Literature and Knowledge (original) (raw)

LIFE AND LITERATURE: 'A STUDY ON LITERARY WORKS WITH REFERENCE TO SELECTED WRITERS'

Literature and life has an interconnection that cannot be broken. Literature is a reflection of life as a portrayal of the brilliance of a literary artist. The literary artist can structure the society with her/his genius literary technique, as the excellence of the literary work evolves in the mind. The personality and ideas of the writer echo in her/his writings. The philosophies portrayed amaze the society of all times, thus leaving an imprint on the minds of the readers with her/his varied thoughts. Thus, literature is relevant at all times, growing into a treasure house of learning that has examples for all walks of life and always shines bright as a guiding light. Literature is a mixture of real and imaginary characters and societies, which function to establish an ideal and moral world. Keats designed his own imaginary world, whereas Wordsworth' s discourses approve that he is a worshiper of nature. One common aspect of all the great masters of literature was that all were touched by human suffering. Bacon, John Milton, William Shakespeare, John Keats, Shelley, Valmiki, Kalidas and Socrates have always been motivated to sympathize with the pathetic state-of-affairs of human life in their respective era. Accordingly, literature intellectually and emotionally educates man through various languages. In conclusion, life is literature and literature is life.

What We Can Learn From Literary Authors

Acta Analytica, 2021

That we can learn something from literature, as cognitivists claim, seems to be a commonplace. However, when one considers matters more deeply, it turns out to be a problematic claim. In this paper, by focusing on general revelatory facts about the world and the human spirit, I hold that the cognitivist claim can be vindicated if one takes it as follows. We do not learn such facts from literature, if by “literature” one means the truth-conditional contents that one may ascribe to textual sentences in their fictional use, i.e., in the use in which one makes believe that things unfold in a certain way. What we improperly call learning from literature amounts to knowing actually true conversational implicatures concerning the above facts as meant by literary authors. So, in one and the same shot, we learn both a general revelatory fact and the fact that such a fact is meant via a true conversational implicature by an author. The author draws that implicature from the different truth-co...

The Value of Literature: Knowledge and Imagination

The topic of this dissertation is partly motivated by a climate where the importance of literature no longer goes unquestioned. Statistics show that the general population reads less. This seems to beg questions about what sort of value literature, and art in general, has, particularly when having to justify the spending of money, be it personal, private, or public. I argue how metaphors in poetry make it possible for us to imagine abstract notions that are otherwise unimaginable, and also how engaging imaginatively with a work of literature is akin to engaging in counterfactual thinking. How is this useful? I propose two ways in which literature can be valuable: (1) It reveals to us knowledge (qualitative) that is different from, but complimenting, other forms of knowledge such as scientific knowledge. (2) It enriches our potential for empathy through imagination. This, when taken taken as part of a wider social, holistic, and lifelong system of moral education, may contribute in furthering a more moral self and a more moral society.

Aesthetics and Literature: a Problematic Relation?

Philosophical Studies, 2007

The paper argues that there is a proper place for literature within aesthetics but that care must be taken in identifying just what the relation is. In characterising aesthetic pleasure associated with literature it is all too easy to fall into reductive accounts, for example, of literature as merely ''fine writing''. Belleslettrist or formalistic accounts of literature are rejected, as are two other kinds of reduction, to pure meaning properties and to a kind of narrative realism. The idea is developed that literature-both poetry and prose fiction-invites its own distinctive kind of aesthetic appreciation which far from being at odds with critical practice, in fact chimes well with it.

Analytic Philosophy of Literature

The Cambridge Handbook of Philosophy of Language

This chapter attempts to provide readers with a basic understanding of philosophy of literature in the analytic tradition. The chapter begins with an overview of the history of the analytic method in aesthetics, followed by philosophers’ recent formulations of the analytic enterprise. Philosophers’ different interests in literature will be classified, and the difference between philosophy of literature and philosophy and literature will be explained. The main chapter is divided into five concise sections, which elucidate a topic by representing and assessing popular philosophical theories about the matter. ‘Literature’ presents the main conceptions of literature in analytic aesthetics. The definition of literature will be briefly explored. Also, the distinction between the ‘text’ and ‘work’ and the ontology of literary works will be examined. ‘Fiction’ surveys analytic theories of fictionality, focusing on the recent debate on the relation between fiction and imagination. The epistemology of fiction—the ontology of ‘fictional worlds’ and the question of ‘fictional truths’—will be introduced. The section also describes key topics explored by philosophers of fiction, such as the nature of fiction-induced emotions and readers’ ‘imaginative resistance’ to morally deviant fictional worlds. ‘Narrative’ examines philosophical definitions of narrative and scepticism toward them. The section will focus on the alleged distinctive epistemic value of narrative explanations, and it will review the difference between real-life and literary narratives, our ‘fictionalizing tendencies’ in narrative explanations, and philosophical doubts about the epistemic and ethical value of narrative identity. ‘Author, Meaning, and Intention’ explores the mentioned concepts in the philosophy of literature. It presents an overview of three main theories in the philosophy of interpretation: actual intentionalism, hypothetical intentionalism, and value maximization theories. Textual and thematic meaning in literature and the appreciation of literary works of art will be briefly discussed. ‘Cognition’ overviews theories of the cognitive value of literature, that is, its ability to furnish readers with knowledge and insight. The section introduces the three standard epistemic notions employed in the debate: propositional knowledge, experiential knowledge, and ‘understanding’.

Literature as a Meaningful Life Laboratory

Kurakin D. Literature as a Meaningful Life Laboratory // Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science. 2010. Vol. 44. No. 3. P. 227-234., 2010

Meaningful life is emotionally marked off. That’s the general point that Johansen (IPBS: Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science 44, 2010) makes which is of great importance. Fictional abstractions use to make the point even more salient. As an example I’ve examined Borges’ famous fiction story. Along with the examples of Johansen it provides an informative case of exploring symbolic mechanisms which bind meaning with emotions. This particular mode of analysis draws forth poetry and literature in general to be treated as a “meaningful life laboratory”. Ways of explanation of emotional effect the art exercises on people, which had been disclosed within this laboratory, however, constitute a significant distinction in terms that I have designated as “referential” and “substantive”. The former appeals to something that has already been charged with emotional power, whereas the latter comes to effect by means of special symbolic mechanisms creating the emotional experience within the situation. Johansen, who tends to explain emotions exerted by the art without leaving the semiotic perspective, is drawn towards the “referential” type of explanation. Based upon discussions in theory of metaphor and Robert Witkin’s sociological theory of arts it is demonstrated an insufficient of “referential” explanation. To overcome a monopoly of “referential” explanation of emotional engagement, in particular, in literature, means to break away from the way of reasoning, stating endless references to “something else”, presupposing the existence of something already significant and therefore sharing its effects.