A Sense of the World: Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge

ISBN-13: 9780415875530 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 346 str.

John Gibson

Opis

A team of leading contributors from both philosophical and literary backgrounds have been brought together in this impressive book to examine how works of literary fiction can be a source of knowledge. Together, they analyze the important trends in this current popular debate. The innovative feature of this volume is that it mixes work by literary theorists and scholars with work of analytic philosophers that combined together provide a comprehensive statement of the variety of ways in which works of fiction can engage questions of worldly interest. It uses the problem of cognitive value to explore:

• literature's contribution to ethical life
• literature's ability to engage in social and political critique
• the role narrative plays in opening up possibilities of moral, aesthetic, experience and selfhood

This remarkable volume will attract the attention of both literature and philosophy scholars with its statement of the various ways that literature and life take an interest in one another.

Recenzje

"...this volume makes an important contribution by focusing on several areas in which literary fiction and narrative remain of vital contemporary philosophical interest." -- Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Spis treści

Introduction  Part 1: Narrative as a Form of Knowing  1. Narration and Knowledge  2. The Ends of Narrative  3. Problems of Holocaust Fiction  4. The Truth about Stories is that that's All We Are  5. Narrative and the Fulfillment of Knowledge  Part 2: Fiction & Cognition  6. Learning from Literature  Cognitive Functions of Fiction  7. Poetry and Cognition  8. Fiction, Simulation, and Knowledge  9. Nonsense, Logic, and Wishing  10. Knowledge Across Fictional Worlds and Real Worlds  11. Drawing Inferences from Literature  Part 3: The Epistemology of Literary Appreciation  12. Myths and Legends  13. Interpretation, Emergence, and Insight  14. En Abyme:Internal Models and Cognitive Mapping   15. The Return of the Represses: Caring about Fiction and its Themes