This course in philosophy explores fundamental questions about literature. We shall draw on literary examples as and when required to illustrate the relevant philosophical point.
The first question considered is the definitional question as to what we mean when we describe a text as ‘a work of literature’? We shall start by contrasting essentialist and anti-essentialist accounts of fiction and apply the anti-essentialist approach (Friend 2012) to literature. We shall discuss what the standard features of literature are and any controversies surrounding the claims that literature is well-written, constituted by a thick narrative, thematically serious and the product of an author seeking to write literature. In session 2, we question the link between literary art and morality. We shall begin with some case studies to frame the problem and pose two separate but related questions: can a play, novel or poem have moral value? Is moral value important in judging a work of literary art? We shall explore the second question in more detail in relation to the canonical arguments of two philosophical positions: autonomism (the view that moral value does not affect aesthetic value) and ethicism (the view that moral value does affect aesthetic value).
Session 3 explores creativity and we shall start with a definition of creativity. We shall then examine Margaret Boden’s account of creativity and her distinction between combitional, explorational and transformational creativity. We shall rehearse both positive and negative character traits associated with creativity and consider what is creative about creative writing. In session 4, we shall examine the question of whether A. I. could pass the Turing test in the restricted domain of literary criticism.
Finally, we shall look at the question of whether a reader can gain cognitively from reading literary fiction. We shall present a sketch of the problem, how the problem has been formulated in the recent philosophical literature and an alternative approach based on close reading. The issue of learning from literature is developed in more detail in Hd1 The philosophy of literature: what can we learn from literary fiction?, which is an excellent complement to this course.
