Abstract
Readers of literature often focus on attitudes or states of affairs in a text and ask themselves, implicitly, whether they share those attitudes, whether similar states of affairs can be found in real life, and suchlike. In this way readers establish and evaluate comparisons between literature and extra-textual reality, and the focusing, comparing, and evaluating, taken together, make up what I refer to as application. Application is far from an unknown phenomenon, but it has never been discussed in depth, and its aesthetic relevance has often been disputed.
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Notes
Els Andringa, “The Interface between Fiction and Life: Patterns of Identification in Reading Autobiographies”, Poetics Today 25 (2004), pp. 205–40; citation from pp. 227–28. Andringa’s explanatory remarks in square brackets are left out here.
Mulisch’s novel was originally published in Amsterdam by Uitgeverij De Bezige Bij. I do not read Dutch, and my observations about the novel in the text are based on the German translation: Harry Mulisch, Schwarzes Licht, trans. Bruno Loets (Hamburg: Nannen-Verlag, 1962).
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (1960), trans. William Glen-Doepel, 2nd edn (London: Sheed and Ward, 1979), p. 163.
Anders Pettersson, Verbal Art: A Philosophy of Literature and Literary Experience (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000); see esp. pp. 46–8.
I quote the play from William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1979). For the dating, see Harold F. Brooks’ “Introduction” in the same volume (pp. xxi–cxliii; here, pp. xxxiv and lvii).
J.A. Appleyard, Becoming a Reader: The Experience of Fiction from Childhood to Adulthood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 189.
Sylvia Plath, “Sheep in Fog”, in Plath’s Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 262.
Susan Lanser is right, I think, in believing that we usually ascribe the gender of the real author to the narrating voice if no specific indications point in another direction: “the narrating voice is equated with the textual author … unless a different case is marked — signalled — by the text”. Susan Sniader Lanser, The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 151. Admittedly, Lanser is speaking about narrative fiction, but I believe that her words hold true for poetry as well.
Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 135–6.
Another example is Martha Nussbaum’s remark that “the moral activity of the reader … involves not only a friendly participation in the adventures of the concrete characters, but also an attempt to see the novel as a paradigm of something that might happen in his or her own life”: Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 166. In Verbal Art, pp. 153–5, I comment on Nussbaum’s views on thematization and application in Love’s Knowledge.
Christopher Butler, Pleasure and the Arts: Enjoying Literature, Painting, and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 154.
Thus, e.g., John Gibson in his Fiction and the Weave of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. pp. 18–19f. I discuss Gibson’s standpoint in Chapter 8.
Many students of literature would want to distance themselves from talk of “communication” in connection with literature, believing that the concept of communication implies a transmission of definite and ready-made messages from a sender to a receiver. As understood here, however, communication — whether literary communication or linguistic communication in general — involves an intricate interplay, a complex transaction, between the creator of the text and the listener or reader. For a good and easily accessible account of the cooperative view of communication, see, e.g., Gillian Brown, Speakers, Listeners and Communication: Explorations in Discourse Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Chap. 1.
Cf. Victor Nell, Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988).
I am quoting the prose translation by Edward Henry Blakeney: Horace, “Ars Poetica: Translation”, in Horace on the Art of Poetry; Latin Text, English Prose Translation, Introduction and Notes, Together with Ben Jonson’s English Verse Rendering, ed. Edward Henry Blakeney (London: At the Scholartis Press, 1928), pp. 41–59; here, p. 54. Latin hexameter original: Quintus Horatius Flaccus, De arte poetica, lines 333–34.
M. Fabius Quintilianus, Institutio oratoria X / Lehrbuch der Redekunst 10. Buch, lateinisch und deutsch, trans. and ed., with introduction and commentary, Franz Loretto (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam Jun., 1985), p. 24.
See Gary Iseminger, The Aesthetic Function of Art (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), esp. pp. 31–32, 36, and 50–51.
Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics”, in Style in Language, ed. T.A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1960), pp. 350–77; here, p. 356.
Paisley Livingston, “Aesthetic Experience and a Belletristic Definition of Literature”, in From Text to Literature: New Analytic and Pragmatic Approaches, ed. Stein Haugom Olsen and Anders Pettersson (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 36–51; here, p. 46.
Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 109.
Leo N. Tolstoy, What Is Art? (1898), trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 40.
T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920), 7th edn (London: Methuen, 1950), p. 100. Perhaps I am taking Tolstoy’s and Eliot’s formulations too literally, but as they stand they seem to exemplify the stimulus view.
Reuven Tsur, Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1992), pp. 183 (the quotes) and 193.
Timothy Schroeder and Carl Matheson, “Imagination and Emotion”, in The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction, ed. Shaun Nichols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), pp. 19–39 (at p. 33).
Alvin Goldman, “Imagination and Simulation in Audience Responses to Fiction”, in The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction, ed. Shaun Nichols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), pp. 41–56; here, pp. 53 and 53–54 respectively.
I quote the Poetics in Stephen Halliwell’s translation; see Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell; Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. W.H. Fyfe, rev. by Donald Russell; Demetrius, On Style, ed. and trans. Doreen C. Innes based on W. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 1–141; here, pp. 59 and 61 (Poetics 1451b).
John R. Searle, “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse” (1975), in Searle’s Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 58–75 (quotations from pp. 74–75).
Sigmund Freud, “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage” (1905 or 1906), in Freud’s Art and Literature: Jensen’s Gradiva, Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works, trans. under the general editorship of James Strachey, ed. Albert Dickson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), pp. 121–27; here, pp. 121–22.
The emphases are Freud’s; see, e.g., Freud’s “Psychopathische Personen auf der Bühne” (1905 or 1906), in Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, vol. 10 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1969), pp. 163–68; here, p. 163.
Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 353.
D.W. Harding, “Psychological Processes in the Reading of Fiction”, British Journal of Aesthetics 2 (1962), pp. 133–47; here, p. 134.
Nicholas Wolterstorff, Works and Worlds of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 231 and 233.
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© 2012 Anders Pettersson
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Pettersson, A. (2012). The Application of Literature to Life. In: The Concept of Literary Application. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035424_1
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