among them ‘Relations Between Philosophy and Literature’, ‘Emotional Engagement and the Experience of Reading’, ‘Literature and the Moral Life’, and ‘Literary Language’ Offers a combination of analytical precision and literary richness Represents an unparalleled work of reference for students and specialists alike, ideal for course use.

This monumental collection of new and recent essays from an international team of eminent scholars represents the best contemporary critical thinking relating to both literary and philosophical studies of literature. Helpfully groups essays into the field's main sub-categories, among them ‘Relations Between Philosophy and Literature’, ‘Emotional Engagement and the Experience of Reading’, ‘Literature and the Moral Life’, and ‘Literary Language’ Offers a combination of analytical precision and literary richness Represents an unparalleled work of reference for students and specialists alike, ideal for course use.

This chapter suggests that one of Henry James’s three great later novels, The Wings of the Dove is an exacting study of the enormously intricate processes through which we human beings come to understand one another. This process is one in which real words—that is, not merely words as transcribed, or words on paper, but words as voiced by a person, by a character—display their power in revealing who we are, what we mean, and what we mean to each other. In the novel Merton Densher only gradually comes to realize—first through vague hints, then through ambiguous intimations, then through clarified intimation, then through non-explicit implication, then through clear implication, and finally through explicit statement—what Kate Croy’s plan is (i.e., to let the terminally ill Milly Theale fall in love with and marry Densher, leaving him her vast fortune which, after her demise, will be theirs). And James shows that the communication of meaning need not always be a matter of explicit statement, but can also be shared action that is based on, or indicative of, shared understanding of a kind that is still in its way voiced, but in these cases through a kind of Kierkegaardian indirection, where what they do voice conveys mutual understanding of content not, or not yet, propositionally encapsulated.It is true, Hagberg observes, that one may find it initially implausible to investigate voice, where voice is understood as a too-often-unappreciated determinant of meaning, within the pages of a novel (which, of course, is in the first instance read and not heard). But a closer look proves otherwise: James delivers not only words of a flatly “transcribed” kind. He captures the tone, the voice, of an important linguistic interaction—which he does not only by describing the tone with a sculpted precision, but more importantly still by fully setting out the present psychological and emotional context of an utterance and the backstory, the psychic history, that leads to, and inflects the meaning of, this present utterance and that leads that utterance to be voiced in the way that it is. Read this way, we come to see how James’s late masterpiece makes a significant contribution to the philosophy of language and to the theory of meaning of a kind that incorporates a rich awareness of the significance of voice. Hagberg suggests that what we see here is a literary presentation of the comprehension of interpersonal meaning of a kind so intricate and so truly human that it takes the length of a novel to show it.

It has proven easy—perhaps sometimes too easy—for thinkers about language to begin with one underlying presupposition concerning the essence or single foundational question and proceed to theorize from there. One such presupposition is that, once the question of reference is settled, we will then have a full and singular account of meaning and the nature of word/world relations will be permanently clarified. Another is that, if we are asking about verbal meaning, we should answer it on the model of a dictionary definition—that is, determine the invariant essence, the core meaning, of a word that travels across varying contexts without alteration—and we will then quickly arrive at a universal account. This volume offers a different approach: instead of presuming the singularity of a foundational question, the chapters presented here explore multiple aspects and usages of our language as they are represented variously throughout significantly differing cases of literature. Thus the governing idea is not that of reducing multiplicity and diversity to a case-transcending essence, but rather to assemble a mosaic of cases, of detailed examples, that independently bring into view and clarify multiple and divergent—but not incompatible—aspects of linguistic usage. Also, the chapters presented here keep in view the importance of the expressive, personal voice: the sensibility of a person inflects the words they use to express what they mean, and how something is said is not always separable from what is said. We of course live in a world of words in this way, but it is literature and the development of a character—which is so often a matter of developing a voice for that character—that gives us the opportunity to look closely, as J. L. Austin put it, at the things we do with words.

