This course will investigate one question in depth: what kind of cognitive value, if any, do we gain from reading literary fiction? While examples will be drawn from specific poems, plays and literary prose, this is a course in aesthetics rather than literature. No prior philosophical knowledge is required, just a healthy academic interest and the desire to be challenged by something different. Given that many students will be new to philosophy of literature, and to philosophy, time will be taken at the start to sketch out some of the methods used in philosophical enquiry. The second session will advance an account of literary fiction that draws on Stacie Friend’s recent contribution to the debate on the nature of fiction. The remaining sessions of the first week will examine the three main positions in the cognitivist debate: literary anti-cognitivism, literary non-cognitivism and literary cognitivism.
Plato famously wrote about banishing poets from his ideal society. He argued that poets brought no new knowledge to their audience, prioritised emotion over reason and made half-baked ideas sound attractive. Session three will update and interrogate these anti-cognitivist concerns. In session four we shall sketch out the non-cognitivist position of Peter Lamarque who holds that while the reader may learn from literary fiction, such cognitive gain is not a pre-requisite for literary appreciation. In the fifth class I shall present a survey of the most prominent recent literary cognitivists (John, Putnam, Gibson and Nussbaum) and draw out some of the similarities and tensions between these accounts.
Literary cognitivists claim that the ideal reader gains a better understanding of something from reading literary fiction but it is not clear how understanding is different from knowledge. In session six, I shall suggest an account of what is meant by understanding. In session seven we shall examine what it is to develop a better understanding of other people. The remaining sessions pose the question: how can gaining a better understanding of literary fiction help us to gain a better understanding of each other? Sessions eight and nine will advance the case that the presence of literary devices such as irony, metaphor and ambiguity do important work in stimulating epistemic capacities that make up the relevant senses of understanding that we have distinguished. We shall examine some specific case studies from literary fiction. Finally, in session ten we shall explore how a reader’s understanding of a literary fictional work can result in a better understanding of the world beyond the literary work.
What our students say
"Jon Phelan made the course content (which had the potential to be very confusing for those new to the study of philosophy like myself) very clear…and gave helpful and elucidating examples every step of the way."