There has been a steady stream of articles written on the relations between conceptions of meaning and the interpretation of literature, but there remains a need for a book that both introduces and significantly contributes to an elucidation and understanding of the ways that voice and tone contribute to the determination of meaning. Only rarely have considerations of voice been brought together with considerations of meaning-determination (the work of Stanley Cavell, covered in one section of this book, is a leading example). This volume thus offers an analytically acute and culturally rich way of understanding how it is that we can productively think philosophically about meaning in language and literature in a more inclusive, expansive, and indeed human way.

First describing the difference between simply understanding a word and the more complex way we understand that word at the end of a story, this Introduction briefly sketches the ground covered in the fifteen chapters presented in this volume. The themes include the role of ethical vision in moral life, the ethical content of self-narratives and their potential difficulties, the layered depths of moral responsibility, some distinctive ways that moral progress can be unobvious or indirect, and the reduction or prevention of understanding that descriptive oversimplification can all too easily engender and the moral importance of full and particularized description.

It was in what is known as the Big Typescript that Ludwig Wittgenstein made the point that of a given sentence, he may well understand it in terms of knowing all the words, being able to imagine contexts in which he would use it, and so forth. But he said that if he reads or hears the sentence at the end of a long story, a story in which that sentence emerges in its long-form narrative place and plays a role there, he will understand it differently. We can and do use brief sentences and words to describe ethical actions and circumstances (where we know all the words as used, e.g. no legal Latin phrases with which we are unfamiliar), but that level of description and understanding is like Wittgenstein’s first case of meaning-recognition, not like the second.In this chapter, Hagberg suggests that one of the central conceptual or philosophical achievements of the third Godfather film is to show in detail how such long-form understanding arises. When Francis Ford Coppola returned to his Godfather project to complete the trilogy years after the first and second installments, he developed the film in two parts, not as separated parts but rather as parts interspersed that cut back and forth between the present life of an older Michael Corleone and his early life, family background, cultural inheritance, and formative experience. This, as Coppola’s delayed third installment of this great trilogy shows, is how we come to understand a person—their deeds, their words, their self-concept, and more broadly what one might call their mode, their way, of being in the ethically interactive world. The long-arc narrative context of ethical understanding is not a luxury—it is a necessity.

Throughout his work Stanley Cavell has maintained, with the kind of special vigilance that I will here connect to his understanding of the power and nature of absorbed aesthetic experience, an acute and tireless awareness of the expressive nuances of speech. And it is not only that such nuances are expressive; they are also, and perhaps still more deeply, self-constitutive. There is good reason to believe that he sees a fellow traveler in this enterprise in Henry James, and Cavell’s observations concerning what it is to be “haunted” by past experience, to have such experience “carry with it an after-sense” in James’s phrase, describe at one and the same time (a) our relations to our words and past words (as Cavell has written about at length), (b) the unsettling experience James had coming back to America after twenty-five years (as chronicled in his The American Scene), and (as Cavell explains, intimately connected with this) (c) the experience psychologically investigated in James’s “The Jolly Corner,” where the protagonist returns not only to New York, and not only to a former house, but indeed to the spectral image of the person he would, or might, have become had he never gone abroad years earlier. These themes are further pursued in James’s “The Beast in the Jungle.”In these connections James refers to what he calls “the widening circle” of resonances, meaning-determining connections, and deepened meaning; this, I will suggest here, is Cavell’s approach to aesthetic experience, the process of continually grasping and articulating a “widening circle.” And this experience, as Cavell shows in his philosophical-critical writings, and as James shows in the minds of his characters, is the content, the substance, of aesthetic understanding, interpersonal understanding, and indeed self-understanding. In one essay Cavell catalogues James’s self-descriptive phrases in The American Scene (“the indiscreet listener,” “the hovering kindly critic,” “the seeker of stories,” “the visiting shade,” “the restored absentee,” among many others), and we see here in microcosm the relation between the nuances of language and the nuances of self-identity that weave themselves together. Cavell’s work as reader, as interpreter, is the work of discovering and articulating “the widening circle,” and the character of this work, when contained within the aesthetic realm, is both Austinian in its acuity and Wittgensteinian in its discernment of meaning-creating and meaning-shading nuance.

There has been a steady stream of articles written on the relations between ethics and the interpretation of literature, but there remains a need for a book that both introduces and significantly contributes to the field – particularly one that shows how we can think more openly and creatively about the multiform powers of ethical narrative by considering ethically significant literature. This volume offers an analytically acute and culturally rich way of understanding how it is that we can productively think philosophically about the narrative structures that describe our ethical lives and what kind of distinctive conceptual, and in some cases personal, progress we can make by doing so. Given the extremely widespread interest in ethical issues, this volume will strike resonant chords far and wide on arrival, while offering something new in bringing together the study of long-form narrative, the language of moral psychology, and detailed literary case studies. Given the vast expansion of narrative studies in recent years, the time for just such a volume is right.

There has been a steady stream of articles written on the relations between political thought and the interpretation of literature, but there remains a need for a book that both introduces and significantly contributes to the field – particularly one that shows in detail how we can think more freely and creatively about political possibilities by reading and reflecting on politically significant literature. This volume offers analytically acute and culturally rich ways of understanding how it is that we can productively think philosophically about political literature and what kind of distinctive conceptual progress we can make by doing so. Given the extremely widespread interest in political issues, this volume will strike resonant chords far and wide, while offering something that has not been done quite in this way and for which the time certainly seems right.

Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood pursues three main questions: What role does literature play in the constitution of a human being? What is the connection between the language we see at work in imaginative fiction and the language we develop to describe ourselves? And is something more powerful than just description at work—that is, does self-descriptive or autobiographical language itself play an active role in shaping and solidifying our identities? This adventurous book suggests that interdisciplinary work interweaving philosophy and literature can answer these questions. Main sections investigate the relational model of the self derived from American pragmatism, the sense of rightness that can attach to descriptions of ourselves and our actions, the analogy between interpreting works of art and the interpretation of persons, the special power of literature as a self-compositional tool and the “architecture” of self-narratives and the corresponding growth of self-understanding, what we can learn from cautionary tales concerning the tragic lack of self-knowledge, the possibility of “rewriting” and “rereading” the self, and overall, the assembly of real-life structures of self-definition through our reflective engagement with literature. Throughout, the book develops a model of active, self-constitutive literary reading that provides language for, and sharpens, self-individuation and sensibility. Conjoining a relational conception of selfhood to a narrative conception of self-understanding, Living in Words makes a powerful claim that aesthetic experience and our engagement with the arts is a far more serious matter in human life and society than in some quarters it is taken to be.

The fact that Arthur Danto is so well known for his vibrant writing on the visual arts should not blind us to his deep interest in literature and writing, his vision of its role in the living of a human life, and the special way he interweaves his literary interests with his writing on the visual arts. In Danto's life and work, the writings of Henry James proved particularly powerful in this regard. Between life and literature, Danto found parallels that were metaphorical both in perspective and in structure. The appreciation of James's metaphorical style never left Danto; it remained alive and wove itself throughout his writing regardless of primary subject. Even when thinking about painting, Danto saw parallels to James's intricate and hyper‐alert mode of presentation. For Danto, art either was or strived to be what it can be at its most profound: a locus of human meaning.

Multiple definitions of Modernism have been put forward, often focusing on the character or features of the works of art and literature produced within this cultural movement. Here I want to focus, instead, on the sensibility of Modernism as this has manifested itself to be especially concerned not with the content of representation, but with the materials out of which a representation is made. Through an analysis of eighteenth-century English portraiture, nineteenth-century French political painting, and up to twentieth-century Modernist painting, I will show how one ceases to see the representational content through the materials and technique, and how we begin to see it depicted in them. I will furthermore examine some cases showing the progression into Modernism in those arts, and then consider the parallel movement in philosophy. Each, as we will see, casts important light on the other, and in the end, something essential to the Modernist achievement will emerge in high relief: just as paint and visible, attention-capturing brushstroke is constitutive of the content of modernist painting, and just as steel and glass and the purity of visible, exposed design is constitutive of architecture, so language is constitutive of us and a distinctively modern form of self-understanding. In this context we will see more of the significance of Wittgenstein’s claim that language itself is the vehicle of thought.